Family

I just got back into town from what was truly the most amazing experience of my life. I spent all day Saturday rafting the Nile in class 5 rapids. I won't go into too many of the details because this trip is really intended to be more about the human connections I make than it is my tourist experiences, but I can tell you that it changed my life. There were a couple of moments I had under water in which I truly wondered whether or not I would resurface in time to breath. Granted, they were short moments, made to seem longer from panic, but they definitely made me appreciate my life more. Add that to the list of things I never knew I had.

I've also been fortunate enough to start really getting to know some of the new volunteers that will be here for a while over the weekends. I can't possibly do them justice in this blog, but I will say that their presence has made me increasingly optimistic about humanity.

Besides rafting, the past week has been excellent. I have fallen in love; fallen in love with teaching, with my village, with the kids, with Uganda, and with the world as a whole. There is not a moment here which is not completely blessed. I've been filling my time with a multitude of small projects. David, my host father is learning to use his new computer. I taught him how to play music on there. Joyce, on of my P6 students, is learning how to take pictures with my camera, an activity that the rest of the school enjoys so much that I killed two camera batteries in the course of one week. I have had my hands full as a teacher as well. Teaching English to six different classes is definitely not easy, but is also the most rewarding thing I have ever done. On Thursday, my P6 class had an exam, which I am supposed to grade. The grading is a real chore, but I am thrilled to see how much it really seems like they are learning and understanding the language. In my spare time, I go down to the well after school to gather water with my students, play games with the nursery kids (they particularly enjoy tickle tag), and run or do yoga. Little interactions are what lift me up the most: the kids shaking mangoes out of a tree to eat them (and getting in trouble for it), the little girl that makes helicopter noises at me when she wants me to swing her around in circles, and having children at my window to get me to come out and play in the morning have been some of my favorite moments of the week. Granted, I wasn't too happy to see them at the time because I was changing after a shower, but it dawned on me that that was just their way of expressing love. Love is basically the staple of my life out here. I know that, no matter where I go for the rest of my life, I will not be nearly as accepted, appreciated, and embraced as I am as the one Muzungu in Nsanje. If I could summarize my life right now, I would quote my friend Christine, one of the teachers at the school. I was playing with the kids during a break time and she stopped by to tell me, "Well done." As I blankly stared at her, wondering what I had actually done to receive the compliment, she looked at me and said, "You have found family here." I most certainly have.