A.A. Milne: You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.

August 2002:  It was our fourth day in Rwanda.  In a remote area, just northeast of Kigali, 12 of us made our way down a steep and damp hillside, unsure of our footing.  I was anxious to arrive at our destination – the home of a single mother who had received a World Vision goat from our small church group.  She was so welcoming and so grateful to meet us and for our gift.  I felt as though we had given her so little, yet she was filled with gratitude as to her it was so much.  We couldn’t communicate directly with her, and thus ensued the awkward few minutes of crouching, crowded in her tiny thatched-roof dark mud hut, eating the few grains that she offered us, asking strained and contrived questions through a translator as we struggled for appropriate and sensitive topics.  I notice a news clipping tacked to the wall, and ask if it featured someone she knew.  The unexpected response was simply that it had some color, so she put it on the wall to brighten the space.  Already overwhelmed by all I had experienced thus far – all the news photos and documentary film footage I had ever seen could not bring the physicality of it all to life – this moment stood out among moments.  The juxtaposition of the simplicity and poverty of this life, when framed against my own and the lives of those in my world was acute … the privation so extreme that the tiniest acquisition increased her worth and assets many-fold; the heartfelt gratitude for something so pedestrian; the sparseness of belongings that welcomed a piece of newsprint as decoration.  But then a goat?  A goat was a gift among gifts.  A world of change for this family could come from this gift whose cost is less than a dinner check at Pastis.  I would never look at the world the same way again.

Ten years later, I’ve been given the great privilege of returning to east Africa – this time to Burundi for close to three months.  Village Health Works is bringing a new kind of hope to this tiny African country.  A hope that sees long-time enemies band together to better their community.  A hope that compels people who have next to nothing to give what little they have.  A hope that heals and fortifies and expands.  I get to go see this hope first hand.

Snow is swirling outside my window as I type in the quiet of this morning, my last day before I go.  Packing is daunting, leaving family and friends for so long feels odd.  But an adventure awaits beyond my corner of the Forest.  And the chance to once again readjust my lens, and look at the world in a new way yet again.