Only now, a month after coming home, it is unbareable.
The E-lab is really quiet and I just had to send an email out to John. I know where he'll be sitting when he reads it. I know the sounds.
Maybe feeling displaced is better than being comfortable/stagnant. Because, yes, I would take this feeling over the one that had settled in my bones last summer.

Excerpts from Third Paper. This part, about Madurai.

It's a funny thing, sitting in a rooftop restaurant, looking out at works of beauty –man made and natural, and think that just five hours ago you were in a big shack with dusty floors, wiry women, and children with moon eyes. I eat to forget about those children for a little bit, I laugh louder to drown out their cries and sari tugging, and I go to sleep early, welcoming the respite. This is the first time in my life that my race has played a bigger part in how I am treated by others than my gender.
After DAWN we visit Peoples' Watch. I am sick to my stomach on this day; I am doing banking in my head – making dollars and sense out of my recent bank transaction. Subtract here, add there, carry the two, move the decimal place over a few spaces…This is the reality of lectures, visits, and classes: notebooks out, faces attentive, and minds in New Jersey, India, bed, interlaced with images of bloated Tsunami victims and checking account receipts. Home and India battling it out for domination, your heart is with those little bodies and to cope with it your brain wonders where you'll be working this summer.
The issue of Untouchability does not translate well into American society. Because, wait, is it like sexism or racism? No, not exactly, try again. But there's nothing left to compare it to and we're told not to compare, but how else can I process? So Dalitism is kind of like racism, but not, and I am sitting listening to a representative of People's Watch (name not remembered) trying to dump out all of my previous conceptions of what is Up and Down, Right and Wrong. People's Watch is the Oppressor helping the Oppressed who cannot afford to help themselves. The NGO aids in legal issues, steps in when a person's rights are being violated, and is taking an active role in protesting the Indian government's treatment of the coastal Tsunami victims. Their houses were swept away and then they were told, "No you cannot live here anymore; it is not safe." So they are displaced and a shiny, fancy, affluent resort is being put up where they used to cook their meals and love their kids.
The picture books with the bloated bodies, dead animals, ruined houses, and smiling people shaking hands with their right hand and holding donations with the left came out at the end of the session. We scrambled to hold one of them and our enthusiasm to see pictures was met with reality. I have never seen brains oozing out of a man's eye or a child with bruises all over his body where he was thrown up against the rocks. No, I have just seen poor miserable alive people.
A generic Oppressor is anyone who is not oppressed. If the oppressed are supposed to help themselves, if that's the ideal, then is it okay that the people who helplessly fall into the Oppressor class help them? I thought about that as I sat in the cramped office at People's Watch and lifted my face towards the breeze coming at me from the air conditioner in the wall. I do not think it is right to make these divisions. People fall into too many of the categories. I'm White, that makes me an oppressor, but I'm also a woman, that makes me oppressed. My mother and I have to work very hard to make our ends meet. She does not have health insurance, a full-time job, but she does have Diabetes, a bad back, and depression. My mother is oppressed, but she's white, but, wait, she's also a woman.
These boxes and labels induce guilt or shame. How is to be called Oppressed? Does a self-righteousness and appreciation of acknowledgement flood the system or does a person get crushed under the weight of the implied struggle ahead? And what kind of guilt comes along with being called an Oppressor; that you oppress people... women, if you're a man; people of color, if you're white; the whole of the LGBTQ community if you are straight? ......

People's Watch is made of Oppressors who help Oppressed and there is nothing wrong and everything good about that. I can see of no better way of advocating for equality and justice by practice compassion and giving justice. One by one we filed out of the little building and got back into our auto rickshaws. It was lunch time and we would not be eating on a roof top, but a nice little restaurant at the hotel. Too practice the hand to mouth technique of eating, I had to forget that I just saw three little children laid out shoulder to shoulder on a beach; none of them alive; none of their faces in one piece. .......

The working class, the women, gays, blacks, even the rich fat white men are all under the thumb of Patriarchy, a mentality. It's a simple trick to undo this, just educate. We have to talk until we're blue in the face and then we have to have someone come in and take over for us while we breathe into a brown paper bag. Keep at it. This is why there needs to be advocation for white people to participate in dialogues about race; straight people to understand theirs is a sexuality as well; men to open up about the societal pressures they feel; and for the big bosses and money makers to be forced to spend a day working under the conditions they place on others. So, understanding, people need to understand that just because something is the majority (white, straight, male, etc) does not make it invisible, does not make it exempt from criticism or oppression. Everyone is oppressed and they/we are oppressing themselves/ourselves. By accepting ideology that lets a person be an Oppressor, a person is just falling easily into the box made for him or her. The same is true for the box made for the oppressed. I want radical thinking to break out of these binaries because only then can we have radical change.