Processing

After 30 hours of travel – from Entebbe to Heathrow to O’Hare and finally to SeaTac airport – we’re finally home from our week in Uganda. Already, I’ve been asked several times how it was, and I can’t for the life of me decide how to answer that question. “Great!” truthfully doesn’t even come close to describing “how it was.” Beautiful, horrifying, sad, productive, hard, exciting, frightening, hot, sticky, life-changing, too short, long enough, expanding, unsettling, exhilarating, shocking, encouraging, fulfilling, frustrating, touching, edifying… These would all be appropriate words to describe the experience.

Truth be told, I’m tired, and I have a lot of processing to do in the coming days/weeks/months. To experience so much in so short a time leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed. Like this picture of a Ugandan girl picking tiny stones out of a pile of rice, I need to sort through the last 10 days piece by piece until I can truly process all that there is to take away from the experience. And, even then, I have a feeling I’ll be discovering new ways it has changed me many times over in the future.

Stick with me, and I’ll share my experiences as I fill in the blanks, piece by piece, story by story, picture by picture…