Then, Haiti got in the way.

Iwas naive. I left to begin my nursing studies, and soon learned that time and distance changes both people and places. It was a harsh lesson for a young woman who belonged to two continents. But the world is like that, ever moving. I was unsettled to feel evidence of the fault lines in my life; the shifting parts. I returned to South Africa many times, not ready to let go of my plans for a future there. After all, overtime, oceans open and close. Need a departure be forever?

I retain a great deal of respect for the work God's Golden Acre does at the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic but I eventually had to admit that the project and I no longer fit. I could wait for new suture lines to form, I thought, but then, to return to the metaphor of plate tectonics, transport by of the earth's crustal blocks across the sea can take millennia. I had procrastinated too long already. The long and short of it is, after much sole searching, I decided to look elsewhere for a place to serve, and to be active in the search.

Still, all this talk about Africa, only to bypass the continent and, more specifically, the children of the continent. Well, the search for a new project was certainly focused on Africa, but somehow, Haiti got in the way. This will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me because you can't know me without knowing my heart for Africa, and for the children I worked with there.