You are wondering how to live and the hills are green burning off mist. The boy in the car driven across the border to Kigali for project smile. His eyes, round deep brown. They are pounding in the fields in the valley with a hoe, tilling, a young woman rests holding the small of her back in her hands. The wind carries Eucalyptus through the open windows.
The men in the car speak in a language I do not. When will we get there?
The heat comes.
To wake up each morning to the hills. It is work to take in so much beauty. It is work to tend these fields.
The familiarity of roadtrip.
In my head, I am trying to tell myself a story of belonging to something so I must feel a little lost in the back seat of the car driving to Kigali - which arrives suddenly and stretches itself out among the hills.

He will be in Kigali four days, the boy. The men, Ugandans who work for an NGO in the villages, say they noticed the other children at school avoid to sit with him. I wonder what the boy thinks. Does he know what surgery is? How long will it take to heal? What will it be like to smile at someone?

I saw the muscle tighten - the involuntary one above the eyes that distinguishes genuine happiness from the polite smile - when he first got in the car to cross the border. A long road for a little boy. He sits forward in the middle seat. He leans forward. There is so much we can recover from.

I am writing a story to myself of how I came to Rwanda to begin with. In the backseat of a car in Valencia, CA I am asked - something that implies the inadequacy of the question 'why does suffering exist' - that fingers the immaturity of shock and of placing all suffering as elsewhere. But I think a series of events the summer of 96 made me stop believing that suffering was redemptive. That the choice to accept suffering led to any meaning. Or at least, parsing through that space for god was much harder than I had been conceiving it. The stranger knocks and you turn him away. He had round brown eyes like the boy.

I wonder the difference between recovery and redemption.

After two days, the incision all the way down to the muscle will hold itself together on its own. Hours, days, weeks in bed and the tissues knit themselves meticulously together. The work of surviving. But we don't. Survive life.

Is it the same work, to support the conditions that make life possible and to support the conditions that make life meaningful?