Staying Grounded

Sometimes I like to walk around the Hospital, to a grassy spot near the front entrance, take my shoes off and just stand barefooted in the sunlight.

It grounds me and helps remind me of where I am, why I am, who I am, and what we do here. It reminds me to stay planted with my feet on the ground, and resist the urge to get swept away in wind-storms of paper-work, reactive behavior, anger, frustration, and even excitement. It reminds me to draw from within outward, and not the other way around.

When doing humanitarian, development, aid, and even missionary work, it can sometimes seem so far-removed from the needs and the people, that it is easy to forget that the work really does affect lives. Sitting in our office at Panzi Hospital, in never-ending meetings, typing out strategic documents, painstakingly translating papers and discussing flow-charts, it can sometimes be easy to forget what and who it is we work for.

The truth is that we deal with lives. Even with the most mundane piece of work, tiring grant application, the hardest wooden chair - it all boils down to us wanting to make a difference in someone’s real life.

And when we don’t do well, when we slack off, when we act half-heartedly, when we’re just so over it that we can’t even think anymore, real people suffer. People that we don’t even really know, count on us to do our jobs and to do them well.

This makes it almost paralyzing sometimes, not wanting to mess up, not being able to rest, but it also makes it that much sweeter, when we do something right!

Take for example, our meeting with Dr. Prince Imani yesterday - the founder of our newest local partner organization, when we let him know that we had managed to get another solar suitcase from We Care Solar, this time for use in their soon-to-be-opened clinic. His shock was unbelievable and his sheer amazement at the will of people who had never even met him and who didn’t know his story, to support his vision, his dream for health in Congo. His genuine shock and gratitude translated into stunned silence at first, even as I cheesily shouted YAY and began doing the ‘keep the roof up’ dance.

You know, for us...a victory like this, means that we can support a trail-blazing local hero in serving hundreds of rural women with life-saving health care. It means that in some small way, we’ve just contributed to building health and hope in a village.

In everything we do - we have a new chance to change lives (for the better hopefully) - and this is both awe-inspiring and ridiculously terrifying for the girl who just likes standing barefoot in the sun.