Some Memories

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 3 minutes.

A SHORT STORY

Fifteen years ago, I lived for six months in the world's largest refugee camp during one of the worst famines ever recorded in the Horn of Africa.

Since that time, I have found it hard to return to the reality of that experience. While I think of Dadaab every single day of my life, the reality of meeting so many that close to death has lived somewhere in the past.

But recently, I started reading Ben Rawlence's book City of Thorns. The book was written about the time I lived in Dadaab, and while I had met Ben at the launch of the book in New York in 2016, I never had the courage to read it until a few weeks ago.

On the title page, Ben had written a note for me—"for Michael, Some memories…Ben." What I didn’t realize was how life-affirming these memories would be for me.

Every page feels like visiting an old friend.

And in a moment of synchronicity, this past week my friend Arnold sent me a message I had written to him 15 years ago—words that now seem to summarize what those memories mean to me.

I told him: “I have discovered that life is harsh here in Dadaab, and people carry within them such deep and harrowing stories of suffering, torment, and pain like I’ve never heard before. But what I have quickly discovered is that within every person here, who has escaped death, fled genocide, lost their families, and endured unimaginable hardships, there is something that exists, that rises up and clutches onto life; it is the ultimate will and strength of the human spirit.”

The Irish have a saying: the thing about the past is that it is here with you.

And so, maybe that’s what Dadaab continues to teach me all these years later—that the past is not something to be resolved or set aside, but something that walks with us, reshaping how we see the present and reminding us what it means to be alive.

What past moments still walk beside you, quietly shaping the way you live today?

A POEM

“Finisterre” by David Whyte

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water, going where shadows go,
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you had brought
and light their illumined corners; and to read
them as they drifted on the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.

Grateful,

Michael