Massaging consciousness

I received my first legitimate body massage this weekend (and by legit I mean I paid for it and it happened in a spa). I would have never imagined that my first spa experience would happen in Ghana. I went in the sauna for a half hour and then got a Swedish full body massage for an hour. I really only went because my friends were going. It was very relaxing. However, I was slightly (and at times overwhelmingly) uneased. At the same time as I was listening to a CD playing sounds of the ocean in a candle lit room as a women rubbed my non-exerted, non-aching muscles, 1/3 of the population of Accra was (and is) living in slums. How can I so easily bury that fact from my conscious? How can any person, with any knowledge of the conditions of the poverty stricken sleep at night? I ask the question not to arouse guilt, or to even motivate. I ask it because I am perplexed by my own mind’s ability to see the face of poverty and feel an engulfing desire to help and yet still walk away from it and largely fool myself into forgetting the face as I go about my daily affairs. Perhaps its one of my survival mechanism, for if the face of the underprivileged haunted my every thought I don’t think I could survive. Perhaps its pessimism at work; perhaps I see no way of fixing it all and am immobilized by my lack of faith.