DAY THREE: SHEER EXHAUSTION

Didsbury to Innisfail. 41 km. What can I say? The day after day 2. Both from a walker and a medic’s perspective, it was a day of trial first for our bodies and lastly our minds. I found myself drifting in a world of music blasting from my mp3 in order to help myself take each step. Songs filled with lyrics that further reminded me why I was putting my body to such a test and why I found it necessary to walk until exhaustion forced me to rest.

“We eat out of hunger, read out of hunger, scream put the guns down, sleep when its sundown, so we cant be that different because we don’t listen. Poverty is big business, and war is deep sickness…”

In our world, genocide and war have been way too prominent. I hope that with these steps, we inspire and help end Darfurs long drawn out atrocity.

As discussed in a presentation that we held tonight at Innisfail High School. Today each step, each blister treatment, and each word of advice I offered to the walkers on their conditions were fueled by those silenced in Darfur. I knew that with each painful push forward somewhere across the world in Darfur there were others walking. Others who are fleeing from their homes and villages. Others that may have lost a mother, brother, sister, cousin, father, best friend… to this genocide. Others that don’t have a safe place to rest and have snacks and tape their feet. Others that aren’t pushed to finish those last 6km by dreams of a shower and a delicious meal floating around in their heads. And others without the promise of a safe and comfortable bed at the end of their journey.

When I signed up for the Walk for Darfur, I hoped to both achieve a likemindedness to these forgotten people as well as help push for active change in the genocide. I never did take into account that even with walking 40 km a day on progessively dehibilating limbs would place me perhaps only in a little sliver of their mind frames. While I am listening to my MP3 player and pushing on with “Ain’t no one going to break my stride/Ain’t no one goin’ to hold me down/Oh no/ I got to keep on moving/still alive” in my $120 running shoes, Darfurians are living a completely different existence. Hiding from lions, Antonov planes, Janjaweed and fighting off hunger and disease…

With this realization however, I gained a new perspective. Not one human being on the world deserves this. We all should be living in an existence with equal human rights. One day, perhaps, even a world full of peace and a unified global community, instead one of unnecessary killing. And until we are, I will continue to do whatever I can. And what I can do today, tomorrow and the ones following until May 4 is walk…

I would like to personally thank Didsbury High School and Innisfail High School on behalf of the entire team for their gracious offering of both a place to sleep/ recuperate and eat on these two days. And not enough can be said for allowing us to use their gym mats… You cannot realize how much of a difference those blue wonders made in our short lived slumber.