The Stories Start Now...

A Warm Solstice Greeting to Everyone:

I am finally writing the blog postings from my recent trip to Africa. I appreciate everyone’s patience! I will be posting stories from the trip regularly so I hope you will continue to read along.

A note about me as a blogger – turns out I think slowly and I am not cool or brilliant on the fly. Who knew? Who cared?

This blogging thing, this twittering thing, this “facetwit” as my husband calls it, stupefies me. I simply am unable to move that fast nor do I honestly believe that I have enough usefulness to blurt into cyberspace that regularly. Okay, there, I’ve said it. I have admitted I am a blogging newbie and self-consciousness thusly abounds. Okay.

Blogging while on the road turned out to be really difficult for several other more concrete and less self-deprecating reasons. While traveling I often had little access to the internet, or there were electricity issues (i.e. there was none), or I was just so plain flattened after a 14 or 16-hour day that I couldn’t face preparing for the next day, processing that day and writing about it all before I fell into deep, dream-filled sleep.

On this trip I played numerous roles. I was grants administrator - having meetings and working on One By One’s next steps, which I must say are very exciting! I was helping to launch our research study in Tanzania. But I was also our coordinator, negotiator, photographer, filmmaker, interviewer, audio and technical engineer and our researcher.

Amidst these competing roles, I did not factor in the amount of time it would take me to process all that I heard and saw – the time it would take just to internally process the stories, the feelings, the energy. I felt like a sponge, absorbing the tragic, the inspiring, the joyful and the complexity that is the experience of the women, girls, families and service providers with whom I met.

Upon returning home I went into a kind of hibernation where I could feel the experiences I had stored being “milled” by some non-verbal machinery inside myself. At times, out of feeling like I needed to “send something out” I would try to write. I found I could not put even one word to a page. There was simply too much yet to feel, too many mysteries to be anchored in my being, too much cognitive dissonance to either harmonize or be placed in a “philosophical to-do pile.” (For the first two weeks of being home, I dreamed incessantly only about what I had seen and heard. Coming home was an honest challenge.)

I have now been home for three weeks. I am back in this time zone and have pushed through the requisite two-week “you’re home after seven flights and now you have a cold.” The small boy in my life, my son, has proffered his “punishments” for my extended absence in the form of regressive behaviors and now he is successfully on school holiday. We have decorated a gingerbread house and watched “The Snowman.” I can say now, I finally feel home again. And with that suddenly now, the faucets are finally open in my brain and the stories are starting to be wrung from the sponge.

Keep reading and keep in touch!