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Coming Home
Feeling a little dead inside today. Remembering these Rwandan kids both makes me happy and fills me with a sense that I am not doing enough. For them or for me. This is a new year: GET ON IT.
From May 18, 2009
The travel time back home yesterday worked out to be something like thirty hours, giving us ample time to sit in that awkward place between missing the village and being eager to get back into a regular routine. And now that those thirty hours are over, and I’ve had a hot shower and slept in my own bed, I can’t close my eyes without seeing the faces I met this week.
Visiting the new home of one hundred twenty five students was humbling. They walk a mile uphill to the Dining and the School (often in the rain, so maybe they’ll tell “back in my day” stories years from now), every shower of theirs is cold (they don’t know hot water but for the tea that is a luxury to them), they call their home “America,” and their families are now each other (“we are a team,” Fabien said). They are the most open and generous group of young adults — of adults I have ever met.
I have never felt so welcomed on such a scale.
Which made it very difficult to leave the Dining yesterday, waving with two hands at some of the people who we’ve come to know this week, watching them clean up the tables according to their regular duty, and knowing that their lives will continue on, much the same as we’ve seen — only without us.
So what will our lives be like? Mostly the same as they were, only hopefully with more of the students in them. There is so much more work to be done, and no one is more deserving than these kids who work so hard, who struggle against memories that could destroy them, who are daily trying to learn — English, math, science, culture, the world — forging friendships that will make life-long family, and becoming the people they are told they can be.
On the drive from JFK, I was having trouble recognizing places along the way, places I’ve seen a hundred times. The lower east side was a totally foreign landscape. Union Square, which I look at every day, suddenly seemed tiny like a toy. Passing restaurants, something was just off about them.
And the only thing I can conclude is that this past week has just been so huge. Yes, Africa is on the grandest scale there is, but I mean emotionally, intellectually, culturally. Coming back to “the greatest city in the world” feels much smaller than it used to.