Problem Attic. Insert witty tagline here.

The Sound of Me Freakin’ Out

I just read Kelly’s Reuben & love post (not what it sounds like), and it totally struck a chord with me, so I thought I might say a bit about how I feel about the life ahead of me.

I am freakin’ scared out of my tree. So much stuff needs doing, and I could so easily be consumed by it all and not even make a dent. There are people starving and dying of AIDS in Africa, people living in poverty and slavery in Asia, people dying of wealth and depression in the West, and billions of people who don’t know the good news of the gospel, and I’m one insignificant, mostly-average middle-class white-boy from down-under hoping to make a difference.

Information Overload

I think information overload is a very real problem, and a big part of my problem. Human beings are just not built to cope with a whole world of worries. I find the only way I’ve learned to cope is to glance at the big picture, but ignore details where I can’t do anything. It seems pretty harsh, and I guess it is, but if I was intimately aware with the full horror of the world we live in, I think I’d crack.

As a result, you’ll hear me talk a lot about South Asia. That’s where I’m going, so that’s where I *need* to care about, and that’s somewhere I can and do care about. I’m not able to care about the whole world in anything more than the broadest terms, so I focus on a smaller part of the picture.

Even then, when you truly know the detail of a certain area, there’s more than enough to overwhelm you. I *still* hear new stuff about the area I’ll be working in that makes me feel sick. And systems and government and corporations are always going to be bigger than people. There are **10,000** women in the red-light district there. That’s 1/3 of the population of Timaru, selling their bodies to survive!

People is where it’s at

The only way I can deal with all this stuff is to focus on the people. Where I worked over summer employed around 30 women. That’s 30, from 10,000. That’s 0.3%. But those 30 women are real people, with real families, and real smiles. Those 30 women are 30 women who don’t have to hate themselves anymore; who don’t have to bear the shame their culture throws at them about a choice they don’t have; who don’t have to act out daily what is one of those most humiliating, horrible things for a human being to suffer.

Those 30 women are the reason I’m doing what I’m doing. Those 30 women, and the 9,970 around them—them, and the rest of the world. But I’m starting where those 30 women are.