Aaaand, We're Back.

Sorry for the seemingly infinite delay but once you read through the mess that follows it might make a bit more sense as to why I was so jumbled and scared and messy in the previous blogs. Its weird to have these amazing, terrifying, huge and insignificant experiences, everyday, every hour, and then try to jot them down so that later, when near a fan and light and icewater I can focus and type… I’ve found that when I’m near a fan or icewater all I want to do is stick my face and feet in both, alas, I’ve decided to sit down and take verbatim from my journal (bear with me).

Here it goes…



7 february 2009

2 months later, after a rocky Christmas, a blissful New Years and a terrible month of InServiceTraining in Bamako, it is finally Ferbruary. In 57 days Ryan will be in my arms. He will be here, in Mali, in the heat and the muck and the beauty and the harm. He will help me to realize my life, current, past and future, a track I feel that I have lost due to my ability to normalize much of this way of life. He will help me to confirm, help me to explain and help me to explore my magnificent and completely simple surroundings. He’ll see beauty here that I have grown to take for granted; he will be visiting, be living, here with me for 13 days. He will help make me see the truth behind this quest.
20 months to go… I’ll need his outlook to make it.
…………………………………………………….later that day………………………….
I tripped near a well today; a fall down a well is sure death, instant if you’re lucky. I fell while pulling water in Wurdia’s garden across the face of the well.
My first thought was of Ryan. After being helped hastily by my host sister Tene, I steadied myself and handed the job of pulling water over to the professionals – the 12 year old girls with no shoes.
It was terrifying – it was clarifying.
I will never do that again and I truly deeply wholly love Ryan.
Life will go on.
So will my love for and of him.
………………………………………………………….even later………………………
Today was tough first day back – I almost fell into a well, Gus* died, I’m constipated with heartburn, the temperature is starting to affect the animals and a snake crawled halfway into my hut before being thwarted by an adolescent in a ‘90s concert-t.
On the bright side, because if I die out here I want my loved ones to know that I didn’t loose my spirit in the face of adversity: I did work with Wurdia, I was given a garden plot in the Women’s Community Garden (a sure sign that they see me as a woman OF the community), Newt* survived and still has a big heart and I have faith that if something did happen to me out here, my Malian friends would do their absolute best to help me AND my American family at home. That is huge.

* I was just getting to the end of LoneSome Dove. If you have not yet, take the time out of your life to make it better by reading, truly living, this novel. It is one of the best.