My goal is to read 40 books in 2008. I’m off to a chaotic start. The latest read was “Blue Clay People” by William Powers. I enjoyed his other book earlier this year and was excited to see my library carried this one. Four out of five bananas, absoloodle.
This book is about Liberia in 1999-2001 when President Charles Taylor was fine-tuning his abilities to see that the rain forest was cleared and the diamond mines emptied. (In all fairness, he did this to feed the diamond and timber hungry markets of the world, very much including my own American community.)The expense was a generation of Liberians — and their next door neighbors in Sierra Leone — who fought brutal wars, many of who survived with wicked drug habits and missing limbs.
Powers excerpts the following, which so accurately sums up my experiences as an expatriate:
“Like most people who go overseas to do development work, I did so expected to find out what it’s like to be poor…That ‘s not what happens. Instead you learn what it’s like to be rich, to be fabulously, incomprehensibly, bloated with wealth.”
— Mike Tidwell, “The Ponds of Kalambayi”
And this point from Powers’ book will remain with me for the rest of my life:
“There is a point called ‘enough.’ It is elusive, but it exists and Chief Wah, and many of Liberia’s simplest people know where it is, even if they slip below it during the hungry season, during the warring season. Enough is food, water, clean air and community. Enough is the rhythm of a talking drum under a moon that speaks to you through its light. Enough is listening to nature rather than dominating it. We in the West must relax and ratchet down to the joyful place called enough; many Liberians need to increase their well-being until we meet there, in a sustainable world.”
One last excerpt:
“I go into each new day looking at every person as a unique being capable of miracles; I look with wonder upon the healthy forests that still remain and draw strength from them; I am conscious of what I consume and try to bring my consumption into harmony with my vision of a just world. I attempt to find joy in living simply so that others (including other species) may simply live. I act as if a sustainable world were possible.”
Learning not to fulfill every need, living in the world of enough. It would be a beautiful thing.
Books in 2008:
1. Whispering in the Giant’s Ear
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns
3. Lipstick Jihad
4. The Island
5. A Year of Pleasures
6. Blue Clay People
7. Where God Was Born — currently reading
~K