It’s month 5 of my race, and the novelty has slightly worn off. They all warned me about the 5 month wall. When you feel like you’ve been on this thing forever, but you aren’t even half way done. When you’d give your left pinky for a hot shower, air conditioning, and some Chik-Fil-A and a diet coke with ice.
This wall is even more blindsiding than just feeling the weight of time and the abandonment of comfort. It’s knocking me sideways because the romance of the foreign had been replaced with the sobering reality that a large percentage of people in the world go to bed with hunger as heavy as a boulder every single night. And now I’ve met some of them. That instead of around the world, now just around the corner, there are hundreds of orphaned street kids sleeping in a trash filled ditch. A group of them just finishing a futbol game told me the other day that they couldn’t believe in God because they didn’t have a shirt or shoes on their feet. They told me that God had forgotten them. My translator nonchalantly informed me that most of them had lost their parents to AIDS. She looked at me, like, so what do you have to say to that, Miss American Mzungo.
Kampala is CHAOS. Imagine a state fair/ motorcycle rally/ Feed the Children commercial, in the slums, on crack. 24-7. It is daily burning images in my mind that I don’t know if I’ll ever get out. I feel like I was warned about this. But I stepped into it anyways.
Last night I lay in bed for almost three hours. It was so weird. I was having hundreds of flashbacks to all kinds of conversations I’ve had over the last few years. To dozens of dinners and evening runs and drives to work. I flashed back to my first year at work as a nurse, and multiple adrenaline pumping moments therein. To my small group, and the countless nights I spent in Jess and Leslie’s backyard with a bottle of wine with Phoenix playing in the background. It was so weird. And I guess I was really trying to pinpoint the moments and the things that led me to believe that I was searching for something bigger, some adventure. To pinpoint the moment that I remembered that I was created to do something weighty in life. So that when the World Race came along my path, I knew instantly that I was supposed to do it.
I was just wondering how I got here. In Uganda. And how different I feel now. How my life will never be the same after seeing this. After Africa. After knowing what I know about the world and life and people. And I felt this crazy weight of responsibility. Like. After I’ve seen villages ravaged with AIDS and extreme poverty and dying people like this, how can I ever go back to pretending that they don’t exist. And how could I possibly go on, knowing that I have a Hope of Glory in my hands, and not share it with them?
