Intangible State

I take long weekends. One reason is because much of the communication work I'm doing for the Association is much better accomplished in the relative quiet of the guesthouse as opposed to the ebb and flow of chaos that rolls through the office in Manshiyet Nasr. Also, the internet is much more reliable at 'home' and a thousand times less frustrating than walking into the office and being unable to do anything but sit and watch people. As a result, every time I'm away from Garbage City for three days, on my first day back, it seems as if I've been gone for weeks. The smell is as pungent as the first time, the waste is shocking, the slow, exhausted gait of the people is hard to watch, especially when I'm being chauffeured through in my clean, white taxi. There's a small part of me that thinks I should be living like the people. Yet in all honesty, if I were, I wouldn't survive this place. I couldn't do this, I couldn't be here if I were waking up every morning in this atmosphere, if I didn't have the escape that is offered to me every day at 3 o'clock. 

There are things that feel wrong about this. Why even though this is an uncomfortable country, compared to almost everyone I meet, I am quite comfortable in comparison. I meet people at the guesthouse who's entire life for a family of four fits into five suitcases. I used to marvel at the amount of clothes and shoes in my friend Christie's closet when I was in college. Now I feel like the one with the unending wardrobe for the simple fact that I don't have to start wearing the same thing after three days. And the several pairs of shoes on my floor are almost embarrassing. I can see someone coming in to replace a light bulb and thinking, why in the world does one person need more than three pairs of shoes? The funny thing is, most of my wardrobe, actually most of what I own regardless of where it may reside on the planet at the moment, was free. Or found. Or given to me as a gift. I'm not sure telling people that makes my excess any more acceptable. Then they wonder at the generosity of my friends and the state of income that must exist if people are just giving this stuff away. Some of the kids in Manshiyet Nasr already think I'm a digital camera Santa Claus, since I had three donated ones with me when I came the first week. I tried to be as discreet as possible in distributing them to their new owners, but word gets around quickly in a place like this. I had kids I'd never seen before telling me they wanted a camera. I wanted to say, "no, you don't understand." But what else are they supposed to think? Tourists come here and walk through their streets practically reeking of wealth. Even though by US standards I'm rather poor and made so little last year I'm pretty sure I could have qualified for food stamps, even I, in my cleanliness and restedness, look like I should be able to hand out dollar dollar bills ya'll without even blinking. 

I know I write about this a lot: the dirt, the disparities, the absolute inability words contain to describe what this feels like. It's because it strikes me so often. There is no getting comfortable with this. There is no getting used to how much better off I am than them and how everything I say, every opinion I have, is coming from a mentality that was developed in a world of ease and relative prosperity. I don't know what it's like to be from here. I don't know what it's like to live here every day knowing that regardless of how much I may want to, it would be really difficult for me to leave and change my circumstances. It's easy to sit on the outside and say, 'Well of course there's a choice. There's always a choice.' There may, indeed, always be a choice. But having grown up in a place where choice is on every corner, I cannot understand the difficulty it is to break deep, ingrained cultural responsibility. From the outside, it looks easy. From the inside, I imagine it looks as if the picture will never change. What good does a room with a view do if all you're looking at is a brick wall?