Calling all angels
Overwhelmed by the endless stories of violence all around us, I’ve had the line of a Train song in my head:
I need to know that things are gonna look up
Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup
But a beautifully supportive quotation sent in from a friend today lifted my spirits a bit. It’s from Dr James Orbinski’s recently published book An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century. Orbinski is a Canadian doctor who remained in Rwanda through the genocide, working for MSF, when most other aid workers fled. Trying to explain his actions, he writes:
There are moments in a particular story where I knew that my fear overwhelmed everything else, and there are other moments where the implications of not acting or speaking overwhelmed my fear….What I’ve experienced is that I can’t know the future. I can’t know if anything that I do will change what happens tomorrow. I can’t know with certainty, but what I do know is if I do nothing, nothing will change.