Home Sweet Home
For our sanity and for our longterm survival, we took over three months of vacation this year. And it was awesome.
And then it was time to leave ‘home’ in America. We left Dad’s ‘home’ in DC. We left the lake ‘home’ in Virginia. To come ‘home’, whatever that means. And we were ready. Nothing has brought purpose and meaning to our professional lives like working in Tchad, and nothing ever will. And nothing will probably ever be as challenging, frustrating, rewarding, fun, infuriating, blissful or... hard. Just hard. We are bipolar here. But we still believe this is where God wants us for the time being.
So we packed up all our twelve checked bags and six carry ons, we remembered all four children, plus a father, and headed to the airport. Uneventfully checked in, we said our goodbyes to Dad and started ‘home’. Wheels up at 10am and wheels down in N’Djamena a little before noon the next day. We are a mess. But we want to get back to Bere as soon as we can, so we register the two new passports, Lyol’s third of his life and Addison’s second, with the national police. I then head out to James and Sarah’s place to pick up the in-laws’ 4Runner and drive it back to our ‘home’ at TEAM. We set out to do some shopping, jet-lagged zombies in a grocery store.
We finish one grocery store in the dark and head to another, brains fully on auto-pilot. Danae has decided she will buy me a new stove, as our current one is down to a single burner. $450 later, and Danae’s anniversary present to me in the bag, we are outside in the dark trying to load all our grocery purchases plus a stove into a Toyota 4Runner. I strap the two replaced tires onto the roof and we cram the stove and all into the back, although I’m none too happy the stove is on its side. I want it standing up. It’s a good thing Danae gave our suitcases to Laurent. We’re chuck full as it is without them.
Our day of torture not yet finished, we go to eat some Lebanese food a mile away and manage to enjoy the meal. At least, nobody is awake enough to complain. Finally ‘home’ to TEAM and into our two different rooms, me with Zane and Danae with the other three.
Danae gives me an oh-by-the-way right as I’m falling asleep... ‘Oh, by the way. I can’t find my phone. I think it was stolen outside the store.’ Well there goes our plan to leave early in the morning. I switch on Find My iPhone on my phone and lock Danae’s and leave a message for whoever has the phone: ‘This phone was stolen. Please call me at X to return it to me. Thank you.’ Whoever had the phone had switched it off, so GPS had no signal on it. I also send some internet credit to her phone so it would pick up, since she was probably out. Whoever they are, they now have something no more useful than a paperweight and I am going to sleep.
The next morning, we go back to the grocery store and the nice Lebanese owner looks at the security footage with Danae and they see Danae cram her phone into the bottom of her purse as she paid and walked out. Ok, so she had it then. Nobody was anybody near us at the restaurant and Danae was too tired to pull it out then. The car had been locked. Must have been in the parking lot.
Well, we give up the phone for lost and start driving to Bere. But wait!!! On the way out of town, my phone buzzes. Danae’s phone has been located! I call it immediately. ‘Hey, you have my phone. How can we meet up?’ He jabbers on for a few seconds before the call drops. Dang it! I’m out of phone credit! I sent my last money to Danae’s phone for internet credit. Ok, so I turn on Find My iPhone and I locate Danae’s phone. Piece of cake. I will just take the blue dot to the white dot on the map and confront the guy with the phone.
Except. Wait. Hang on a sec. No. That can’t be right. This thing says Danae’s phone is in Cameroon?!?!?! Lemme refresh and see where it really is. No. It’s still in Cameroon. Well, isn’t that special.
So I pull over and put some more phone credit on my phone. Except this vendor with the Airtel sign isn’t actually selling Airtel credit. Nor is that guy. Or that guy! Ok, Airtel, stop giving people these Airtel umbrellas! So misleading!!!
Well, I drive over the bridge toward Cameroon as I’m looking for phone credit. I finally find some and buy it. Ok, back in business. I call Danae’s phone. Wait! He turned it off again!?!?!? Grrr... ok, it’s game on now!
I drive to customs and patiently explain my situation. They wave me on to the border. I talk to the emigration guy at the gate, relating the hilarity of the situation. He takes me to his boss. I explain the situation again, bemoaning the troubles of theft. He takes me to his boss. How many bosses are around here? Oh right, Chad. Ok. So I explain the situation again, emphasizing my desire to respect international law, and also to put the fear of Allah into this bozo and help him realize he’s actually trafficking stolen electronics across international borders and I have my CIA satellites tracking him. I impress them with the GPS location on my phone, showing Danae’s phone in the left room of a house just on the outskirts of Kousseri, about four kilometers from where we are on the border.
