Smell the Onion

Comming Soon:  Ranty post regarding this foolishness.

I am in the process of gathering paperwork to renew/update my passport,
and obtain one for my girl.  No immediate plans to leave the
country, but should the opportunity arrise, I sure want to be
ready.  It has been four years now, since these soles (souls) have
touched another continent.  (Or country, for that matter.) 
Far, far too long.  I’ve got the itch, bad. 

Between Croatia and Tanzania, I took almost 400 pictures. They are neatly arranged in albums now—albums that mostly stay closed until I humor the near constant aching in my stomach and get them out and look at them. It is not fair, I think, that it is lack of a few hundred dollars that keep me so frustratingly bound to this continent, this state, this blue rose wallpaper.

I cannot write anymore, though I imagine that is my own fault.  I remember detail: the rivulets of wash water and waste and rain that ran through the sidewalks and streets with no regard to shops or feet, the midnight dense sweet bread and bottled cold cokes, the julienne carrots with my beef chapatti, Nixon in his blue uniform on the stool outside the “Restaurant” and the sound of his pursed pink sluggy lips as I passed. … having a Pivo with Roman (the smelly DJ) and his plastic cigarette holder, the refugee girl and the paper bags of cherries…but all of these citrus sharp images are welded to the inside of my skull, and I cannot expel them and arrange them in any order that makes them of any use to anyone else.   Blessed am I that I can still clutch shining shreds of memory, cursed am I that I cannot spit them out to examine them.

An estimated 34,000 children under age five die every day from hunger and preventable diseases (many
of them caused by chronic malnutrition).

This is the equivalent of more than three 747 airliners, each holding 430 children, crashing every hour, every day, year-round and leaving no survivors.

Every hour, every day.

While thousands of children die every day from complications of lack of food, we live in a country that has to write laws to keep us from killing ourselves by eating too much.

Lord, have mercy.

Here’s new news.  My parents are not moving to Lincoln,
Nebraska.  But you can still pray the house sells because they’re
still looking for a smaller place. 

I am sitting here enjoying some delicious warm oatmeal cocoa chocolate
chip cookies, assembled and baked by one super wonderful husband. (He
even cleaned up after himself). Oh man, the gooey goodness. 
The cocoa he used was from a  tin of cadburys that I picked
up in Moshi.  It has been unopened until tonight–and I think
these chocolatey morsels are the perfect inauguration–special enough
to justify breaking it out.  Thank you, beloved mine.