Where have you been, my darling young one?

This one has been far in the days since I hurtled it, a bit unwillingly, into the stratosphere and away from the comforting stability and warmth of the Earth. There were times when I doubted my ability to reach this time, this end of training.

But now, we are here. And I am ready. An adventure is beginning. In a day or two, I will be at my site, in the first home of my own.

The house – as I am sure all of you are dying to know – is a little white and blue gem surrounded by fruit trees and sunshine. There are mangoes, guavas, papayas and lemons growing in my yard. There is a vegetable garden and a soybean plot. There is a chicken house (should I decide to get some) and two trees that are waiting for a hammock to be strung between them. There is a bathing shelter for bucket baths and a pit latrine. I only miss indoor plumbing when I brush my teeth – strangely.

There are two rooms and a pantry. There are two lazy boy chairs sitting around a brazier. There is a bike and a bookshelf to filled with novels and notebooks. There is me.

Training is over. Three days ago, me and 34 of my new found friends stood on the lawn of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence and said the same oath that President Obama had uttered in my D.C. months earlier, to defend the Constitution and protect the country we still knew as home. We sang the U.S. and Zambian national anthems, with my voice cracking from pride in my home and for these amazing people singing next to me.

“Make me an instrument of your peace…” began the country director in her address. She read through the prayer and my heart beat against the St. Francis medal that dangled below my dress. I felt once again the simple truth that I was meant to be here, the soft force of encouragement from somewhere I couldn’t see.

I have traveled in two months. My self is wider. I won’t say I have grown because that is too cliché and not entirely true to the reality of I feel. But my experience is more capable, my being is more expansive. I have pushed out new boundaries from my skin and understanding and now wait for an existence that will fill them.

I have seen poverty. I have seen standards of living that before I had only known about through development classes and Christian adopt-a-child commercials. I have seen a hundred students crammed into a classroom, lacking books and efficient teaching but filled with a desire to learn. What has this brought me – this understanding of lives so closed to the opportunities that stretch before me like America’s mid-western prairies? These new boundaries are membranous – they let pass through these truths and it becomes a part of me, as this food grown in African soil becomes the cells that comprise the physical me. I do not know what will happen when the cells of my being have this muscle memory of Zambia. I do not know self these nutrients will construct.