I...can't think of a title.

The rest of yesterday was actually really good. We went to a university where we ended up having some extra time just talking to students. I talked to 3 ladies studying business administration and heard their stories. It was a pretty good conversation, and I think I encouraged them a little bit, Lord willing. haha. Then we went to Kuluva hospital. We thought we were going to pray with all the patients, but ended speaking to the nursing students there. It wasn't what we expected, but seemed well-received, and they asked good questions. Then we went through the wards and prayed in each building with the chaplain there. The hospital was clean enough, but the equipment was all totally outdated, the mattresses were torn and the sheets were dirty, and families were sitting on the floor with their babies, all kinds of stuff like that. The incubators for the premies looked like bread boxes with heating lamps in them.That was the only place I really cried. They didn't take us to the malnutrition ward because the last white people they took in there fainted. I wish I could have seen it, just to feel their suffering for once. For some reason God didn't have it in his will...

It's getting difficult to be here for so long, for other reasons than just being away from Shawn and my family...and Kerry, haha. Less things shock me or make me cry, but the reality of daily life of these people just sinks in more and more. We had to walk 20 minutes one way just to buy pork with Judith today, and I was hungry and thinking about the big lunch we were eating when we got back. Then on the way there we saw kids in the guava trees eating unripened fruit during their lunch break at school because they had nothing at home to eat. Nothing in my life will ever compare to what they've gone through. Nothing is convenient or easy here, and hunger is part of normal life that never goes away. I've never been hungry for more than a couple hours in my life, and I can't imagine not being able to just eat whenever I want. But my FRIENDS do that all the time. I just don't know what to do about it. It's so overwhelming. When I get back, my friends here are still suffering and they'll become a more and more distant memory as time goes on. We wouldn't let our neighbors live this way in the US, but who is our neighbor when the world is so small these days?

If there's anything I've learned during my time here, it's that the world really IS broken, and our real hope is in Heaven. Not in good insurance, a nice home, a good job market, whatever. As believers, we are the ones who are called to fix this broken place. That's what it means for us to be reconcilers...to make things more of what God would have them be, no matter what field in which we work. It's just that the world I live does not seem to be that messed up, and there's a serious problem with that...