Belief

‘I do believe,’ Sophie says. ‘Just not in God.’ We are sipping beer under the Kashmir stars, hiding around the corner in the tiny Atlas Logistique compound so the drivers won’t see us. Not that it matters. They know what foreigners do.

‘Well, then what?’ I ask. We’ve just finished a fascinating conversation during which I’ve discovered that Sophie did a doctorate in particle physics in a past life. She was building a detector under the Alps or something. They were trying to find WIMPs – weakly interacting massive particles – the dark matter of the universe. The stuff we can’t see that holds everything together. It’s kind of poetic, like faith. I asked her if she found any, but she shook her head. It will take years, she says. You have to guess how they’ll interact because you can’t watch them directly. Then you have chart how every other known particle interacts so that if you log an event that is something but isn’t something you know, you might have a WIMP. Maybe. Again, it seems a lot like faith, trying to believe in something you can’t see, something hiding from you but still somehow present, influential, vital. But I keep quiet with my comparisons. We’ve moved on to religion, which Sophie thinks is boring, boring, boring. She saw one of the young Tearfunders on the helicopter once reading a Bible, of all things, and she rolls her eyes. What a waste, she says. People should be having fun.

Sophie is staring at me, questioning. Back to the present. I repeat myself. ‘What do you believe? If not God, then what?’

She plays with her lighter, rolls it around in her fingers and clicks the blue flame up to lick the end of her cigarette. She graces me with one of her incomparable French shrugs. ‘Humanity,’ she says, blowing out smoke.

Humanity. That’s us. She believes in us. Oh, hell.

My 11th and 12th grade English teacher, Mr. Mckellar, was quite big on Humanity as well, except he called it The Human Spirit. This was the part of us that fought oppression and wrong and evil in the world, what kept us not only alive, but civilized and loving and good and above all, free. It’s that last one that makes the whole thing a little tricky, because free has to mean free to oppress and do wrong and be evil if you want to do that instead of being civilized and loving and good. I didn’t quite have the head about me at the time to point that out in class but I’m sure Mr. Mckellar would have had some clever answer to it. And I’m not about to bring it up with Sophie now. I hate having intellectual debates about belief. But I think it.

Actually, I think about it just about every day here: Our ability to ruin everything, our world, ourselves. It’s the garbage that reminds me.

***

It’s about day 10 of 14 in Bagh, the longest I’ve been here at one stretch. Have I described Bagh yet? It is a river valley with steep green hillsides rising up from the now-dry river bed like alien spaceships on all sides, glinting with corrugated iron rooftops during the day and pricked with the yellow holes of low voltage lights at night, like stars on the cape of a hunchbacked magician. The bazaar and the main road run along the north side of the river, and the town sprawls up the hill from there. From the helicopter, it looks like a kid tripped and spilled a bunch of houses from his bag. He just kept running and forgot to pick them up.

The Tearfund office is on the main bypass road that drops down to the level of the river below the bazaar between the bridge that crosses to the old section and the gully-wash clutching the upper river at the end of its long run down from the northern hillsides. We live in metal shipping containers, converted for domestic use. They sit at slightly odd angles on the ground, which is not the ‘level, compacted ground’ the company told us to prepare as a site for the cabins. They used to rock a little like rowboats at the dock, but after the latest heavy rainstorm they have settled into slightly but decidedly un-level positions, cockeyed like white dice that fell of the game board onto the carpet by accident.

It’s less hot here than Islamabad, but it’s still hot. These days in the evenings the clouds build up the valley and get dark and the wind starts blowing like the end of the world. Sometimes the storm slips around us, channeling up some other valley, but most of the time it turns the sky that dark Crayola gray colour and begins to pour rain and fork lightning all over the place and rattle the air with thunder. They ask me what will happen if lightning hits the metal cabins with us in it, but I really don’t know. It’s one of the many things I feel like I should know, but don’t. I tell myself I’ll look it up when I get home. The trouble with Progress and things always working is that most people forget how they work.

About 25 of us live here. We are young and old, men and women, Muslim, Christian, educated and not. We work during the day and in the evening we are crazy about badminton. The Muslims stop for the evening prayers. At dusk you can see the strange sight of bearded men in prayer caps bowing prostrate in a line beside the badminton court, while two (presumably Christian) opponents whack the birdie back and forth in the heat of their match. It appears irreverent, but no one seems to mind. We have a small space, and badminton and prayer must live shoulder to shoulder. Everything must share. The beds are bunks, ten to a cabin, so space is shared, air is shared, cupboards are shared, bathrooms are shared. Only the space on your own bunk is your own. To be alone I have to go out, so I do, every morning, and run.

