(I was just trying to remember some hokey quote about friendship, and I used the Google machine to help me. It spit this out:
Which is not at all the quote I was going for, but hey!)
In any case, we started talking about the trip- my trip to Ethiopia. I talked about the leper colony and my fears- some of which I wrote about last night. I (not surprisingly) got blubbery as I tried to describe the scene I read about as I was researching Korah. I can't find the exact article now, but it went something like this:
When the leper colony was established it was far away from the town. It was built near the dump. No one wants to live near lepers or trash. 75 years later, Korah is home to about 80,000 of the 3-4 million people who live in the country's capitol, Addis.
I described to Rob and to our friends how I'd read that it became common for the folks in the colony to go to the dump for their necessities. I described the story I read and the pictures I saw. Large groups of people chasing the garbage trucks into the dump, anxious to be among the first to filter through the waste to find other people's discarded, rotten, diseased food with which to feed their families.
Blubbering, I tell you.
And then my friends described their experience of visiting the lepers in India. And I can not do this story justice and I am hoping that they will be blogging it soon and I'll share. It's a story of being the first westerners to sit beside these people. The first to hold their babies and beat their drums and be- not just in their presence- but *with them*. It was the Gift that they did not know that they were giving.
And I blubbered some more. And I sit now, reflecting in wonderment, at the people I get to know.
My t-shirt is right, Life is Good.
1 comment:
You make me cry - in a good way.
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