As any lawyer who has taken a vacation is sure to know, sorting through emails and missed correspondence upon your return is about as pleasant an experience as giving yourself multiple paper cuts. One of the things that helped the most with my professional re-entry was the enthusiasm of the colleagues who dropped by my office to hear stories and look at photos from my trip.
My return from Shakawe, Botswana (where there are no street names, you just describe where you live in relation to your neighbours) to the tallest tower on Bay Street resulted in something I wasn’t prepared for: reverse culture shock.
I returned home after a six hour, non-air-conditioned bus ride in 45 degree heat and three flights. I was sunburned, covered in bites from bugs that I do not ever want to identify, dehydrated and thrilled to see my family. But now, I miss Botswana so much that I would even consider putting up with the hippos grunting in my backyard and the red Kalahari sand that still seems to hide in everything I own in order to go back.
As my colleague and fellow Leave for Change volunteer, Meghan Thomas, observed about her experience in Guatemala, there is a lot of value in being uncomfortable. I cannot agree with her more.
For a good portion of my trip, I was either physically uncomfortable due to the bugs, animals, heat and lack of water; emotionally uncomfortable at being confronted with such extreme poverty and sickness; or culturally ill at ease and often a bit lonely. Being uncomfortable did not ruin or detract from my experience, though; in fact, it enhanced the trip. The fact that I was so uncomfortable gave me a new perspective on many things about my life in Toronto.
We are incredibly lucky in Canada to be so wealthy and to have access to so many resources — both natural resources like water and nutritious food, and professional resources such as technology and accomplished colleagues.
Perhaps as a result of our abundance of resources, we are also incredibly wasteful with what we have. For instance, Toronto has put on two fireworks displays in one week. Both the pollution caused by fireworks and their expense made me wonder whether the funds wouldn’t have been better allocated towards helping the homeless people who sleep huddled on subway grates along Bay Street to keep from freezing.
This stands in stark contrast to my experience in Shakawe. Once, while walking through the town on my lunch break, some school boys (pictured above) who were wearing mismatched shoes and whose schoolbags were falling apart at the seams, came up to me to offer a homemade popsicle (a big treat) to help keep me cool in the noonday sun. If people who have so little are willing to share what they have, why is a rich society so unable to care for its few truly poor people? It is uncomfortable to think about how much more we could be doing as a community to help those around us.
Silence can also be discomforting. I realized when I was waiting to catch my flight home from Heathrow that I had spent three weeks without being subjected to any advertisements, without listening to the radio, reading the New York Times, Huff Post or Lainey Gossip. While this freedom from popular media meant that I was able to daydream, read books under my mosquito net illuminated by a tiny book light and focus on taking in everything in my immediate surroundings, I quickly became aware of the fact that I’m not accustomed to having this much time alone with my thoughts. I also realized that I had no idea of what was going on in the world — that I’m so reliant on getting quick hits of information from all over that I often miss out on thinking about small and local issues as a result.
While I was in Shakawe, I was often uncomfortable with how much attention people paid me. Walking to work on my first day back in Toronto, it dawned on me that it was no longer culturally appropriate to greet everybody I saw with a “Dumela Mma,” “Dumela, Rra” and that, as a result, I was likewise invisible to everybody. In Botswana, it is rude not to greet everybody you see. If you end up being late for a meeting because you’ve been greeting people, that’s just what needs to happen. Greeting everybody and enquiring about their day is possible to do in a country with a population of around 1.8 million, but I’m not sure how my colleagues would feel if I waltzed in at 1 p.m. each day, saying “Sorry I’m late, I bumped into about 3,000 people I had to enquire after. No matata, right?” It would be incredible to find a balance between the relative anonymity experienced in a city and the beautiful gesture of acknowledging people’s presence.
More than anything, my three weeks working in Shakawe taught me how important a job it is to be a lawyer. I don’t mean this in any kind of self-aggrandizing way; having been taught how to interpret and apply the law and how to communicate in a specific way are skills that brought tangible results to the community in which I was working. A two-page contract for the sale of veld products drafted on Tuesday meant that the villagers were paid on Wednesday and were able to buy groceries for their families on that same day. I would say that anybody who has lost his or her idealism about the power of the law to be a force for good or for change should volunteer — whether here in the city for an organization that needs a few hours, or through a program such as Leave for Change. Seeing my work act so directly and meaningfully as a positive force for good has reminded me of why I became a lawyer in the first place.
FMC lawyer Melissa Ghislanzoni joined us this month to blog about her time working as a volunteer lawyer in Botswana.