Time moves fast, and life changes just as quickly. In what feels like only the time span of one day, I have gone from enjoying last laughs and a last supper with Sarah, Kyle, and Ryan, to mindlessly passing time in transit, to crying myself to sleep over homesickness, lovesickness, and anxiety about the next 5 months of my life, to peacefully watching the sleeping hills of Ndejje under the early morning moonlight.
I have never stayed up this late/woken up this early here in Uganda. Such a contrast. Probably the only time I will actually feel true quiet here. The moon is full, bright enough to write from. Although I do miss my home and the ones I love, I feel somehow rejuvenated in coming back. Recharged. Even if most of the sense of adventure is gone, I think that I am more focused, repurposed. I know the frustrations ahead of me and now expect complications and setbacks in everything I do.
Going home was a reminder of how lucky people in the West truly are. Even though Americans are falling left and right on to hard times, there is so much more opportunity for growth and education then there is here. Seeing how elementary school children are cared for and nurtured in our school system -- thanks largely to the teachers who actually care about what they are doing -- makes me want to work even harder to make a difference here. Maybe the older generations are hopeless, but the children aren't. Reeducation is often spoken in a negative light, synonymous with brainwashing even. But this is different. This is showing children that they don't have to grow up with the same backwards thinking as their parents This is grassroots social change at its finest.