‘We have no authority there.’
Of course you don’t. But maybe you can go and talk to your comrades over there and explain it to them and then the kind folks on the Cameroon side of the border can escort me to this house and back to the border. Or let me go and chat with them and see what we can arrange.
‘Oh, no. We can’t do that. But here’s what we should do. You go to the Cameroonian embassy and explain the situation. They will readily understand and give you permission to enter their country. Then return with a written complaint. Then we will write a complaint to the Cameroonian authorities under my authority and we will go and get your phone.’
Mmmhmmm. Yeah. I know the Cameroonian embassy. I’ll need to pay a visa and it will take another day. This doesn’t sound like fun. I nod my head in agreement at their inefficient plan and walk out, without any intention of following their well-intended advice. Instead, I call Laurent.
Now if you’ve visited us, you’ve probably met Laurent. He’s our taxi driver. He picks you up at the airport and gets you registered and changes your money and finds you lodging and gets you on the bus to us. Laurent has done a lot for us. He’s even gone to jail for us. Literally. A volunteer once brought an air gun into the country. He somehow got it through customs at the airport without being caught. Laurent then sent his luggage to Bere in a minivan. The minivan was stopped and searched by customs, who found the air gun, not realizing the difference between an air gun and a firearm. They put the driver in jail, who then called Laurent, who admitted he was the responsible party. Laurent called us and we flew up in the plane and they didn’t release Laurent until I laid down and told the customs police I was sleeping there. They didn’t want a foreigner on their hands all night long, so they let Laurent go. (And as an aside to the aside, we ended up getting the air gun back, but not until I told the customs chief to shoot me with it as proof it wasn’t dangerous. He refused to shoot me, but was impressed enough with my insistence that he gave it back.)
‘Laurent, are you willing to drive your taxi alone to another country and then confront an unknown person at an unknown house about stealing our phone?’
Well, what a silly question. Of course Laurent is down! I mean, come on, the dude’s Laurent!
So we sat on the side of the road halfway between the border and N’Djamena awaiting Laurent. And we wait. And wait. And wait some more. While waiting, I try to think of how I can show Laurent how to use my phone to bring the white dot to the blue dot.
‘Laurent, dude! What’s up? You still coming? What’s taking so long?’
So Laurent went to the Cameroonian embassy and had to wait for them to finish a meeting to talk to them and he’s got things in the bag. Sweet.
So we wait some more.
‘Ding.’
Wait. What? They turned the phone back on! I’m calling!!!
Hey, dude, what’s up with my phone? Bring it back to Tchad!
‘Francais mafi.’
Francais mafi, my foot! Dude, we were just speaking French on the phone earlier!
Ok, fine. You wanna play hardball? Ok, let’s see. What are the right words in Arabic. Yeah, there we go.
‘Go! Tchad! Phone!’ Ha! I guess I showed him! He didn’t think I could do it! That’s, like, fluent. He knows darn tootin’ well what I want.
I hang up and send a new message to the locked screen on Danae’s phone: ‘I see you. You have my phone in Kousseri. And I even see the house there where you are in the bush. Please, come back to Tchad with my phone immediately.’ Bam! What now, sucker?!
Oh wait! The phone’s on the move! He’s coming to the border! No way! It worked!?!?!? The white dot crosses the border! Wait! He’s coming straight at us!!!
We drive back toward the border. We’re gonna nab this guy. We’re now right across the street from the white dot. He’s clearly on foot. I pull over and Danae runs across the street to talk to three guys talking together, looking suspicious. I pull out my phone and call Danae’s phone, looking around to see who will pull out a phone and nab the suspect. But nobody’s reaching in their pocket or looking at their hand. Oh, man. They saw Danae too early and are now nervous and on to us.
‘Salaam Aleikum.’ Uh. Wait. Huh? I’m looking around desperately. He’s on the phone, but nobody in sight is talking.
‘Yo, Danae. Not here!’
‘Ummm... uh... Aleikum salaam. Yo, dude. Where you at with my phone?!’
‘Car.’ Ok, so he’s in a Toyota Hiace minibus. He must have just caught the minibus across the street.
‘So where’s your car going?’
‘Dembe.’
Click. Ok, he’s headed to the market. Danae, get in!
