Home

At long last, I'm back in Bundibugyo, and in most ways it feels like coming home. After an incredible trip with my parents, we said a tearful goodbye at the airport - it was easier this time, but still not easy. Then came a wonderful week in Kenya with Sarah, Ashley, and Heidi, as school breaks are the time that people take a break from the district. So it was an amazing month for travel, but it feels good to be back here. While there are a lot of things I miss about Kenya and Kampala already, I sometimes get the feeling that one can travel too much, and it's good to be back where neighbors know me, even if they don't give me a moment's peace. So, in a frustrating and often foreign way, this place is home, a place I'm glad to come back to, a place that feels right. It's hard to explain how this works in a place where I'm an outsider and that can be stressful to a degree that makes college look like an afternoon nap, but it's true. It has to do with the beaming smiles on Gonja and Charity's faces when we pulled into the mission, and the friends who came from all around to welcome me back. It has to do with the sound of the birds in the morning and the sound of rain on my roof. It has to do with Pat cooking dinner for us when we arrived. It's good to be back.

A couple of re-entry highlights. In one of their most endearing moves yet, several neigborhood children used a slasher (picture a razor-sharp, double-edged golf club used to cut grass) to carve my name into the grass in big letters in my yard. The night we arrived, when I went out to use my cho before going to bed, I found a poisonous snake at the bottom of the door. This was a more difficult "welcome back" moment - sometimes I feel like Bundibugyo delights in slapping me in the face. If he had been actually inside the cho, I would have been seriously disturbed. I returned to find my neighbor Majili, Gonja and Charity's mother, in the hospital, very sick with malaria, and multiple friends have had relatives die while I was gone. It is a sudden and forceful reminder of the realities of life faced by people here, struggles that are far less real to me than to them. I've been away from them as I've been out of the district, but it's as though I've been hiding for a short time, and now that I've come out of hiding they hit me even stronger.

So I'm back, blessed by my family's visit, saddened by their departure, feeling rested from a wonderful week of vacation in Kenya, stressed by shopping in Kampala, glad to be in Bundibugyo, and confronted again with the challenges and heartbreak of life here.

Family

I’ve been notably silent this summer, for which I apologize. It’s been a hectic month, with interns to host, medical school to apply to, and visits to plan, all while continuing my normal work on the team. Just about every time I’ve thought that I should write a post, I’ve thought that it’s probably a better idea to work on medical school applications. I’m now finished with the primary application, but have already received secondary applications to work on. No rest for the weary, I suppose.

But the main purpose of this post is to say that I am incredibly blessed to have my parents and brother visiting me. They arrived about a week ago and have been experiencing life here and just spending time with me and with the team. I still can barely believe that they’re here – it’s a fusion of disparate worlds that hardly feels real. I feel like I exist in two separate worlds, one here, and one in the States, and the two have previously had precious little connection. But now I find myself struggling to believe that I’m walking down the road into Nyahuka with my mom; not only does it barely seem real, it almost doesn’t seem possible. Their visit has been a huge blessing to me. I’ve been anticipating it all summer and it’s truly beautiful to sit around with family in evenings, just talking, drinking port, and enjoying each others' company, something I hadn’t been able to do for nine months. My parents also have my house in a state of cleanliness that it probably hasn’t seen in that same time period.

It’s wonderful to have family see the things that I see and meet people that I know. Their presence here is an amazing gift to me, though it makes me miss my sister even more. This weekend we head out of the district for some travel – a time to see new and wonderful things, to explore new places, to rest in a way that one can never rest in Bundibugyo, and to spend time together. It will be a striking contrast, especially for my family, going from the rugged, sad, hectic, painful, beautiful, and poor landscape of Bundibugyo to a more pristine, natural, secluded beauty of Murchison Falls National Park (with quiet crater lakes and the dirty, chaotic commotion of Kampala thrown in along the way).