Transitions

I don't have to go into the hospital until later this morning (8am!) so instead of sleeping in I decided to try to get a little studying done and catch up on some e-mails. My e-mail routine also includes checking out my friend's blogs, and I just read a friend's entry written on the SAA flight from Jo'burg back to America, mid-journey from Malawi where she has spent the last 20 months, to California, where her new/old home is. She wrote about her emotions leaving, on knowing it was the right time to leave and go back to America, but at the same time how heartbreaking it was to leave and the overwhelming feeling of loss that never quite goes away. The tears started rolling down my face as I read, crying again for all of the friends and colleagues and the work I left behind. The smiling faces of African children look down on me from my walls in my little mill house in Carrboro, NC and make me smile through my tears as I remember the precise moment I took each picture; the sun, the laughter, the conversations, and the scenery. My friend wrote, "Malawi was not 'a trip.' It was not 'part of my travels.'....Life in Malawi is very real, real on in-your-face levels people in the West rarely have to deal with on a regular basis." Anyway, time to get ready for a day in an alternate universe - the American hospital - but I was heartened to know that I wasn't the only one who cried openly on their flights and don't know exactly where "home" is anymore....