Day in the Life

5/27/2014 07:21:00 PM sendtheroths 0 Comments

Amethyst Roth

It hurts when I breathe in deeply, because there's so much dust that filled my lungs today. I just washed a mud-like substance out of my hair accompanied by at least three unidentifiable insects that fell out in the muck. I thought I had a tan, until I washed myself and realized it was dust plastered over pretty much every centimeter of my body. I passed two UN contingents carrying seemingly enough arms to blow up the whole forest. I passed a squabble between two soldiers and civilians. I also passed a group of soldiers beating the hell out of another soldier, whose gun was thrown on the ground in front of our vehicle. I drove over it as fast as I could, trying to avoid hitting some other soldiers involved in the rough-housing. All while Andrew and the rest of the Congolese were yelling, "Drive! Drive! Drive!" at me (as if I'm seriously going to stop and stare at a bunch of angry soldiers fighting with loaded weapons?) Halos flew over our vehicle more often than usual and our return home was met with news that only 30 km from the villages that we work in, another armed group abducted scores of children who were on the way to their final exams. I say all this to say that through a seemingly chaotic day (which is actually just a normal day for us)—we had so much laughter, so many smiles and I have so much appreciation for the villages that we work in, the people we work with, the boys (even though some of them can act like punks) we work with and wouldn’t trade this job for the world.