Processing

I was looking through some pictures from Uganda this evening, and realized it’s been three months to the day since I arrived back at O’Hare from a month in Africa.  The journey back took something like 40 hours (apparently Heathrow requires an eight hour party on a parked airplane for three inches of snow) but I was at a point where I was so tired and emotionally overloaded (plus finally ill – don’t eat the cheese) that I didn’t really mind it because I wasn’t really all there.

I never posted about my trip to Uganda (even though it was one of the trips I intended to cover when I created this blog over a year ago) because when I got back it was still so real.  It felt wrong to write about something I was still living.  It felt like I would be literally writing it off as done, completed.

But the realness has worn off.  It’s a sad reality that once we leave a place and people, our feeling of connection and responsibility inevitably fade.  After last summer I learned that.

Yet for me, the hardest reality I found while in Uganda was an inability to process what I was seeing.  It was amazing, but I was almost numb to the beauty, the harshness, and the hurt.  Looking back, my mental state sounds exactly like where I was in my final post when I was leaving Appalachia last summer.

But now that enough time has passed, I find myself feeling emotionally filled and convicted to move.  When I look at the pictures I took of Appalachia and Uganda, I want to do more.  I’m feeling the things that I wanted to feel when I was actually there.  So really, the time to process is a necessary part of the trip for me.  It’s like the answer you’re solving for in a long equation; it doesn’t take any work to finally write it down, but it’s the whole reason you went through the effort of the process.

It’s rejuvenating to remember why I do the things I do.  It sounds cliché, but I’m doing it for the kids I met, and who are now frozen in my photographs.  I’m ready to start another equation for them.