I never know where to begin to talk about my experiences in Northern Uganda. It’s as if when I come back, my heart is still over there and mouth has not yet caught up with my heart. Gradually stories will come out of me as I regain …
This week so far in Kampala has been really good. I was able to take the Ugandan family I love and support the items that Barcroft school and others sent. It was so cute because kids from Barcroft school wrote letters to my kids and the kids thought that was just the best thing in …
The sun sets a stream of red over a long horizon above the deserts of Sudan. As I fly over I feel my heart sense that I am coming closer to home. I have always said God was in sunsets. He is probably in sunrises too if I could ever wake up for them. From …
Sometimes I feel my heart stop beating. When I was twelve, I convinced myself I had a heart murmur. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what that was but I felt sure it had something to do with feeling your heart quit. Or maybe hearing it talk— as if it were speaking a warning—that it couldn’t …
They say animals become restless before birth. There doesn’t seem to be a soft enough space to lie or right enough place to make a home. Everything is uncomfortable, wrong, and the places that should feel familiar don’t offer the reprieve they used to. When I was retreating in Mbale I saw the most precious …
This blog has become a kind of relationship. I’ve had fights with it (why won’t the $#%^ upload my photos!) and I’ve had moments of intimacy and connection reading the comments you’ve left for me and knowing that somewhere out there you care enough to read through a million paragraphs of my journey. It’s humbling …
July 18, 2006 Every once in a while you have to risk something, do something that scares the be-jesus out of you so you know you’re alive, so you know you can. The more fears I face in this life the more I realize that …
July 27, 2006 I spent my last full week in Gulu interviewing child mothers–girls who were abducted by the LRA and were impregnated through rape. Nearly all of them have been rejected by their communities and their children are called “killers” because they were born to commanders and are thought to carry that evil spirit …
(A view of from inside an IDP Camp) Malaria or Unidentifiable Bacterial Infection that feels strangely like Malaria—or what I imagine to feel like malaria—ie—worst flu I’ve ever had. Hmm, so which would you rather have? It’s kind of like that game “would you rather?” Like would you rather be burned alive …
We as Americans we come to foreign lands in search of something, something like our own heartbeat, something slippery and indefinable, but with presence, tinged with a certain energy. For any wanderer, traveling is the high, but everyone wants to belong somewhere–to feel a place, in a slow turning, become home. We want something of …
The north of Uganda is better than I dreamed in many ways, and worse in ways I had not imagined. Everywhere there are fields of sunflowers that make you want to run through them like Maria in the Sound of Music. I didn’t expect the green. Green trees, green wispy grass, and green cornfields taller …
Pictures of me at an IDP camp in Northern Uganda. I’m totally Angelina Jolie. I think this baby peed on me, but it was totally worth it. She belonged to one of the women I sat and talked to (sort of. 🙂 Me with corn that the …
