DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?

DISCLAIMER: To better understand story characters please refer to this blogs very first post.

-The First Part-

Aloha! Thanks for stopping by. I got something for you from the journal. This part of Suzyo’s life we’ll simply call “Seeing Things.”

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                                                                                                                                   23^rd June, 1992

Dear diary,

Let me tell you how my day went. Walk with me.

A warm ball of light filtered through my thin eyelids at five in the morning, slowly bringing me to my wake. I blinked a few times in an attempt to help my eyes adjust to the illumination directed right at my defenseless figure. I breathed in deeply. A new day had begun.

Soaked in sweat from my early morning jog, I put rice on the stove to cook and headed for the showers. At ten to eight I was refreshed, well groomed and ready for my day. Sitting at the kitchen table, ready for breakfast, I looked at my daily planner to see where I would be at what times, what I had to be doing and how I had to prepare physically and even emotionally for those times. I’ve found that planning my days the night before assures me that I won’t waste at least most of the day doing about anything the wind blows my way. After doing that it was just me and my bowl of peanut butter rice. I began to look around me for what I could do in the ten minutes I had while at my breakfast. I looked at my feature phone, not much to do there but play Snake. I looked at my computer, too much time would be wasted in firing it up alone. Then I saw a newspaper on the kitchen cabinet. Perfect! I reached for it and began to browse through. Page One, Headline: THE PRESIDENT IS CORRUPT says opposition. I nodded my head to that the same way you do when you don’t know what to think about something. I quickly skipped to the international news section: Page thirteen, Southern and Central African countries still lagging behind in development. Disappointed, no -devastated, I got up and threw the newspaper back where it was -letting it spin mid-air before it landed. I reached for my backpack and closed the door behind me as I headed out.

I had to buy a notepad at the bookstore but when I got there they weren’t open yet. I sat down on a bench outside the store and decided I could put a few pages of David Foster Wallace’s latest book in while I waited for them to open. As I pulled my backpack to my side to grab the book, I noticed a man –probably in his mid-thirties- sitting next to me. Clad in a shabby suit, he looked, fairly, like Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happyness. I brushed it aside, got my book and got to reading. Two words, literally, two words into the book, I heard him say hi to me. I looked up at him with all the surprise my face could muster. As if oblivious to my expressions, he warmly smiled at me. I don’t think I smiled back; I really just wanted to get back to my book. But no, he was not going to let me. He began to explain something to me but I could barely follow him as my mind blurred. He said something about being there looking for a job but just when I was starting to care the bookstore was opened and I really had to go.

As the day progressed, I attended all my classes, met up with my study group at some point and studied at the times I was supposed to. It was a good day for productivity.

Late at night -after my day was done- on my way back to my hostel, I saw a poster stuck by the Development Studies Association on the notice board outside the library. I paused to read it. As soon as I noticed that it was only about them hosting a discussion with the minister of National Development and Planning a few days from now I read no more and walked on.

A few minutes later, as I walked on, lost in my own thoughts, I stared up at the university buildings. Bringing a slight smile to my face, I noticed that they were so old they looked like every day they had to find a new reason to remain standing. A pothole I stepped in made me stumble and called me back to wake.

At the hostel -lying face to the ceiling on my bed after supper- as I went over the events of my day, I became pensive about something I rarely, if ever, thought about. I thought about the claims in the newspaper that the president is corrupt. I thought about why the man with, probably, the highest salary in the land would be corrupt. I thought about whether his corruption, if true, had an impact on investments, on the exacerbation of poverty, and maybe even on the under-development of my society. I thought about the job-less man I had ignored in the morning. I thought about for how long he could have been jobless. I thought about whether there was something that could be done about his plight by anyone at whatever level of my society.

Now I couldn’t stop my mind. The unmentionable odor of these things had now offended my night. I kept on thinking about the things going on in this society. I thought about why everything seems to be going wrong. The eroded university structures, human rights violations, misappropriation of funds and the ever increasing national debt. While a lot of countries that were ‘third-world’ when Alfred Sauvy coined the term have since developed, we’ve been stuck here for more than four decades. It’s so bad that development seems like a far-fetched dream down here. And if you never think of these things, dear diary, I want some of what you’re having.

Now, I don’t consider myself patriotic by any stretch of my imagination but, lying there, I was forced to think about why things where this way down here. Is it the…
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Wait, the continuation of this must be here somewhere. *Flips back and forth vigorously* This is embarrassing. Give me a second to look for it. *Exhales*