I'm back. I'm back touching the concrete of New York City streets. Before I left Centrafrique I told Janel my nurse colleague to touch the African ground with her hands..." it is something you will remember after you come back " I told her. I did the same myself. Such a simple thing you think, but actually powerful. Try it some time wherever you may be.
The beauty and pain and sadness and joy I experienced in Africa obviously has its parallels here in my city home. I worry that I will not find such dramatic, exotic and obvious examples of our frailty, ferocity and love here( OK, I know this is New York, all I have to do is walk up to the Port Authority bus station and voila!). But the stories I read in Africa often seemed to write themselves in front of me, I only had to recount the details to others. Now I stand on the edge of new actions and new directions closer to my friends and family. I may have to search just a little more to find the stories that stir me. Stories that chronicle the absurdness of the human condition yet touch the essential within us that makes us feel -despite all evidence to the contrary -that we are beautiful and eternal.
