Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Journey Home





        It is odd how a place that was home for a month and a half can feel so far away after only a week. I left a part of myself in Kisumu. It is too early to tell what small fragment innocuously dropped off somewhere on the walk from the Dominican compound, passed the mud huts to the school, like a quarter falling out of your pocket in some unknown place without you noticing. I do not consider it a loss. I guess, in a sideways sort of way, I gained something from it. By leaving a part of myself behind in Kenya, I opened a place in my heart for Kenya. I know this all sounds mooshy gooshy and I know mooshy and gooshy are not words but that is not the point, the point is that I will always remember my six weeks in Kenya, the sights, the sounds and the all too often unpleasant smells.
         The memories will come in short fragments, kind of clips of a movie in a preview, enough to tell the basic story but too little to truly tell the whole thing.  I guess that is the beauty of an adventure. The events pass into a distant and cloudy memory, like a long lost dream, until one clip unexpectedly floats back up to the mind. One memory snowballs to the next and the story slowly comes back to the dusty halls of my memory. Like Bilbo's adventure, mine was a shove out of my comfortable life into a new, exciting and not always pleasant world. I did things that I never would have imagined myself doing and exprienced things that will, one day, fundamentally change the man I will become. My adventure is not the typical story, I hope. I do not want to be the stereo typical twenty something year old student who goes to some third world country and comes back with the self-righteous attitude of "You do not know what people go through outside of the U.S you are so comfortable sitting in your air-conditioned room far away from pain and suffering. I now know what it is and you should feel bad for everything that you have." If I learned one thing in Kenya, it was that we all experience pain and suffering.
         As odd as it sounds, I constantly had to remind myself that these students, the ones telling me their stories, were not just stories. They are men and women of faith and character with the same inherent dignity as you and me. I did not tell the students stories to garner pity or make anyone feel like their problems are insignificant. I told them to give insight into the school and the students that go there.  I do not blame anyone in the United States for being blind to the sufferings of our brothers and sisters around the globe. We all know it because we have all gone through it. We have all suffered the sting of pain and the burn of suffering. It is far too easy to allow myself to hyper focus on the sad story and lose track of the person telling it. I will always remember what Fr. Martin, a co-founder of Fr. Tom's Kids, said about the students. Myself and the other volunteers were drilling him about the stories of all of the students that we had met. When answering, he would take off his glasses, spin them around and in his typical fidgety fashion and relay each students story in detail. I told him that he had very impressive memory, he looked at me and simply replied, "Well I can remember because I love them. It is easy to remember if you love them."
        We said goodbye to the students at OLG about a week ago. It was the first time I heard someone say to me, "We will meet again, in this life or in the next." It sounds trite but I know it was said from the heart. I never thought that I would find myself saying it either, "I will see you again my friend, in this life or in the next." I did not say it to be dramatic or because I had nothing else to say, I meant it. After only six weeks, I felt like I was leaving family. I consider the men and women I met and grew so close to my brothers and sisters. Over the course of my six weeks I came to a greater appreciation of the unity of the Catholic Church through the Eucharist and all humanity. We are not all that different. The more you learn about people, the more you immerse yourself in a culture and way of life totally different than your own, the more you realize that we are not that different. Is this just another cliche? Maybe. I do not think it matters how much I mean it and I am okay with that. If a cliche is the best way, then why not use it.  I will always remember the men and women I met in Kenya.  It is odd but every time I think I go somewhere to try and help people, the people I came to help end up giving me more than I could ever give them. Sometimes I struggle to grapple with this reality and I try to find a way to counter act it but always to no avail. All we can do is thank God for the time he has given us and do our best to use it wisely and for His name.
       Time and  memories will fade  then slide back in again like waves on a sandy beach. I may forget many of the students names but I will not forget their friendship, all that they gave me. Africa has a strange pull and I doubt if this was my last time on the Dark Continent but regardless, this adventure has ended and I am left sitting on my bed at home wondering when I will hear the loud "rap rap" of a knock on my door, beckoning away form what I know, on a new adventure.

No comments:

Post a Comment