Zahara Nakibuule, aged 19, graduating from high school

My eye was caught in the paper yesterday by the happiness of this young woman graduating. I was curious about her relationship with the older woman. Turns out she is a Ugandan who lost both parents to AIDS and was adopted by an affluent US family at age 12. She says she finds it hard to see her friends leave food on their plates because she recalls so well going out to the garden every day with her mother in Uganda to see what there was left to eat, and sometimes finding nothing. Her personal journey and struggle is an extraordinary story of our current world. This sentence stood out for me:

“It seems like it’s switched,” Zahara said. “In Uganda, no one complains about how stressful things are, and there’s a lot of joy in people, especially in the kids. Here, there are so many enjoyments, but the people are stressed out. They talk about their stresses all the time. … I was not sensitive to my friends’ complaints. I wanted to understand them, but at the same time, I could not.”

If that doesn’t relate to Nichola’s comment in the last post, what does? It’s not that life in Uganda is happier than here: of course that was not what Zahara meant or why I quote her. It’s that we have so little understanding of how fortunate we are and at the same time of how truly bizarre is the way we are using that good fortune.