[Note: This is kind of a long post. In fact, it's a really long post. About four times longer than what I normally put up here. The reason is I worked a really long time on this one and believe it should be read as a continuous narrative, not broken up into little parts. With that in mind, I ask that you read it that way. If you don't have time now, come back to it later. Print it out to read it some evening. It might take you a little while to get through, but without understanding this, the rest of the stories here are just cheeky anecdotes and amusing tales. So please, read and enjoy, and maybe even pass it off to a friend when you're finished.]
You don't know what it's like.
Lets just start with that as the premise. You can't sympathize, you can't relate, you can't know how it feels. You simply don't know. You come from a life and a culture that is so foreign to the challenges and difficulties and the struggles that are part of the fabric of life here. But in understanding what goes on here there is no way to separate the individual threads from the whole tapestry. What I will be writing today I've already tried in the last several weeks to explain to the closest of family, to the best of friends, all the way to the strangest of strangers. The only way I have found to adequately explain it is by laying down the premise that you simply won't understand.
You don't know what it's like.
That is the admonition I have for you today. I want to warn you that this is not something that is intellectually out of reach as if I were explaining rocket science to you. It's not something like modern art that you either appreciate or think is unintelligible. It is as if I were asking you to hear colors, or draw with sounds. You have no adequate frame of reference for even understanding what that would mean. You're picturing yourself drawing with sounds right now, but I assure that you're doing it wrong.
Because you can't even begin to know what it's like.
The reason for this is that I'm going to tell you what our kids did for Christmas. Rest assured, it's nothing shocking. We weren't doing animal sacrifices or getting matching tattoos or something salacious. But at the same time, it should be absolutely puzzling and alarming: We sent the kids to be with their families. For the end of December and Christmas the kids got to spend two weeks with their mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins.
Did you hear that? I sure did. That was the sound of you brain saying, “What!?! I thought you ran an orphanage, not a boarding school or summer camp. What do you mean send then them to their families? Their parents?” Let me try to calm you down some.
