On the road to find out

I leave this week for Honduras. More specifically, I'm headed to a children's home.

I spent two summers at this home in undergrad. I look back on it as one of the most defining experiences of my life.

In undergrad, my worldview broadened exponentially. For the first time, I was exposed to international politics and national as well as global poverty. I devoured the words of Freire and Gutierrez. I was full of passion and optimism.

The Honduran orphanage added a healthy dose of cynicism to my otherwise idealistic understanding of a world of revolutions. I stopped romanticizing poverty after that experience.

While at the home five years ago, I wrote this:

Little hands, deep brown eyes

scarred and barred, get free!

Or are you cursed eternally?

Penetrated.

Your childhood terminated.

A lack of food has left your stomach inflated

And all we can do

is coo

"how cute".

Life: a brute.

How has it treated me so well?

My much larger hands have not known your hell.

I moan and groan in the ripples of your past

The curse it cast

Does change stand a chance?

You are David, but where is your stone?

Doubt cuts to the bone.

But giants will topple

and cycles will break.

Brown Eyes,

I can't wait to see

what your little hands make.

As you can see, I stood at a point in my life with one foot in youthful faith, believing that all ends well, and the other foot awakening to the harsh realities of this world and a growing sense of hopelessness. Several times throughout my journal I used the phrase, "All to the good". I believed that everything, in some mysterious way, worked to the glory of G-d, as well as my own personal benefit.

"Someone stole my favorite shirt while it was drying out on the line, but it's all to the good, I want to overcome material attachments anyway".

The phrase becomes more bothersome in the context of, "These children come from backgrounds of extreme abuse and abandonment to a home where violence and neglect are perpetuated realities. All to the good."

I needed that blind faith as a nineteen-year-old to face daily life at the home.

For the past two years I've been living under the rock of graduate studies, pretending to learn how to come up with creative ways to address the roots of societies ills. I changed my mantra from, "It's all to the good" to "It's all up to me and you".

But I still believe in the mystery. There's a human resiliency unaccounted for in the mathematics of sociology.

I'm not sure where I stand now.

I'm on the road to find out.