Ex Post Facto Prelude

It is often said that the more you experience different things, the more you realize who you are...On the day of our departure, I had written about the hopes I had for this trip and the expectation of transformation...I write this three weeks after our return from our trip and little can be said of how it has changed me, not because it has not changed my perspective and enhanced my understanding, but because the true impact of a once-in-a-lifetime experience such as this will have its true realization not in the moment of the event, but in the days that lay before me and I am challenged to make choices and allow the true brunt of an experience such as this impact me in my daily life.

For now, each day I experience here is a day of heightened senses - an osmosis of my environment into my very physical being - and the instantaneous synapses firing in my brain. My emotional memory is reminding me of how I felt a short three weeks ago...I walk down the street on 12th Street in front of Cardozo and just as easily as I allow myself, I am transported back to Kigali, Rwanda and could easily be walking down the road from our Hotel Gorillas to the city centre. How easily I am transported, yet how stark the contrast, how tangible the difference.

For the sake of posterity, as they say, the next few weeks will be filled with recollections of the two weeks we spent in Rwanda and Tanzania.