One Week Down

It's a beautiful Saturday morning in Kigali, and we've been here for one week.  As Caleb has said, it feels like a lot longer... so much newness and so many big and small hurdles and excitements each day.  How am I feeling about all of this?  A lot of relief... that we've successfully made it through this first huge adjustment and that everyone is doing so well so far.  While Caleb has been an enthusiastic and supportive co-pilot in this whole endeavor, we all understand that I'm the one driving this ship and dragging everyone away from the home and community we love.  I've done this because I'm convinced that we'll all benefit from this experience in ways we can't fully anticipate, that we'll leave here stronger and more compassionate and more connected to our beautiful and complex world.  From my own lifetime of travels and moves, I know how life-changing and resilience-building it is to land in a new place and have to reorient, to see things and meet people that break down our stereotypes and force us to look at ourselves and our home from different perspectives.  It's not easy... the dis-ease of it is the point.  And yet, even believing all of this so deeply, there have been many, many moments of doubting whether this is worth it, whether it's fair to yank everyone up from our roots, what we're doing here.  Our first night here was really rough, watching Mazie be so miserable and seeing everyone so wobbly and disoriented.  I know there will be more of those moments ahead.  But we made it through that one, and seeing my girls' smiling faces and conversations with classmates when we pick them up at school has made me so happy, and so grateful to all of them for going along on this journey.  I'm excited about what's ahead for us, and I'm also still grappling with doubts and questions about my and our purpose here.  But this morning I'm mostly just content to be right here, with some of the weight I've been carrying for the last several months lifted.