The Curse of Andromache the Scythian
“Have you been watching the news lately? Some good means nothing. I don’t know about this, guys. We are not helping”
The above were the words of Andromache the Scythian in the fictional movie, The Old Guard. Andy, as she likes to be called, is an immortal who has lived for many centuries; she is a warrior that has consistently fought for the rescue of humanity. Andy is a leader but at that point, her hope in the rescue was at the thinnest. Seeing the chaos, starvation and unfairness in the news, it had appeared to her the world is inevitably doomed like a moth that won’t stop reaching for the fire no matter how strong the efforts at stopping it are.
Be it as a volunteer, a social entrepreneur or as a leader, that feeling of helplessness is always roaming around the world of humanitarian services. It is that dark cloud that always hang in the sky even after you just added “1000 kids fed” to your score sheet last week, (emptying almost all your savings in the process) yet there you are on the road with a young boy with these soulful glistening eyes who keeps tugging at your shirt with one hand and a begging bowl in the other hand — the impact feeling like a million tonnes of metal crashing on your shoulders. On other days, it could be that hashtag used as a call for good governance or awareness about public health that keeps resurfacing every now and then like menstrual cramps. So many advocacies have been done, why does it appear like the world is not healing no matter how we try to treat it? Where do all the efforts go; what abyss swallows them?
If we humans that can only live for about a hundred years at best can get so dejected and puzzled about this situation, one can only imagine how intense it must have been for a change maker like Andromache who has lived for many centuries. She seems to be powerless despite her powers, helpless despite all her efforts at helping. Top of it all, she would not age and pass away; she would watch as the suffering and injustice transcend from one generation to another. This must have felt like a curse that came with her capability and immortality as it robbed her of happiness and fulfilment. In retrospect however, Andy was doing a lot, more than what she gives herself credit for. The only barrier to her gratification was her perspective. It took the monitoring and researching of a particular Copley in the movie to bring to the fore all the feats she has accomplished for humanity, saving them from annihilation: “Montenegro 1916, she saved a family of refugees whose daughter would discover the technique for the early detection of diabetes”, pointing to faces on his mapping board, Copley continued, “this one, her grandson would save 317 people from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This guy, this man prevented an accidental nuclear exchange in 1978 and likely saved civilization as a result. The famous and the unknown names; she saves a life, two, three generations later, we reap the benefits.” It was Freeman, another character in the movie that offered insight on why Andy is not aware of all these iconic events and this, she said, is because she is living in all these events so she can’t see them.
There is a question that however begs to be asked: would Andy live a more fulfilling life if she had read about Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, a research paper that gave birth to the widely known “Butterfly Effect” written by an MIT meteorologist professor called Edward Lorenz in 1963? He discovered that rounding up decimal numbers he thought were not significant eventually had significant effect on a weather forecast simulation he was running on a machine for the second time. This led to the formulation of an existential question: could the fluttering of the wings of a butterfly in London cause a hurricane in Ibadan? This was in a bid to highlight the limit of the predictability of events that happen. In contemporary usage it has been linked to how the ripple effects of seemingly little actions can add up to cause a huge change in the world.
The interesting thing about The Butterfly effect is that it is more than a philosophical question; it gives a scientific support for us to indulge in our fantasies of “what ifs”. We become licensed to wonder if we would have had a world war if a soldier had fired a gunshot to kill a wounded Adolf Hitler; if we would still have some advances in medicine made in the Nazi camps if the camps never existed; what great invention could lie in the brain of one of the 30 million Jews killed — perhaps the solution to world hunger? This freedom to wonder is very essential especially in the field of civic services, because numbers are just statistical references; the real impact of positive actions is best felt in places where they can’t be measured. How do you measure the impact of a sincere commendation from a mentor that fuels your confidence to discover a revolutionary innovation? Or the magnitude of the impact on a kid that an NGO kept in school, only for the kid to change the world several years later. Also, the actions of environmentalist prevents the displacement of sharks by pollution, how do you measure the number of lives that have been prevented from shark attacks? The Butterfly effect serves as a channel for us to make contact and confidently imagine these possibilities.
It should however be noted that there is no guarantee of a positive effect even from the purest of intents. A lion saved from a poacher this year can attack a village the following year and it will be nature just running its course, but this uncertainty is what makes life interesting, if not, it becomes similar to a movie with no plot twist or suspense that the end can be predicted from the very first scene. There would be no point living such a life but with the knowledge that there is a possibility that our local action can make global impact comes a drive to at least try and contribute our bit which is better than not trying at all.
What do you see in the uncertainties that lie ahead; hope or despair? Can we still save ourselves?
