Shajara

It’s just past 6am on this flight. The sun hasn’t risen yet, and I’ve spent the past two hours trying to sleep. I’ve caught a wink every now and again, but generally I’ve just been listening to old episodes of This American Life and staring out the window at fuzzy stars and at the vast, dark expanse of Sahara below me.

I suppose it’s times like these that one tends to get existential, wondering why they’re doing what they’re doing. I’m no different. I also suppose one can only breathe so much stale, recycled air before their brain gets unsettled.

So, why am I on this flight? Why study abroad in Kenya? My mother has asked this question countless times, I’m sure, but I guess it’s rare for me to suss out a real answer.

A couple of years ago in a Youth Sunday sermon, I said something to this effect, that I thought our reason for being was to learn how to love each other, so that when we meet God, we might be able to understand His love for us.

I still believe this. I think that human interaction and the presence or absence of human love is one of the base, driving factors of why we do what we do, and that our actions are, in many ways, dictated by our connections to the people around us.

If you want to catch a glimpse of the human need for understanding and love, get on an airplane. Listen to the conversations that complete strangers will start up, exposing a bit of their soul, hoping for a taste of humanity, of a common human experience. The topics may seem innocuous, conversing about the weather or sports, but their interaction is born out of a need to feel human.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said (in an interview given by Brad Pitt, no less) that “a person is a person through other persons. You can’t be human in isolation. You are only human in relationships.”

International foreign policy has manifested itself in such a way that we, Westerners, rarely feel that we have a relationship with the people of places like Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia or the Middle East. We see their stories on television or on the Internet, viewing them as if they were in a movie. Their lives are presented in such a way that we feel like we are on a completely different planet from them. We don’t feel connected, and our humanity isn’t brought out in that moment.

In reality, our connections run deep. If our race ever drags itself out of this hole of massive inequality that we find ourselves in, it will be because we stumbled upon the idea that humanity, that our being, cannot be fully realized in isolation. We have created the tools necessary to either unite our existence or destroy it. We can only choose one of those two.

So, in short, I’m headed to Kenya because I want to help connect the world.

The sun is starting to rise outside my window, turning the clouds a pale shade of blue. Soon, the rest of the plane will wake up, and the process of reaching out for human connection will start again.