When I was a child, I rarely got in trouble. My parents more often than not did not have to discipline me often. My Dad would just give me “the look” and I would start crying. I was a softie, sensitive, and a crybaby.
As I grew older I lost a lot of my sensitive side. At times it was because I would suppress the urge to cry, or lock myself in my room where nobody could see my hurts and pain. This was not healthy.
Then came a time in my life where I just didn’t cry. At this time it wasn’t that I would suppress my feelings, it’s just that the tears weren’t there. This lasted for several years, mostly throughout my early twenties.
All of this changed before I left on the Race. I recall one night about a month before I left, lying in my bed thinking about how I wouldn’t see my family for almost a year. I cried. I then shared a good cry with my parents over that.
Then the goodbyes and the thank you’s for all of those that have supported me, loved me, and invested in me throughout the years brought me to tears. I cried over those too.
I cried at the airport saying goodbye to my family. That was tough. My whole family cried.
Going into the Race I expected to cry a lot this year. I was sure that the things that I saw would move me to tears. I was okay with that. Surprisingly that really hasn’t happened much. I have lived in slums where I went to sleep at night to the sound of gunshots and almost all of the children there were abused. I have played with children that were days away from being sold into sexual slavery. I have stood in a church full of people who had lost literally everything they had due to a mudslide. In these situations and many more I would usually stand there in a surreal state of mind, not being able to believe what I was seeing, hearing, and experiencing. In these moments I just couldn’t grasp what the realities of the present moment were offering me, hence the reason why I wasn’t really moved to tears.
However, recently I have learned something. As the Race goes on I find that I cry when I least expect it. Almost without fail the moments I cry are when I am telling someone what I saw or experienced months ago. For some reason I can go months with things I have seen on my mind, without showing much emotion, however, when I speak about it out loud it becomes real to me. This was evident when a little over a week ago I was at the Parent Vision Trip speaking about my experiences these last months abroad. As I spoke I began to talk about my little friend Vot, who so much reminded me of an old student I used to teach back in the States. As I talked about Vot and the realities of his hard little life, I began to feel how real his pain, his suffering, and his life of poverty really was. I cried. It went from seeing, to thinking about it, to it becoming real somehow when I began to talk about it.
Even as a sat with my parents eating pizza spending quality time with them reminiscing about the last 8 months of the Race, I began to recall something from month two of the race and broke down crying.
As my Race draws to an end and I have less than three months to return home I am realizing that there may be many tears in conversations back home. As I tell about where this year has brought me, and the people I have met, I may cry because as I speak of people and places I have been, they somehow become real to me in a new way.