U-turn and we’re back on the chase. We chase down a minibus and pull it over.
‘Does anybody here have my phone? No? Ok. Sorry, my bad. Have a good day. We love America!’
Chase down another minibus. Dear, you’re scarier than I am. Go get it! Danae hops out and runs up to the minibus. Who’s got my phone?
Sheepishly, an early teen kid crawls out and walks back to our car. I immediately take the phone from his hand and place it into the middle console of the car. A crowd gathers. Danae wants to know where he got the phone. He insists he paid 90 cents for it in the market to buy it from some unknown girl. So you bought a phone you couldn’t unlock the screen of with a picture of a lovely (if I do say so myself) American family on the screen? Danae and the mob ended up escorting the young boy to the police, where Danae handed him over, almost certainly for the boy to be released. But whatevs, we had the phone back!
By now it’s awfully late to drive the ten hours ‘home’ to Bere, so we stay another night, this time at our ‘home’ at Lutheran mission, on the outskirts of N’Djamena where it’s a bit more peaceful. We meet a super-cool family there and spend the evening chatting with them while our kids play. They have four kids, all within a year of our kids’ ages.
The next day we drive ‘home’ to Bere. A road I’ve traveled in less than five hours in the past, now takes ten hours, as oil trucks and others continue to beat up the road to an unrecognizable condition. And we drive slow as we have unbelted children, two marginally strapped-down tires on the roof, and $450 of brand-new stove laying on its side in the back. It is so painful. But whatever, we finally make it, pulling into ‘home’ on the hospital compound in full darkness. Despite all our suitcases being on a cargo truck coming down at some future date, it still takes quite a while to unload the 4Runner into our ‘home’.
Every year we come ‘home’ to Tchad from ‘home’ in America, Danae always gets blindsided with the house. From the million dollar lake ‘home’ we stay at in Virginia to our ‘home’ in Tchad, a ‘home’ which would be condemned if were in America for so many reasons. And yet, it’s the nicest ‘home’ in this district of 200,000 humans. Danae is always shocked by the dirtiness of the place. I never even notice.
This year, for the first time in eight years, the roles are reversed. Danae sees it, but accepts it readily as routine. A nuisance, but one that can be anticipated and dealt with and accepted. I, on the other hand, am utterly shocked that we call this ‘home’ and raise our children here. I’m shocked at how dirty the walls are, how dusty things are, how stale, how simply... not ‘home’ it is. And I’m shocked that I’m shocked. And intellectually, I know this is probably the cleanest our ‘home’ has been in the better part of a year. Somebody must have worked really hard just to get our ‘home’ this clean.
But we get the kids showered and fed and into bed. And we unpack and put away the little we have. And eventually, I collapse into bed. Our bed. In medical school, I slept on the floor for the first six months on a backpacking foam sheet. Every week, I’d go to the mattress store and lay on every single mattress. And every week, I had the same favorite. And every week, I’d make
the owner the same offer, $700, with a smile. And every week, he’d laugh at my offer and kindly refuse. I’d tell him it was an entire month’s stipend for me and I literally couldn’t afford more. Finally, one Friday, after six months of our charade, he accepted my $700 for the most comfortable California king in the store. I don’t know if he lost money on it, but he certainly couldn’t have earned anything. I quickly called Steph to borrow her truck and got a buddy and drove it ‘home’ before the owner could change his mind.
Prior to this, my friend Paul had explained to me that a good mattress is a purchase you don’t want to be stingy with. If you’re lucky, you’ll be spending 1⁄4-1⁄3 of your life on it, and the time you spend on it will dictate how enjoyable many of the hours are you don’t spend on it.
I brought this mattress ‘home’ almost 15 years ago. The mattress then moved to our ‘home’ in Massachusetts. It’s the only mattress our marriage has ever known. Then it cross the ocean on a container ship, trekked across Cameroon and Chad, and ended up in our ‘home’ at the hospital.
Collapsing into it, there’s a familiarity. This is my bed. Beside me is the love of my life. Twenty feet away are four creatures I would give my life for without hesitation. There’s a dog beside me I’ve had twelve years. The fan is blowing on me just as it has for the last eight years. The cries of the pediatric ward are within earshot, just as they always are.
So I make a mental, emotional and spiritual effort to remove the quotation marks and embrace the fact: I am home.
For our sanity and for our longterm survival, we took over three months of vacation this year. And it was awesome.
