Late night ponderings

It's late and I should be in bed, but instead I'm up pondering.  I close my eyes and see a land far far away and I hear the laughter of children I love. My inbox holds a letter from one of those children.  He writes me from the heat of Uganda all the way over to where I can see my frosty breath in late Canadian fall.  I love the stark contrasts his careful printing remind me of. This boy, he tells me how much he loves me and I feel his words right to the centre of my soul.  I love him back and I miss him every single day I'm not there.

I sat today, in a boardroom listening to the Texas drawl of a this guy who tells us about geosynthetics.  And I wonder how they would have worked on the drainage ditch I designed in Haiti.  My head is here, but my heart is in lands far off.  I treasure the way the things I learn here can be transferred to the other ends of the earth.

I was thinking today, how, us girls, are really all the same.  The girls I met in India, whether young or grown, they all wanted the same thing.  To know if they were beautiful.  I want to know that too.  I and every single other female I have ever known.  We want to know if we are thought of as beautiful.  To be known deeply and to be loved for what people see in the very depths of our soul, if we allow them to see it.  A girl I sponsor in Dominican Republic?  She tells me that she has never felt so special because I have told her she is beautiful.  You see, how we are so very different, yet so much the same?  Can I be someone who sees and embraces those differences, throws myself headlong into another culture and at the end of the day stand beside them and tell them I too understand what it means to be human.  Even though there is much that separates us, this kinship, holds us together.  They are part of me, some of them they know this.  The children in India, their wide eyes when they saw I remembered their names?  Now that is priceless.  I bring them home with me, they echo in my thoughts.