I arrived back in Sendai at 5.45 am on Sunday morning, about an hour ahead of schedule. I have now unpacked all my bags, and the physical evidence of the trip is hanging to dry, put away, or neatly displayed. I wish that coming to terms with everything I’ve seen in the past two weeks was that easy.
Sorting through my reactions, to say nothing of my stories and photos, and deciding what to share is going to take a while. I promise there will be full blog coverage eventually. For now, I will leave you with a short list of things that I didn’t know I didn’t know:
--Poverty means nothing to a child. There are worse places to grow up than a village with a hundred other kids, scaffolding, giant piles of gravel, and foreigners to play with.
--Manila is a good example of a worse place to grow up.
--I am 23, unmarried, and childless. Therefore, I fail at life. (I learned this from a couple of middle-aged men on a bus in Bohol. They also had a lot of trouble accepting that I was not married or attached to either of the two boys I was travelling with.)
--People in Bohol are honored that foreigners would come to their island; they don’t consider it worthy of visiting because everyone is so poor. (This was after we established the depth of my reproductive failure.)
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