Today's Visit

A few highlights from my visit in the village today:
**5 sweet children crowded around me on a bed while I tried to explain freckles and blue eyes in Arabic
**Beans, just beans and bread, for breakfast (no boiled stomach...woohoo!!)
**Asking children, for the very first time in their life, what they want to be when they grow up and then hearing the innocence of their answers
**Giving a child the idea that they can be anything they want to be
**Stopping everything in the middle of breakfast to tell an important story
**Being told that I am their sister and I'm not just welcome in their house but I am a part of it
**Sitting over tea and crying with my new dear friend
**Another story, this one about how we are all alike and in need

People here don't get to be what they want to be. It's all based on how far you go in school and then how you do with grades. For example, the students with the best grades become doctors...they don't get to choose. If they make straight A's they have to be a doctor or nothing. It's all ranked by your grades. So normally when I ask someone what they want to be they don't know what they want to be because they haven't thought about it...it wouldn't matter anyways, right? Today I sat with a 5 yr old future doctor and a 3 yr old future teacher. It was the sweetest thing to see them sitting in deep thought, contemplating on what they would like to do when they got older.

Then I sat with their mom Mary for a while and she was just so grateful. I didn't do anything, didn't bring anything with me or do something special for her that I would think she would be thankful for, I was just there. But she was so amazed that a white girl, especially an American girl, would come to her house and be comfortable with her and her children, not worried about what I am eating or that I might get dirty but just spending time with them. She told me that when she walks down the street Sandbox people see her only for how poor and simple she is, how she doesn't have henna or gold or pretty clothes, and they won't even look at her as they walk by. She thought white people were like that too, but she was wrong. Then she thanked me over and over for telling her stories and for talking to her like she is a normal person. She said 'I'm not educated, I don't deny that. But I'm also not stupid. People just assume that I won't understand things because I can't read, so they talk to me like a child. But you are so different. You see me, you know I am poor and uneducated and you still treat me like we are equal. No one does that.' That's the part where we both started crying.

It's days like today where I know that I am exactly where I need to be and I think I never want to leave. Tomorrow I may want nothing more than to be on the next plane out of here, but today...today was perfect.