Shickel Family

I have heard many times that if something doesn’t sit right with you, you need to dig in further and figure out why. I think that’s how I felt as a high schooler who felt uncomfortable when I saw displaced people living in a community called Nuevo Vida in Nicaragua who were just barely surviving and their kids really did survive on the lunches provided daily by the local church. The lunches changed the community. Kept kids in school, kept families together, brought down teen pregnancy rates (as an adult now realizing the relationship between young girls in need and the ugly truth that they do what they have to in order to survive), it sustained people and gave them glimpses of hope. The lunches didn’t fix every single problem, they still struggled with sickness due to lack of public health and hygienic services, still struggled for jobs. But the simple fact that a meal a day made an impact was obvious. The meals were supplied by Rise Against Hunger (then called Stop Hunger Now) and ser...

As we sit in quarantine, watching the number of daily case count in the USA rise up higher than any day so far in this pandemic, I have had plenty of time to read on the dock and rest (Ike rests and then can't help but do physical labor everywhere we go).  I just finished "The Girl Who Smiled Beads" by Clemantine Wamariya today. A story of a Rwandan girl who fled to America as a refugee at age 12 after SEVEN years of running for safety with her older sister. They ran in and out of Burundi, Zaire (now Congo), Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and South Africa over those seven years - via buses, boats, cars, or on foot. She was six when she ran out of her grandmother's back door with her sister to avoid danger and never came back. She was reunited with her parents and new younger siblings on OPRAH while the entire nation watched (can you imagine being her in that scene? Just feeling like a spectacle?). She fears being left behind, being forgotten because of how much...

No we didnt figure out teleportation and no we were not deported. But somewhat the abruptness of being plucked from Bundibugyo to America in less than 72 hours sort of feels that way.  On June 5 we got an email about a flight leaving Uganda on the 16th, 11 days notice. We slept on it and decided we should take the flight. Without interns, without the conference, without a certain end date but beginning to prepare for departure by starting goodbyes, we decided 10 days was enough notice and we didn’t know when our next chance would come along (of course today we saw an embassy email about a flight next week). So we had 10 days to prepare, pack, wrap up job hand off and contract writing, and say goodbyes. It felt like plenty of time. It kept us from dragging out goodbyes too long, more than 10 days left like an emotional long suffering for my brain to fathom. We left Bundibugyo on the 15th, drove straight to Entebbe,  one night there and then the pool briefly to celebrate a very ...