Book tour of Africa

Is what my mom said today when we were talking about the books all getting to Africa, one container busted, but the rest still intact. How they were loaded on the roof of a van by Africans for transport to Tororo. How someone on our team just happened to tell us about a library down the road that they had worked on last week and painted with bookshelves but no books. How kids on our team helped sort the books last night, reminiscing over the beloved stories from their trip. How somehow miraculously they all made it 10,000 miles away from home.

Choosy Moms choose Jiff (in reference to my mom), In the interest of time (as the Africans always say before they begin a 20 minute long speech), You are most welcome (how they make you feel so special every time that you greet them), women selling vegetables along the roadside, dust in your eyes, clean water to villages that have never seen it and already have their jerry cans lined up, classrooms needing painted, conversations with a new friend- a vegetarian who likes art and Africa as much as I do, dresses that my friends in San Francisco being dressed on girls that have never felt empowered before, reading Eve Ensler before bed and realizing that yes, I like all the African women with me, "am an Emotional Creature." Washing widows' feet and hearing them go "I-yyyyyyyyyyyiiiiii-yi-yi-yi" when they receive gifts and hear about women who aren't trying to buy them, who love them, who have been through trials in life too. Eating chapati bread for a meal. Seeing a goat on top of a van and then dropping through the window a second later.

Hearing that we, in the West, are in a spiritual poverty and sometimes at a greater loss than those living in poverty here. We create our own problems, whereas they live contentedly with what they have.

My head is full of thoughts, as it always is when I'm in Africa. It's the first time I can shut off the tapes that roll through my head or the distractions of city life. It's like I never left, that a part of me was here, that my heart is beating for Africa. I was made to do this, I don't know what, made to bring my mom here and see my African brothers and sisters again. Fill a school with hope, deliver dresses for girls who are wearing rags or nothing at all, seeing my friends' pictures attached to the dresses on their bodies.