paradox

I'm finding it strangely hard to blog from the first world. We've been in Australia for a week now, and I've been avoiding this corner of the internet, totally unsure of what to write.

I want to say what a great time we're having. How we've been welcomed so warmly by friends from the ship, shown everything from Sydney Harbour in a raging thunderstorm to the Australian Outback Spectacular in Brisbane to the top of a mountian in Port Macquarie. How we've slipped so easily back into these old relationships, born of a common love for Africa and a big white ship.

But when I sit down at the keyboard, my fingers are slow to type these words, pushing as they must through an unexpected and overwhelming feeling of guilt.

I expected to feel the not-belonging, coming here. I prepared myself for the shock of first world prices, a place where a bottle of water costs three dollars instead of three cents and actually comes in a bottle instead of a plastic bag. I schooled myself to be ready for the orderly streets, the fenced-in lawns and the stop lights where everyone, inexplicably, stops when they turn red. All this I was ready for.

It was the guilt that blindsided me.

All around me is the shiny, new first world but all through my heart is the third, and it's my heart that's telling me that there is something so wrong about all this. I'm here having the time of my life and I can't stop feeling like I shouldn't be.

At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think I know too much now. I think I've seen and lived among, in my admittedly limited experience, far too much of the opposite side of the coin to be able to bask in the shine on this one without consequence. I run my fingers over dresses made from rich cloth in air-conditioned stores, and I find myself wanting to buy things even as I cringe from the thought of spending so much money and through it all is this voice screaming in my head. You are greedy again. You are enjoying yourself, eating ice cream and going to the zoo and spending long days pleasing only yourself. You want this world and everything it has to offer. You are greedy again.

I'm telling myself it's not true, that I would give anything to be back on the dirt roads and in the bamboo shacks of Asia and Africa, but then I catch the scent of my freshly-washed hair and realize that I'm loving the feeling of being clean and safe in a quiet home where all I can hear is the crickets in the fields outside.

I don't know which way is up anymore. I don't think it's wrong to enjoy myself in this place, to revel in the feel of clean sand between my toes without worrying whether someone's dropped a dirty needle or used the area for a toilet. I don't think it's a sin to wish I could buy a pretty dress. But I don't know how to think that with the same mind that has seen families living in raggedy shacks no bigger than a chicken coop. I don't know how to type about how I got to feed kangaroos with the same hands that were clutched by beggar children with huge, pleading eyes.

I don't know how these two halves of me will ever fit together again. to form anything like the whole I'm used to. I'd say I'm not sure I want them to, but I really don't want to live with this guilt because it's strange and awkward and not terribly comfortable.

This is one time I really wish I had all the answers.