And then it was time to leave ‘home’ in America. We left Dad’s ‘home’ in DC. We left the lake ‘home’ in Virginia. To come ‘home’, whatever that means. And we were ready. Nothing has brought purpose and meaning to our professional lives like working in Tchad, and nothing ever will. And nothing will probably ever be as challenging, frustrating, rewarding, fun, infuriating, blissful or... hard. Just hard. We are bipolar here. But we still believe this is where God wants us for the time being.
So we packed up all our twelve checked bags and six carry ons, we remembered all four children, plus a father, and headed to the airport. Uneventfully checked in, we said our goodbyes to Dad and started ‘home’. Wheels up at 10am and wheels down in N’Djamena a little before noon the next day. We are a mess. But we want to get back to Bere as soon as we can, so we register the two new passports, Lyol’s third of his life and Addison’s second, with the national police. I then head out to James and Sarah’s place to pick up the in-laws’ 4Runner and drive it back to our ‘home’ at TEAM. We set out to do some shopping, jet-lagged zombies in a grocery store.
We finish one grocery store in the dark and head to another, brains fully on auto-pilot. Danae has decided she will buy me a new stove, as our current one is down to a single burner. $450 later, and Danae’s anniversary present to me in the bag, we are outside in the dark trying to load all our grocery purchases plus a stove into a Toyota 4Runner. I strap the two replaced tires onto the roof and we cram the stove and all into the back, although I’m none too happy the stove is on its side. I want it standing up. It’s a good thing Danae gave our suitcases to Laurent. We’re chuck full as it is without them.
Our day of torture not yet finished, we go to eat some Lebanese food a mile away and manage to enjoy the meal. At least, nobody is awake enough to complain. Finally ‘home’ to TEAM and into our two different rooms, me with Zane and Danae with the other three.
Danae gives me an oh-by-the-way right as I’m falling asleep... ‘Oh, by the way. I can’t find my phone. I think it was stolen outside the store.’ Well there goes our plan to leave early in the morning. I switch on Find My iPhone on my phone and lock Danae’s and leave a message for whoever has the phone: ‘This phone was stolen. Please call me at X to return it to me. Thank you.’ Whoever had the phone had switched it off, so GPS had no signal on it. I also send some internet credit to her phone so it would pick up, since she was probably out. Whoever they are, they now have something no more useful than a paperweight and I am going to sleep.
The next morning, we go back to the grocery store and the nice Lebanese owner looks at the security footage with Danae and they see Danae cram her phone into the bottom of her purse as she paid and walked out. Ok, so she had it then. Nobody was anybody near us at the restaurant and Danae was too tired to pull it out then. The car had been locked. Must have been in the parking lot.
Well, we give up the phone for lost and start driving to Bere. But wait!!! On the way out of town, my phone buzzes. Danae’s phone has been located! I call it immediately. ‘Hey, you have my phone. How can we meet up?’ He jabbers on for a few seconds before the call drops. Dang it! I’m out of phone credit! I sent my last money to Danae’s phone for internet credit. Ok, so I turn on Find My iPhone and I locate Danae’s phone. Piece of cake. I will just take the blue dot to the white dot on the map and confront the guy with the phone.
Except. Wait. Hang on a sec. No. That can’t be right. This thing says Danae’s phone is in Cameroon?!?!?! Lemme refresh and see where it really is. No. It’s still in Cameroon. Well, isn’t that special.
So I pull over and put some more phone credit on my phone. Except this vendor with the Airtel sign isn’t actually selling Airtel credit. Nor is that guy. Or that guy! Ok, Airtel, stop giving people these Airtel umbrellas! So misleading!!!
Well, I drive over the bridge toward Cameroon as I’m looking for phone credit. I finally find some and buy it. Ok, back in business. I call Danae’s phone. Wait! He turned it off again!?!?!? Grrr... ok, it’s game on now!
I drive to customs and patiently explain my situation. They wave me on to the border. I talk to the emigration guy at the gate, relating the hilarity of the situation. He takes me to his boss. I explain the situation again, bemoaning the troubles of theft. He takes me to his boss. How many bosses are around here? Oh right, Chad. Ok. So I explain the situation again, emphasizing my desire to respect international law, and also to put the fear of Allah into this bozo and help him realize he’s actually trafficking stolen electronics across international borders and I have my CIA satellites tracking him. I impress them with the GPS location on my phone, showing Danae’s phone in the left room of a house just on the outskirts of Kousseri, about four kilometers from where we are on the border.
