I’m spending this week in Yardley in preparations for living here next semester. I’m doing my second MSW placement at UrbanPromise and Yardley is a better commute to Camden than Waco is. However, my mailing address hasn’t been 19067 since before I moved to Waringstown and it’s feeling a little surreal.
I laid in bed last night overwhelmed with the things that have filled my life since that summer. Journeys of discovery and mourning, times full of laughter and stretching and beginning to truly understand what I’m made of and made for.
One of those journeys, of course, was the first time I stepped foot on the African continent. Those three weeks spent touring through Kenya and Rwanda have shaped me in ways that I think I am still understanding. It’s the laughter of the children that I hear in my sleep and the faces of the dying that haunt my dreams. In the times that I can’t quite remember why I’m putting myself through all of the graduate school tortures, I remember the silent pledges that I made to myself and to the people I met. That I would spend my life trying to create a more equal playing field for them.
This week, as I prepare for the next seminal step in my journey, I miss who I could be while I was in Africa and wish that I could be that a little bit more here. I wish that I could be as unconcerned about semantics as I was there. I wish that I could trust like I do there and that I could have the kind of faith that I find it so easy to have there. I wish that I didn’t spend as much time missing it as I did.
So, at the top of the list of things that I miss this week is Kenya and the children that dance through my memories and teach me how to become better versions of myself.
“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world…”
