100th post!!

So this is my 100th post!

I tried to think of something clever to do with 100...

First, I thought to list 100 of the biggest blessings in my life - 100 people whom I am most grateful for.  However, once the list got started, I couldn't stop at 100.  I might well be able to come up with 1000 people for whom I'm grateful.... so out went that idea.

Then I thought to write100 things for which I am grateful.  But, in thinking, most of those things end up in my grateful/thankful lists I post every couple of weeks, so maybe not such an original idea.

After that I considered 100 favorite quotes, 100 favorite verses, 100 jokes... but lets be honest, I don't have a ton of time to devote to this, and if it's just going to be a cut-and-paste job from someone else's quirky blog, then what's the point?

Maybe 100 great photos?  Oh dear. Not with this slow internet. Might take me a month to upload that many photos….

So then I thought hey, I'll take a look at my old Peace Corps blog and see what my 100th post there was about... and it was really funny to start reading about my own life there! Example: this was written about a month and a half before I completed my service in Benin...

54 days to Freetown.

Well, I'm back at post, and it is good to be here, even if I WAS greeted by a house full of dead cockroaches and a flooded kitchen.

54 days until I fly to Freetown, Sierra Leone! Cheers

Hahaha! wow, I remember those days like they were a dream... coming back to a hut full of dead cockroaches and a flooded kitchen.  Oh my word.  I loved my time in Benin, but gosh... so glad I live here now!

This one made me tear up again… even though it happened years ago now…

Um... excuse me... you forgot your baby...

I had a rather odd/sad/rip your heart out kind of thing happen to me at the health center this morning. Thursdays are baby weighings and immunizations, and I help out where I can, sometimes teaching, sometimes just doing paperwork and keeping things organized. Towards the end of the morning a mom came in with month-old twins, a girl and a boy. The moms hold the babies as they are being immunized so once the girl was done, I took her to just hold her while the mom held the boy to get his shots - I do this alot, it's just kind of natural, I guess. I sat back down at the table where I was filling out paperwork and the baby girl I was holding was surprisingly calm considering she had just gotten a shot! Well, anyway, I was doing some work and greeting some new arrivals when I realized I had been holding this baby an awfully long time, so I looked around... her mother was gone.

The village is not that big and just about everyone at the health center knew where this woman lived, so we walked to her house to give her baby back. When we got there she was crying... and begging me to please take her daughter with me. She already had four or five small children and her month-old twins were proving to just be too much.

It was hard to watch because the people here really have never heard of compassion or empathy, basically the health center lady yelled at her for awhile and then pushed her baby back in her arms.

Sometimes Africa just rips your heart out.

True story.  Africa does just rip your heart out sometimes.

Then I couldn’t stop reading my random other stories.  Like the time I ate python for dinner and wrote that it tasted like chicken. Or the work I did eradicating polio. The stories of the kiddos I loved dearly and the ones who drove me nearly insane.  The times I loved my service there and the times I hated it.  My incredible travels around Africa, the girls camps I worked on, the heat and dust and piles of bugs and hauling water and parasites and injuries and my crazy kitty that was eaten by my neighbors. 

I couldn’t figure out which post was my 100^th, but now I don’t really care. I’m just grateful for where my life has taken me, the fact that I’ve written thousands of blog posts from all over the world and the adventure just keeps on going.  Thank you for being a part of it, and for reading this, my 100^th post.