I go early, which is the only time it’s cool enough. My route is oval, down the road under the bridge, around the corner past the gas stations and up the long slow hill that climbs through the bazaar. I get to the gully-wash and turn right, back downhill again to join the bypass road, then take the long home stretch past the earthquake villages made of Chinese tents and Oxfam latrines and women doing their washing at leaking tapstands. At dawn, the valley and the hills are green and purple, and the sun is a golden crescent slicing up through the shoulder of the far mountain. It’s beautiful to look at, and when you’re out running alone you feel as if you are first up at the beginning of the world.

Until you arrive at the garbage, and remember that you are part of Humanity.

***

Like most things here, garbage is someone else’s job, so people throw it in the gutter, in the stream, along the river bed, down the hillside. Someone else will clean it up, people think, maybe – or maybe they don’t even think that. You see? Freedom. The Human Spirit. I hate this side of it, in me and everyone else. But it keeps popping up, everywhere you look.

Yesterday I learned that the villagers of Androd are refusing to dig the trench for the water supply pipes we want to put in for them because the work is beneath them. Get the Pathuns to do it, they say. That’s their kind of work. I have to nag my staff constantly to clean up the toilet stalls in our compound after they use them and make a mess. ‘It’s not someone else’s job!’ I wail at them. (Now I know how my mother felt all those years). Everywhere you look there is another thing that’s someone else’s job, and in the mean time the world clutters up and stinks and falls apart and we scream at each other to do something, or sit sullenly, or take advantage and gobble up whatever we can for ourselves, kill, rape, steal, whatever.

I’m an aid worker in the 2000s. This is the decade of natural disasters. Nothing you can do about those but yell at God and pick up the pieces. But at night I’m reading a book by some aid workers in the 90s, which started with the UN elections in Cambodia and a new decade of humanitarian hope for the world. They held the elections, full success, and led by Bill Clinton’s new humanitarian American foreign policy, they were off to make a new world order. Democracy everywhere and rockets up in the name of Humanity. Everyone believed. What followed in rapid order was Somalia, then Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The three UN workers who wrote this book gut themselves on the pages and spill their disenchantment everywhere. They thought they could save the world with their Humanity, but it turned on them. Humanity, God love it, cuts both ways.

***

But I know why Sophie believes in it, or at least why she likes it. She likes it for the same reason I like her. She’s all sorts of things, some you like and some you don’t, but she’s capable of extraordinary beauty sometimes. A beautiful act, a true word at the most exact moment, kindness, the way she shrugs. I like Humanity for the same reason I like missing dinner in the dining container in Bagh, so I can go late and sit with Yousef the Cook and trade pidgin-English jokes across the table with him. It’s the same reason I like bumping around Islamabad in the jeep with Paul, Arabic dance music blaring, princes of our world. I like the workmen in this town, the welders and bricklayers with their rough hands and laugh lines around their eyes. And the old men stepping slowly out of their shoes at dusk and dropping to their knees on the roadside to bow before God, the Almighty, the Merciful. There is something wonderful about us, and at times we are almost gods. The reason to believe in Humanity, despite all the garbage and the genocides and the killing and rape and child slavery and complaining is that sometimes, just sometimes, in the middle of all this, we are surprisingly beautiful, and true, and noble, and for a brief moment we get it right.

But not most of the time, and not enough. For some reason I can’t get into it with Sophie just now, because the truth of it is the whole thing’s a bloody mystery, and someone has to die for all the mistakes, but none of us are good enough to do that. I can’t believe in Humanity all by itself because as beautiful as it can get it’s also full of garbage and murder and greed, and there’s no way it can save itself on its own. Mr. McKellar used to quote Orwell’s 1984 and say that the symbol of oppression was a jackboot stamping out a human face forever. He liked to separate the human face from the boot, but it won’t work. The boot’s on a human foot too, and we do this to ourselves. We can’t just be nicer. Try it one day; see how far you get. And who wants to be nice, anyway? I want to be Good. I’m sorry Sophie, but we need a Bible, boring or not, and we need a God, a spotless God to come down and reverse the bloody laws of the universe so the badness in us shrinks back until it is gone, and only our goodness is left.

So. God is our only chance, and God is difficult. He demands perfection and sacrifice and hard work and giving up your life and most of the time there is no reward in sight, only this straining faith in One Day, One Day When It Will All Turn Out Right. Ah, Sophie, I’d love to say Screw It and give up on God and keep sipping beer out here with you under the stars and believe that all of us aid workers with our Humanity and our parties and love-making and our clear and shining moments – that all this is good enough. But a life more than this stirs in my blood, and outside in the world the garbage keeps piling up like evidence against us, the stench of our greed and bloody, selfish intent. The only way I can see to save my beloved humanity is to stop making love to it with the flaccid hope that it will become more beautiful with my caress.

So turn my reluctant face from all the witchery and charm of this world and instead, painfully most of the time – wishing there was some other way - slip me out of my shoes to bow before God, though he slay me with his goodness. Islam: total submission. And there is joy in it, somewhere, one day.

The Almighty, the Merciful.