Always Thinking

So since I returned three weeks ago my mind is constantly moving and thinking. It just doesn't stop. Ever. The only way I have a chance of sleeping at night is if I journal a bit before bed. While I was on the trip I would write myself to sleep almost every night. Everyone I see asks me how the trip was, to which I respond it was great! Or they ask me what the best part about the trip was, or what the hardest thing I saw or experienced was. Those of course require a bit more thought and time to answer.

The best thing about the trip by far were the people I was lucky enough to interact with everywhere we went. From the girls who would come up to me and in a whisper ask if we could be friends, to the woman who invited me into her single room home for a night. From sitting with Ester on her front porch visiting before it was time for a meal while working at the headquarters in Kwarhi, to being invited to come out and play with the children at the primary school right beside the work site. From sharing unspoken words and smiles when language barriers could have gotten in the way, to having serious conversations about faith, life, the world and everything in between. I could keep going on and on about the people I met...they made the trip for me what it was in so many ways.

As far as the hardest parts about the trip, those take more thought for me. I have realized since my return that I was seeing the country through a very optimistic and positive lens. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but now that I'm thinking more realistically, it makes the trip less perfect (but still completely worth it in every sense). So some of the hard parts about the trip was to not be able to drink water that to me looked perfectly clean. Coming back to the states and having the unlimited supply of water that we have available to us each and every day and knowing that isn't good enough for some people. They still need to go out and purchase bottled water. It's a lifestyle I guess. One of the things that I saw everywhere I went was people washing their cars each and every day which is a very curious thing to me. How is it that they can use all that water in that way when not everyone has water to drink and cook their food in is something that I wonder about. Having a clean water source is a big deal everywhere in the world and Nigeria is the same. I was watching a movie the other night with my parents and on it the main characters introduced an engine that was run solely on H2O. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but later on I realized how much I didn't like that idea. Sure initially it sounds like the perfect soloution. Use water to run our engines. It's clean, renewable, safe. But then you have to think of the fact that so many people do not have access to clean water every day of their lives. How can we use that precious water in this way when people aren't having their basic needs met? Then there is the concept of pollution in the country. Trash is everywhere because there is no way to dispose of it as we do in the west. There are no trash cans, no weekly trash pick up. What people will do is rake trash and grasses together and burn them. This will get rid of some of the garbage, but when it comes to the millions of plastic bags that are all over the place, they don't actually burn, they just will seperate into smaller pieces and blow away to cover a different area. There is a joke, with a lot of truth to it, that the national flower is of the black and white plastic kind rather than the beautiful flowers that grow.

As time goes by I'll come to more realizations and revelations but it all was and is worth it. I want to be constantly thinking and constantly being challenged by what I experienced and saw. It's part of my journey and it has become part of who I am as a young female in this world, as a child of God, as a daughter, as a friend. In every way.