Amy's Adventures in Darfur

I started this blog when I left for Darfur in June 2006. I was working as a midwife with MSF aka "Medecins Sans Frontiers" aka "Doctors without Borders" but this blog contains my own opinions and stories- not those of MSF. It is less political than I want it to be and I have been unable to post stories about certain topics due to the fact that this is on the internet and accessible to anyone. I wish I could tell you all of the stories but since I can't, I will tell you the ones that I can...

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

a little self-conscious

one of the first conversations that i had with aurelie was one morning in khartoum. we were all sitting in the livingroom having coffee after breakfast and, although french is their first language, she and letitzia were having a conversation in english, trying not to be rude to steffan (german guy) and i. i waited for a lull before saying "feel free to speak french. i'll still understand you and steffan (whose eyes had glazed over by this point) isn't listening anyways". aurelie looked at me, a bit surprised and said "you understand french but you can't speak it?". i say "i speak it, i just don't speak it perfectly". she smiles and asks "a little self-conscious?". i reply "no, a LOT self-conscious". and that pretty much summarizes how i'm feeling right now. a LOT self-conscious.

i keep getting emails from people either asking me or telling me that either they're forwarding my emails, or their friends are reading my blog now, etc etc etc, and i'm starting to feel self-conscious. in my previous travels i have written similar emails and i wrote them imagining that only my family and friends were reading them, knowing that a) they loved me in spite of whatever i wrote or b) i couldn't care less what they thought of me anyways. in a way i was writing purely for myself (they were a diary of sorts), and in a way it was to allow the people who loved me a small glimpse into what i experience on these trips.

now?.....well, now i find myself starting to wonder what i can/can't, should/shouldn't write about. i filter, i censor, i second-guess. if random people are reading my stories because they want to know the reality of life in darfur am i boring them when i write about my own, personal moments here? if people who are hostile towards "religion" are reading them, should i refrain from telling stories about the growth of my faith? if there are conservative people reading them should i not swear or be honest about how much i want to kill people here sometimes? do i sound like a self-indulgent princess for those days when i feel like i can't bear to witness other people's suffering for the pain that it causes me just to see and/or hear it, when they are the ones who have to actually experience it? if there are days when i hate it here, hate my team, hate everything and want nothing more than to come home is one of my supervisors going to hear about it via the msf grapevine and suddenly my having a bad day/week/month becomes a huge deal?

the last few days i haven't felt like writing at all because i feel that everything i write is now subject to scrutiny. i fear coming across as a drama-queen or, worse, draining to the people who don't know and love me in spite of my inability to not take these stories to heart. i see people starting to resent the fact that i try to bring you to darfur, if only for a moment, to realize that these stories aren't fiction and that it's your responsibility as human beings to f***ing do something. i envision people opening their inbox in the morning and seeing an email from here and either not being able to delete it fast enough or, worse, reading it for the thrill of the brutality of the stories. i've never sent the hardest stories in the mass emails, but now i don't want to include any of the hard stories because i don't know where the line between témoignage and some strange sense of voyeurism lies. i hate feeling this way. i don't know what to do to now. i don't want to not feel like i can be open, and tell the stories that i want to tell. i'm thinking of scrapping the blog, and if people don't want to receive the emails they can just not read the stories. maybe i'll send some stories to whoever cares to read them, and designate some to only family and friends. i don't know yet. for now i'm just not going to write. maybe when i'm not sick and exhausted and frustrated and hating it here, i'll decide that i'm going to write whatever the hell i want, and anyone who has a problem with it can bite me. until then...as we say in radio contacts....over and out.

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