Running: A Love Story (stolen from a book by the same name)

I hadn't run in about a week; with work and travel and then the rules that tell us we won't be safe outside the walls of the hotel. With the heat and pollution and ruts in the road, I wouldn't get far anyways. The high is supposed to be 108 today and at 9 am temperatures were climbing far into the 90s.

But I made it downstairs to the single treadmill. I hate running on treadmills. Most runners do. We enjoy the space of the outdoors, the silence of the sky above, opening up for a sprint and feeling like our minds open with our speed. I've always enjoyed learning about new places through my runs, seeing roads and trails I never would have seen - little glimpses inside people's homes as they awake for coffee, sometimes, what they've planted in their gardens, the different shades of greens in the trees. These are things you don't see from inside a vehicle.

But today in Ouagadougou the single treadmill in the basement called out to me. I hopped on and started running. All the pressure inside my head defused. The sweat washed out the stress inside me. The a/c barely churned, so the sweat was profuse - just what I needed to make it through the day.

I've struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and big changes in my life over the past two or so years - my mother's death, divorce, new relationships, relocating - have made the depression -flanked with whole hours and sometimes days and nights filled with anxiety  - so much worse.

In all my writing, I've rarely ever admitted to this thing called "depression." It seems so silly and superficial when you are traveling in an effort to fix some of the world's problems, and these problems are huge: poverty, gender-based violence, hunger, thirst.

I talked to a woman in Yemen who  had 11 children, one dying after the other from conditions of poverty. Despite these circumstances, she kept getting pregnant again and again, nevertheless, because she didn't have any money to purchase contraception and even if she did, pharmacies with condoms and pills don't exist where she lives, and who knows if her husband would have even allowed them to use either. The woman said she was around my age at the time - barely more than 30 -- although she didn't know her exact age, She looked more like 55.

I've seen men, grown men, scramble in the sand for Cheerios I had dropped because they were so hungry. I've seen people digging meters and meters in to the hard, dry earth just to find water. I've written about little girls who were married off at the age of 8. I've seen people drinking water that looks like mud.

So, depression: what do I really have to be depressed about besides this never-ending string of global strife? I'll never really know - maybe it is just a genetic chemical imbalance passed down through my mother or maybe I am just too fortunate - a fortunate one - where even the slightest graying of the sky can turn my mood down.

All that I know is that running is my greatest love, my only antidote, no matter where in the problematic world I've landed.

Youth: A Dream Spent

I flew in and it wasn’t the same. I was no longer young and wanderlusting. I was just there landing after 24 hours of travel to Africa to do my job—to help organize a conference, to write a few things, to survive the jet lag, and to remember to drink only bottled water. I looked out the window of the SUV transporting us to our hotel and I saw the dust and dirt, the poverty, the dark streets; felt the ruts and deep holes in the roads. I could smell the pollution seeping through the closed windows. And unlike in 2009, when I landed in Burkina Faso’s neighbor, Niger, and I sensed an adventure, making a possible small, meager contribution to "saving the world," learning something about myself, at least, growing, here, I felt nothing, no possibility at all. Yes, the poverty is sad, but it hasn’t overwhelmed, and it never goes away.

The world continues to tick on. Poverty remains. The same black plastic bags littering the streets of Niamey in 2009 stayed there, never disintegrating, littering, just the same, the streets of Ouagadougou. We try to help, to make things better, but so little actually does any good at all. And that mentality of 'helping' is fraught with so many connotations; are we helping or just happy to be of the intention of doing no harm?

I still feel elated by the kindness, warmth, and generosity of the Burkinabe women who work for Pathfinder here. Sarat is so tall and in her height and stealth, she commands energy. Her laugh is infectious. I could never tire of Sarat. So, I guess, women like Sarat are the flowers in the piles of dirt and plastic bags.

It still seems absurd to host these events at hotels that cost more each night than a Burkinabe might earn in six months. But we do. We need to be secure. Last year, a terrorist attack maimed and killed NGO workers just like us, at a hotel just like this, in this very city. So, we come to these countries, stay in these places, spend thousands of dollars to host these events that we hope will ignite change, but it is never easy to determine if they actually do anything at all. So, there you go, with my youth has gone my idealism and the allure for “adventure” travel with it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been impressed and inspired by so many of our programs—in DRC, Ethiopia, in Yemen, before the country devolved into war and we had to vacate. They have offered so many women and girls a chance they never would have had without our investments. But the allure of my travel here, its point, the investment in it, newly mystifies me.

Maybe I’ll walk the block tomorrow, sweat out the 106 degree midafternoon funk, try to be inspired, even affected by where I am—try to get back that gratitude I once had for being able to make these trips at all; for perspective and growth and being able to see how the world lives.

Or maybe I'll realize I'm not really the nomad I thought I always was. Maybe I'm ready to settle and feel like I'm home.