Powerless and Powerful: a Human Manifesto

Becoming a citizen of the world comes with no shortage of downsides. Never in my life have I felt so powerless. Being in the middle of a fast lane of communication/human interactions make me feel like all the pain going on around me is too much for me to even make a difference. Our world is in decay, our humanity being tested every moment… and we are failing.

If you know something about what’s happening in the world, you know that in the last two months, we heard about a group of Islam extremists that came into a university in Kenya and killed around a hundred fifty students. This was only the tail of many more crimes by extremist groups we decide not to pay attention to. Given that education was a door for social mobility for the 150 families behind the murdered, the event is such a crime and a tragedy on so many levels I dare not to look closer afraid I cannot stand the truth. Last week a friend wrote me to translate a statement for humanitarian help for Yemen.  For me, it’s been even hard to help him spread the message because I’ve been far more worried about a cause next to me: hundreds of African humans are dying just trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea I see from the terrace of my building. I’m bathing on these waters, and I feel I’m somehow an accomplice of the overall indifference to the people crossing and dying trying. This week, I went to retire my residence permit in the Italian police department of Cagliari, and it is heartbreaking to see how all foreigners are treated, like scum, like lowlifes. Some people propose “let’s receive them in Sardinia and make of the island a multicultural laboratory that could potentially boost the economy of the region,” but you have to see the contempt of the majority of Italians to this idea.  My Nepalese friend here got the news that an earthquake hit her city today, and that parts of Kathmandu are now in ruins, hundred presumed dead.  I just wrote her a message on Facebook. What else can I do? To all of these things happening around me, what can I do, really?

I want to look back on my country, then, to see if choosing a cause over there would make me feel less overwhelmed and more focused, but the headlines on the news make me feel hope. There’s a cultural regression. Most people seem to be under a spell, blinded to the dialogue that pushes the country forward and absorbed in their “Game of Thrones-like” political plotting and backstabbing. The media hardly focuses on what’s important. Feeling environmentally responsible is the new placebo for well-being, and people have turned a blind eye to social problems. Costa Rica disappoints me because it has all the potential to step up its game and export models of integral development, yet there we are, having a discussion on race that has been taken out of context, tolerating the airs of grandeur of the Catholic church and being petted by its invisible hand, and seeing how the government has no clear north.  Not a lot of hope coming from my homeland.

It’s so much pain and there are so many just causes, I’m lost and powerless. I don’t know what to show solidarity for, which cause to embrace. I’m on a personal environmental crusade over here. Last week I had to present Costa Rica to a group of kids, and the teacher was not amused to see how strongly I pushed the cause of ecology and sustainability through the explanation of Costa Rica’s fauna. This is my cause, right now, from picking up trash on the nature to separate my trash, reusing paper, giving a new life to glass containers, no longer taking plastic bags at the supermarket.  I try to make people aware that sustainability is the future; that solidarity should take part of our time and efforts. It’s all very vague, but I hope that it all makes sense at the end.

In the middle of all the awe, I have found that I also want to speak out. I might not be Malala, but if I keep on writing is because I feel that is my responsibility to speak out for the world that I want for me and for others. The need of speaking out comes, after all, when you feel no one is shouting loud enough. I feel like I have some lung strength, and that’s when I feel powerful.  I see how others want to relate to me on these terms, and I feel empowered by this little Earth Army that want to make a difference.  The fewer people around you that seem at ease with what’s happening, the more people would feel something’s not entirely ok. This is a healthy kind of anxiety people need to wake up to. We need to make other feels the uneasiness for the suffering of others and understand that when we allow other humans to suffer, nothing can really guarantee we are not going to be next.

There’s a book called “The White’s Man Burden” by William Easterly, in which the author says human aid in Africa has failed because all we learn to do is to send money, not to guide them to construct better models of development. It applies to all contexts in need. The “white man”, the alien, would never become a savior: people should learn how to save themselves and all foreigners can do is helping providing the tools they may need that the developed world has and they don’t. We’re also very comfortable keeping Africa poor and alienated, bleeding from afar so that we can send ban aids to perpetuate the idea that we are compassionate.  I am only a wanderer here, I’m passing. I cannot tell Europeans how to react to their neighboring continent’s problems, but I can speak, hoping that they start changing their mentality and their indifference to African problems.  By now, people around me should now that I’m not happy about the injustice in the world, and that’s a start.  Being a global citizen starts with understanding humanity is one, and that I should spread kindness to all the people around me. I may not be superman, but as long as I have the power of one, it’s in my hands to try to make a difference.

