I should've wrote this post when I was fresh in my thoughts. I have this desire to articulate coherently (not a bad desire, mind you), but sometimes I think too much, don't write anything down, and then forget what I was thinking. Does that ever happen to you?
I was talking to a colleague about her trip to Haiti a few weeks ago - she was there for only 4 days, but I could tell that it was a life-perspective changer for her. These conversations invigorate me - challenge me - and remind me just how much I've learned. And then sometimes neglect to live.
Before this conversation, I was thinking. It feels wrong to say, but I feel like my life started after I moved to Haiti to live with my parents and lil' sister (who is beautiful and engaged and not so little anymore!).
Like I said, it feels wrong to say out loud, but I can't get away from it. I feel like I was living in a mist, in a half-life, in such a short sighted perspective. The environment, the things that mattered ... have so little to do with how I see life now. There was no opportunity (at least for me) to break outside of comfortable and see with different eyes.
Until Haiti.
It was before we actually went that I was stung with a hard truth.
Cisca, a Dutch friend, gently explained to me that maybe America wasn't what I'd been taught and sang about in patriotic songs and programs.
It wasn't.
And maybe everyone in the world doesn't want to come live in the US.
They don't.
And maybe, just maybe, America isn't the "greatest" country in the world.
It isn't.
Truly, this rocked my world. And it was only the beginning of world-rocking that would ensue.
No comments:
Post a Comment