My New Diary

(copied from the opening pages of my new diary.)

I am now the proud owner of a Chinese diary, purchased in a Chinese-owned, fixed-price store on Avenue d’Uprona in Bujumbura, Burundi. I am writing in it with a pen from Fellowship Missionary Church, on Tillman Road a few hundred yards from a Wal-mart in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This pen has traveled farther than many of my friends and family.

This diary probably has some sort of typo or defect, which is why it has ended up here in East Africa. In fact, this diary came with a pen of its own, a black plastic click pen that, when clicked, extends the ball point just a millimeter beyond the shoddily-cut plastic end, rendering it nigh useless but for filling the handy leather strap where it was meant to reside. Hence the replacement pen from Tillman Road.

Burundi is the middle child of the world.

It seems that all it receives are the hand-me-downs of its older siblings to the east and west. Recycled tee shirts from your senior spring break in 1992, stationary with typing errors, electronic appliances that are nicked, defective, or simply no longer in their prime fill the markets and storefronts, and the people lay out their hard-earned, yet meager earnings to purchase these international leftovers. The disdain emanates from the older siblings as they watch their old toys trotted out and fought over.

The younger siblings here on the continent receive doting care from the new colonial powers, showering them with international aid, business connections, advocacy on the global stage, celebrity endorsement. This comes from a not-so-subtle sense of guilt that they messed something up. There was clearly an error somewhere in their history of raising these uneducated children with dark skin. Somewhere there was neglect, an abandonment, where the kids unleashed violence and atrocity on each other while mom and dad were too busy with their careers.

So they sent their youngest kids to military school, a school where their leaders become tyrants who whip them into shape at the cost of their rights and freedoms. They shower their babies with money and misplaced affection because they’ve been through so much (and there’s now a motion picture out chronicling their neglect.)

And all the while, the middle child sits, not early enough for oldest-child advantage, the recipient of the same abuse and neglect as all children, but without the endearing baby-face of the youngest that brings about pity and attention.

So here I sit, with my most-likely-flawed hand-me-down of a diary, from a Chinese store on a potholed Burundian thoroughfare. Maybe it’s not so bad to be the middle kid. You learn more quickly to learn things the hard way. You develop creativity and vision to make do with what you have. Maybe Burundi just needs to embrace their “middle-kidness” and stop trying to be the all-important eldest or the spoiled youngest. Maybe if Burundi learns to stand on its own, it will grow up just fine.