Taking things out of my chest

I should start by saying Italy has been a blessing. It is way more than what I imagined, and I often feel overwhelmed by everything that is going on. However, this sense of great awe comes with a great deal of confusion and disorientation. I’ve been accumulating a few things, and since writing is the only way I know to acquire some catharsis, here I go, in a manner of a random confession that may at least reach some of the people that I feel I had to talk to.
I should start this paragraph also by saying that I’m very lucky to have many friends in Europe. Since I started this trip, the invitations to visit them have not been short. And although it is true that once in Europe the possibilities of traveling become easier with low cost airlines, it has not been so cheap as I expected. When I started this trip, I had savings that I brought with me and allowed me to start with my door to door campaing, but I’ve been here 5 months and last week an account balance by mail gently informed me that I’m poor. The implications of this are very simple: traveling outside Italy is no longer a possibility (unless I get a crazy offer on a direct flight that is). I should also feel very grateful that when I have promised friends to do my best to go and visit them, they have believed me. That means they regard me as reliable. This is an unfortunate time because I cannot be reliable. Be it for the nature of the work I have here and simply because now I am absorbed by the impromptu “Italian way” of doing things, I will continually disappoint if I keep making promises. Right now, I have a one way ticket to London for June and a bag full of ideas of what to do to buy the ticket back. Apart from that, I’ll be here, in the island, living a life that lacks no imagination but counts with only 265 Euros a month to make some magic happen.
I have also been very frustrated because of my foreigner status, and I’ve been thinking really to what extent I should continue fooling Italians around me with the impression that I will try to blend. I won’t. As a matter of fact, one of the best days I’ve had here was a Friday when all volunteers embraced their “alien” status and we went to dance under the sunset in the port of the city. We didn’t care how people looked at us: people looking at us is the rule. I am strange, and I don’t think I can change that. I learned their language just to discover that I cannot connect to their mainstream humor; that alone is a mood killer, especially in the island where people joke with you all the time when they are in a good mood. I can see myself enjoying with Italians in a context when they show tolerance to my strangeness, but never outside of it. This is so far the most crushing finding for me, who have dedicated a good part of life and career to understand interculturality and cultural adaptation and failed to integrate into his hosting environment. Back in Costa Rica, I’ll be strange, I promise; way more than I have been. But at least in your own country you can say your right of being strange is equality valid to the others’ right to follow society’s rules without questioning them.
I have also become very anxious by reconnecting with people from the past and meeting new people. For the people of tha past, sometimes I wish facebook could add a disclaimer that says “the person you are trying to add occupies the same body but no longer is the person you used to know”. It’s like all of the sudden I have to open my life to criticism from people who think they know me when they have missed in average, the last ten years of my life, the period when I constructed most of what I am today. Here in Italy I have my share of anxiety coming from the new people too. Every new circle I come in means that I have to eventually "come out". This is particularly shaming for me because I simply have lost the ability or even the desire to come out. Some people approach me because “wow, a Costa Rican” “wow, a latino”. Then they find out I’m gay and the smooth interaction is over. They start treating me like they feel cheated because I didn’t state it at the beginning before they got ideas of me being their next wingman – or date, and I feel terrible for those girls. Excuse me? Why did you even assume on my sexuality on the first place? I am embarrassed with myself because in my head, I am an out gay man, and one who wants society to be more accepting of difference. It was really hard to move to a new house a month ago because that meant finding the space to come out to new people again and then wait for the implications of it in my life. I’m sick of it, so sick. I wish it wasn’t a big deal, but when I have some recurrent nightmares of my mom kicking me out of the house again for being gay, I know it is. I’ve been trying to call her and ask her: “do you know that I remain gay, right?” just to check if she does not believe that overtime I’ve changed my mind about it. I’ve been waking up, gasping for air, wishing to reach out the phone just to know before going back if the distance has not made for her more comfortable with pretending she’s never had a gay son and she’ll rather have me stay somewhere else where my sexual identity cannot bring her shame. It's like I want to know if the progress we've made in acceptance is still there. This whole gender thing has been particularly frustrating because I come from a place when my friends attend Pride with me and where being self-sufficient gave me the room to make my own choices and defend them aggressively, but now I’m in a house I don’t rent, in a strongly heteronormative country that is not my own, somehow disconnected from any gay social bubble, and so far away to ask my family for hugs and understand through their actions and not to words that they whole fight’s over, that I can rest my case because their love is unconditional… this was getting to my head so much that I felt that if I did not put it at least into words, I was going to go crazy. I got drunk last weekend, and I told the flatmate I get along with the most that I was gay. He's completely cool with it. One anxiety less.

Oh, man. Confessions. Catharsis. A cry to the wind (the cyberwind.) I feel better already.