The Endlessness of His Own

"You cannot really explore the whole universe," Akimana Cedrick said. "But you can explore yourself. And you cannot even complete yourself.”

If a universe and a self are equally infinite, Cedrick has been on a long expedition. Cedrick is a master's student in pharmacy at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, in his third year, finishing a thesis on diabetic foot ulcers.

He grew up in Rwanda and earned his bachelor's in India before coming to Indonesia. He has, by his own admission, spent the better part of his two and a half years here pointed inward, mapping an interior space he says will never be fully charted.

The expedition is purposeful. It runs in a direction, and toward a destination, both of them about ninety hours away by plane, in Rwanda

Cedrick's father has had diabetes for almost thirty-five years. His father is now seventy while Cedrick is in his late twenties, which means his father's diagnosis predates him.

His publications are mostly about diabetes, a global science with a personal question driving it. "I always try to channel my personal life into my field in a scientific way." 

He has never treated his father directly. In his clinical practice he has cared for many diabetic patients, some living with what his father lives with.

"I cannot help my father right now, but I'm very sure one day I'm going to help someone who is diabetic," his voice steady.

His father knows what the thesis is about and gave Cedrick his blessing from the start. Most family illness is a private weight people carry alone. For Cedrick it has become the material of his work.

He learned this kind of public work from his mother. She was a teacher in Rwanda before she retired. She spent decades doing the daily public work of teaching: explaining one mind to another.

"More than a pharmacist, I want to be a teacher, an educator," Cedrick said, leaning forward slightly.

This is the cargo of his inward expedition. From his father he took the subject. From his mother he took the way. The thesis is one inheritance translated through the other. The disease his father lives with, expressed in the public way his mother taught him.

"You become the flower they want to give to the world," he said of children raised by supportive parents. "A gift to the world."

Cedrick said he chose pharmacy, because he wanted to express empathy. He is choosing teaching now, because he wants to extend it. The plan is to be a lecturer in pharmaceutical science at a university in Rwanda.

He could have come back home after four years in India. His parents would have accepted it. "But I just feel like there is something in me I need to express, intellectually," he said.

He calls his work “a healing”. One he used not only for the body, but also for the mind, and the spirit. He treated them as one pursuit.

"Before you join communities, you should try to sort yourself out,” he said. The public versions of himself, the pharmacist, the future lecturer, the writer, all rest, in his framing, on a private version that has to be tended first. The work of being someone, for him, comes before the work of being seen as someone.

When not working on his academic duties, one he calls mind exercise, he dedicated one day to tend his spirit. On that day he wrote mostly poems he saved in a folder. "Someday I'll turn it into a book," he smiled at the prospect.

He used to post his writing online, poems and inspirational pieces, and people would tell him they had felt moved. The feedback is part of how he knows teaching is the right direction. He came off the platform when it began to feel, in his words, a place of superficiality.

Cedrick is an avid music and film fan. He favors sad songs and paradoxical films. They push at him, and what he writes afterward comes out better.

"The true feeling has no words. So when I'm listening to a song, I'm really interested in: how am I feeling?" he said.

For the body, he practiced yoga and dances. He called what he does soft exercise. "I am a soft person, but I have courage," his body answered with a small sway, left then right.

It would be easy to read all of this as withdrawal, but Cedrick is not a hermit. He has built a good rapport with those around him. The international office's kind staff, The lecturers, The supervisors and The friends. Years later, he described the inner journey as something still unfolding. "The moment of arrival remains unknown."

Writer: Farizal Luqman Majid

Editor: Al Habiib Josy Asheva