death

Three immediate family members of our friends here have died in the past five days. This is common here but it's still hard to stomach, hard to understand how much death is part of life.

I spent a month in Iraq a couple of years ago, and spending each day at high risk of getting shot changed my perspective on death. I learned to fear death less, to accept its eventuality.

But it's different here. Death is so much less dramatic, and somehow correspondingly more tragic. There's no war, no cause to die for, no way of imagining there's a purpose to it. Instead, it's always some stupid illness that could have been cured easily. It's that somebody didn't go to the hospital soon enough or that they got misdiagnosed by a too-busy, inexperienced doctor. And then it was too late.

The life expectancy here is 38 years. About half what it is in the States. Here, death is part of life.

And this week flags are at half mast in memory of the genocide.