Great New Year

“If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as "good," a "sacrifice" and "help."” From: “To Hell With Good Intentions,” an address given by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968

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This morning I woke up smiling. It is a new year and feels like it. I am happy. My mind is clearer than it’s been in months. People are staring a little less. Work feels like it is going better. Merchants don’t try to rip me off as often. Rickshaw drivers know where they are going. It doesn’t always smell like cow shit. The air is cleaner. There is less traffic. Adolescent boys used the mighty Internet to answer their questions about Western women. Young men combing their hair in packs and posing on their motorbikes don’t hiss at me as I go by.

No, none of this changed in the calendar page that went from 2007 to 2008, there are still Mondays to start the week and no one in my office learned english as Cinderella left at midnight, but it’s in my head. Just like that my brother’s words snuck up on me: optimism is a modifier. Minutes, days, weeks, and months before, my mood, mentality, feelings about being here were not positive – at best, they were neutral, defeated to the point of contentment, inaction, sedation -- which made summoning positive energy in response to the insanity around me very difficult. Today is different. I feel hopeful, happy, more like my old self, less volatile. No more a hormonal, 12-year-old cat spraying on the curtains one moment, curled sleeping in the sun the next.

My actual celebration of the New Year was hardly a celebration at all. In bed with a fever, wearing 5 layers, scurrying to the toilet for my drop at midnight, I was not at an open bar, dancing at a club, or mingling at a party. But, I couldn’t be with friends so it didn’t matter. I was tucked under the covers, shivering, promising not to make empty promises, thinking about former lovers, family, friends, remarkably at peace with spending this over-hyped, anticlimactic party night in bed healing.

I woke up half way home, looking down at the 5.5 months in front of me. No longer am I wearing a diaper, sucking my thumb with Dumbo tears forming in my eyes staring at this beastly, never-ending, fanged, 9-month loneliness in Ahmedabad. And the last two weeks were definitely the bottom of the barrel, the holidays, the expectation of a break in the action, quality time with friends and family. Instead, just more work. No longer. Optimism now.

Who knows what I’ve done so far, if I’ve contributed at all, “helped,” hurt, been a total waste of space, ate too much, done too little -- the only thing that I can say for sure is that I’ve made it. I made it half way and it feels really good. There is a mid year retreat in two weeks, my parents will visit in February, and all of a sudden the end is in sight, there is a touch of immediacy around my work, thoughts of what happen next legitimately enter the picture, travel in June and July, thinking about how I am going to deal with the cost and disconnection of living in the U.S. again, getting to have lunch with B.C.

It is just January 4th, but climbing down is always easier.