What can we say?

Home is any or all of the following adjectives: odd, eerie, dismal, exhilarating, goading, cold, biting, teasing, wrong, comfortable, routine. And I know this sounds dramatic, but because we have changed and also because we don't know yet how we've changed, we must readjust to our lives while readjusting our lives. Our lives here, that is.

I hope our team juxtaposes our memories and thoughts onto this space as we process and unload our experience with the coming semester. I know a Best Shot of the Day series will be coming, and the other teams will have stories no doubt of the faces that were, shall we say, grown accustomed to?

Perhaps this will be an attempt to answer that inevitable, "How was Africa?" question.

A more difficult, better and more hilarious question I recently received was, "So, are you going to criticize our consumeristic lifestyles now?" The subtext being, of course, that Africa comprises of poverty and despair. While this is true (for more places than the entire continent of Africa), we must realize that slums are largely incapable of existing without the other side -- wealth. Rapid urbanization means an enormous amount of capable workers come to a city with hopes of employment (that or, perhaps a more accurate way of putting it, they take their chances in the city).

Poverty, despair, wealth and urbanization are vague key terms. They are bolded in the textbook, but some of us reading this post think in images, sounds or smells and have replayed a memory with those words, so we put a specific and visceral entity to these encompassing vocabulary words. Despair, and not only because of some kind of guilt, is on us, the North Americans who were blessed and financially supported to take the journey. Perhaps we'll find some semblance of an opportunity for significant alleviation. Even if we don't, we've met several who have given their lives to service and, selfishly, we pray that our love will attempt to mirror the depths of theirs.

Thank you for reading and praying, please continue to do so. More to come.