‘We have no authority there.’
Of course you don’t. But maybe you can go and talk to your comrades over there and explain it to them and then the kind folks on the Cameroon side of the border can escort me to this house and back to the border. Or let me go and chat with them and see what we can arrange.
‘Oh, no. We can’t do that. But here’s what we should do. You go to the Cameroonian embassy and explain the situation. They will readily understand and give you permission to enter their country. Then return with a written complaint. Then we will write a complaint to the Cameroonian authorities under my authority and we will go and get your phone.’
Mmmhmmm. Yeah. I know the Cameroonian embassy. I’ll need to pay a visa and it will take another day. This doesn’t sound like fun. I nod my head in agreement at their inefficient plan and walk out, without any intention of following their well-intended advice. Instead, I call Laurent.
Now if you’ve visited us, you’ve probably met Laurent. He’s our taxi driver. He picks you up at the airport and gets you registered and changes your money and finds you lodging and gets you on the bus to us. Laurent has done a lot for us. He’s even gone to jail for us. Literally. A volunteer once brought an air gun into the country. He somehow got it through customs at the airport without being caught. Laurent then sent his luggage to Bere in a minivan. The minivan was stopped and searched by customs, who found the air gun, not realizing the difference between an air gun and a firearm. They put the driver in jail, who then called Laurent, who admitted he was the responsible party. Laurent called us and we flew up in the plane and they didn’t release Laurent until I laid down and told the customs police I was sleeping there. They didn’t want a foreigner on their hands all night long, so they let Laurent go. (And as an aside to the aside, we ended up getting the air gun back, but not until I told the customs chief to shoot me with it as proof it wasn’t dangerous. He refused to shoot me, but was impressed enough with my insistence that he gave it back.)
‘Laurent, are you willing to drive your taxi alone to another country and then confront an unknown person at an unknown house about stealing our phone?’
Well, what a silly question. Of course Laurent is down! I mean, come on, the dude’s Laurent!
So we sat on the side of the road halfway between the border and N’Djamena awaiting Laurent. And we wait. And wait. And wait some more. While waiting, I try to think of how I can show Laurent how to use my phone to bring the white dot to the blue dot.
‘Laurent, dude! What’s up? You still coming? What’s taking so long?’
So Laurent went to the Cameroonian embassy and had to wait for them to finish a meeting to talk to them and he’s got things in the bag. Sweet.
So we wait some more.
‘Ding.’
Wait. What? They turned the phone back on! I’m calling!!!
Hey, dude, what’s up with my phone? Bring it back to Tchad!
‘Francais mafi.’
Francais mafi, my foot! Dude, we were just speaking French on the phone earlier!
Ok, fine. You wanna play hardball? Ok, let’s see. What are the right words in Arabic. Yeah, there we go.
‘Go! Tchad! Phone!’ Ha! I guess I showed him! He didn’t think I could do it! That’s, like, fluent. He knows darn tootin’ well what I want.
I hang up and send a new message to the locked screen on Danae’s phone: ‘I see you. You have my phone in Kousseri. And I even see the house there where you are in the bush. Please, come back to Tchad with my phone immediately.’ Bam! What now, sucker?!
Oh wait! The phone’s on the move! He’s coming to the border! No way! It worked!?!?!? The white dot crosses the border! Wait! He’s coming straight at us!!!
We drive back toward the border. We’re gonna nab this guy. We’re now right across the street from the white dot. He’s clearly on foot. I pull over and Danae runs across the street to talk to three guys talking together, looking suspicious. I pull out my phone and call Danae’s phone, looking around to see who will pull out a phone and nab the suspect. But nobody’s reaching in their pocket or looking at their hand. Oh, man. They saw Danae too early and are now nervous and on to us.
‘Salaam Aleikum.’ Uh. Wait. Huh? I’m looking around desperately. He’s on the phone, but nobody in sight is talking.
‘Yo, Danae. Not here!’
‘Ummm... uh... Aleikum salaam. Yo, dude. Where you at with my phone?!’
‘Car.’ Ok, so he’s in a Toyota Hiace minibus. He must have just caught the minibus across the street.
‘So where’s your car going?’
‘Dembe.’
Click. Ok, he’s headed to the market. Danae, get in!
U-turn and we’re back on the chase. We chase down a minibus and pull it over.
