Winding down

Tomorrow morning will be my last trip up the hill to the school. I have an evening flight first to Dar es Saalam, then to Amsterdaam, then back to Seattle.

At the beginning of the trip I had a difficult time articulating what it is like here, and I still have not made any improvements. There are just so many contrasts. Often I see something that makes me laugh and smile and something else that makes me want to cry. It can be quite a roller coaster. I think that the work at the school is an example of this. The staff has been very very happy and appreciative about the 600+ textbooks that we bought them. They say that this will fundamentally change things at the school. Then you look next door and realize that at the primary school, the class size is over 100 kids per teacher and see that there is no way for those kids to be successful. We feed the kids at the school lunch, but outside the school there are still many hungry faces. We stay at a nice place and enjoy the company of the group in the evenings, while in the distance in the dark, we can sometimes here the sounds of domestic violence.

So it has been a little bit like drinking from a firehose. . . it is a whole lot all very quickly. But it really has allowed me to regain the perspective that I once had while travelling years ago. This is a fantastic place, and if you would like to gain some perspective on how incredibly fortunate we are in America, I'd encourage you to sign up for the Safi trip next year.

-Jeff-