We’re often presented with binary choices. You can be this or you can be that — but you can’t be both. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t serve both God and Mamon. You can only fool some of the people some of the time. You get the idea. Well, not everyone agrees, and thank goodness.
Ming Holden is a humanitarian worker who has helped people in such far flung places as Nairobi and Mongolia — and she has also written about these experiences.
In this episode of But I Digress, Holden talks about how her writing and her life are a single attempt to change the world, and how she earns her keep while doing it. She’s had more than her share of challenges, but she’s managed to carve an important place for herself through courage and determination, and since that courage and determination are at the service of a greater good, I can only applaud admiringly.
She also sees herself quite clearly, and isn’t ignorant of the criticisms to which she exposes herself. “I will always be a white interloper, whatever else I may be in these situations; I will always not have the full story and not tell it perfectly. It will be problematic until there’s not the inequity between the global south, between black and brown bodies and bodies racialized as white.”
Unless you think you can do better, you can buy her book, Refuge, here.
Michael Missing 