‘Does anybody here have my phone? No? Ok. Sorry, my bad. Have a good day. We love America!’
Chase down another minibus. Dear, you’re scarier than I am. Go get it! Danae hops out and runs up to the minibus. Who’s got my phone?
Sheepishly, an early teen kid crawls out and walks back to our car. I immediately take the phone from his hand and place it into the middle console of the car. A crowd gathers. Danae wants to know where he got the phone. He insists he paid 90 cents for it in the market to buy it from some unknown girl. So you bought a phone you couldn’t unlock the screen of with a picture of a lovely (if I do say so myself) American family on the screen? Danae and the mob ended up escorting the young boy to the police, where Danae handed him over, almost certainly for the boy to be released. But whatevs, we had the phone back!
By now it’s awfully late to drive the ten hours ‘home’ to Bere, so we stay another night, this time at our ‘home’ at Lutheran mission, on the outskirts of N’Djamena where it’s a bit more peaceful. We meet a super-cool family there and spend the evening chatting with them while our kids play. They have four kids, all within a year of our kids’ ages.
The next day we drive ‘home’ to Bere. A road I’ve traveled in less than five hours in the past, now takes ten hours, as oil trucks and others continue to beat up the road to an unrecognizable condition. And we drive slow as we have unbelted children, two marginally strapped-down tires on the roof, and $450 of brand-new stove laying on its side in the back. It is so painful. But whatever, we finally make it, pulling into ‘home’ on the hospital compound in full darkness. Despite all our suitcases being on a cargo truck coming down at some future date, it still takes quite a while to unload the 4Runner into our ‘home’.
Every year we come ‘home’ to Tchad from ‘home’ in America, Danae always gets blindsided with the house. From the million dollar lake ‘home’ we stay at in Virginia to our ‘home’ in Tchad, a ‘home’ which would be condemned if were in America for so many reasons. And yet, it’s the nicest ‘home’ in this district of 200,000 humans. Danae is always shocked by the dirtiness of the place. I never even notice.
This year, for the first time in eight years, the roles are reversed. Danae sees it, but accepts it readily as routine. A nuisance, but one that can be anticipated and dealt with and accepted. I, on the other hand, am utterly shocked that we call this ‘home’ and raise our children here. I’m shocked at how dirty the walls are, how dusty things are, how stale, how simply... not ‘home’ it is. And I’m shocked that I’m shocked. And intellectually, I know this is probably the cleanest our ‘home’ has been in the better part of a year. Somebody must have worked really hard just to get our ‘home’ this clean.
But we get the kids showered and fed and into bed. And we unpack and put away the little we have. And eventually, I collapse into bed. Our bed. In medical school, I slept on the floor for the first six months on a backpacking foam sheet. Every week, I’d go to the mattress store and lay on every single mattress. And every week, I had the same favorite. And every week, I’d make
the owner the same offer, $700, with a smile. And every week, he’d laugh at my offer and kindly refuse. I’d tell him it was an entire month’s stipend for me and I literally couldn’t afford more. Finally, one Friday, after six months of our charade, he accepted my $700 for the most comfortable California king in the store. I don’t know if he lost money on it, but he certainly couldn’t have earned anything. I quickly called Steph to borrow her truck and got a buddy and drove it ‘home’ before the owner could change his mind.
Prior to this, my friend Paul had explained to me that a good mattress is a purchase you don’t want to be stingy with. If you’re lucky, you’ll be spending 1⁄4-1⁄3 of your life on it, and the time you spend on it will dictate how enjoyable many of the hours are you don’t spend on it.
I brought this mattress ‘home’ almost 15 years ago. The mattress then moved to our ‘home’ in Massachusetts. It’s the only mattress our marriage has ever known. Then it cross the ocean on a container ship, trekked across Cameroon and Chad, and ended up in our ‘home’ at the hospital.
Collapsing into it, there’s a familiarity. This is my bed. Beside me is the love of my life. Twenty feet away are four creatures I would give my life for without hesitation. There’s a dog beside me I’ve had twelve years. The fan is blowing on me just as it has for the last eight years. The cries of the pediatric ward are within earshot, just as they always are.
So I make a mental, emotional and spiritual effort to remove the quotation marks and embrace the fact: I am home.
I believe everyone of us deserves a home, a family, education & healthcare Dr. Hanna Rhee
ReplyDeleteFantastic! Your posts always touch deep into my heart, and this was no different.
ReplyDelete