SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2007
Reflection
It was five months ago today that we left home, and thinking about being home is a strange thing. There are no salty beaches there, no ruins. No temples and no sites. There are no cows wandering the streets and no children working in the stores calling out your name. There are no beggars waiting for you outside of restaurants and churches, waiting so that they can show you their affliction or deformity in the hopes that you will take pity on them and give them money. There are no two-thousand-year-old buildings or two-thousand-year-old carvings as large as a city block. There are almost forty times as many people living in Cairo, and more people on the street in front of the Luna Hotel than in all of Winnipeg. There are no pharaohs and no kings, no elephants and no tigers. There are no thirty-degree days in December.*
The extraordinary continues to be revealed to us relentlessly, and there are days here when it seems impossible that any of this is happening, impossible that one day we will be back at home, going back to school and work, back to grocery shopping and meal preparation, summer and winter, friends and family. I wonder if we will be able to grasp the extraordinary in everything we do and see and have.
What a time it was.
