Tuesday night, the night before we were to leave, I was still vacillating—what to do? Go? Stay? What if I go and I get worse? What if I stay and get better? I had a prescription of amoxicillin just in case, but it wasn’t very strong. My sleep that night was fitful. My alarm was set for 3:00 a.m.

I woke up at 2:30 and went to the bathroom and threw up. At 3:00, my godsister called and said she was worried I shouldn’t go, was worried that the illness was a sign that I wasn’t supposed to be on this trip. I didn’t know if I agreed. But, as much as I hate it, I do have a bit of a superstitious streak, and I thought immediately of all the stories about people who should have been on the plane that crashed but overslept, that kind of thing. Stories about mining disasters, about men who survived because they just happened to be hungover that morning and stayed home.

Jesse woke up, and I just sat on the couch, half dressed and wet from the shower I’d somehow managed to take, crying, not at all sure what I should do, not wanting to stay, but not wanting to go either. I was so weak I could barely stand.

He said, well, let’s get you to the church. (Where we were meeting the rest of the team.) If you feel too bad there, I’ll bring you back home. If not, go to Raleigh. If you feel too bad there, I’ll come pick you up. If not, go to DC. If you feel too bad there, we’ll get you on a plane home. As long as you’re in the States, there’s time to turn back.

I nodded, pitifully, and he helped me put on clothes, and he put my things in his car, and he drove me to the church parking lot, where I cried some more, curled up in the front passenger seat of his car. By the time the van showed up, I was feeling a little better, the nausea not as strong as it had been, and I got in the van (front seat, so I could keep my eyes on the horizon) and went to Raleigh.

And at Raleigh I felt better, so I went to DC. And then we had a nine-hour layover. At lunch, I took a Mucinex and started to feel much better. Ah, I thought, I’m so glad I came, I’m getting better.

Then, while waiting at the gate, I started to feel very hot. I was flushed, my neck and face a brilliant shade of strawberry. I felt kind of prickly.

This whole time, I had been telling myself, well at least I don’t have a fever. If I had a fever, I’d know I should really stay.

I’d packed a thermometer, but it was in my checked luggage. No one else had one. Some of them went to hunt for one in the airport shops, but they were unsuccessful. I was right back where I’d been that morning. What to do? What was the right answer? Was this some kind of sign? Or was this something I needed to persevere through? It was agonizing.

Then Christie, who used to work at a hospital, pointed out that I didn’t feel that hot to the touch and that the flushing looked more like an allergy than a fever. I realized the Mucinex had been one of those time-released things and called my doctor’s office to get a nurse’s opinion. They called back later and said they’d had people with a similar reaction to Mucinex and that it would in all likelihood go away on its own.

That gave me a bit of relief, but I still had a decision to make. Without the Mucinex as an option, I would have all the congestion and stuffiness to deal with, and I was facing a fifteen-hour flight, an overnight stay in Ethiopia, another three-hour flight, a six-hour bus drive through Rwanda, an overnight stay in Rwanda (at a guest house I knew offered fairly rough accommodations), and then a week of go-go-go in Congo, followed by another several days of travel. But. I’d been planning and preparing for this for months, and there was all that money spent, and I really thought I was on the upswing, that if I could just sleep through the flights then I’d more than likely recover quickly, and if not I always had the antibiotics.

I was kind of a mess. I went to the bathroom and just sat in one of the stalls, the only place I could come up with where I could be alone. I just sat there and cried and prayed for the right answer. Then I realized: there was no right answer. I felt calm, almost instantly. There was no right answer. I could stay. Or I could go. It was just a choice. So, I thought, all right, I have a decision to make. Well, what’s the better story? Going is the better story. Going and being sick was a better story than staying. So, I went to the sinks and washed my face and took some deep breaths and went back to the gate. I was going.

Just before I boarded the plane (literally, I was two or three people from the door of the plane), airport security pushed their way through the line and stopped the man in front of me, pulling him out of the line and asking for his identification.

My immediate thought was: Oh, crap! A terrorist! I wasn’t supposed to go! I told myself I was being ridiculous, and boarded the plane. I sat down, started arranging my stuff, pulling out my sleep mask and earphones, getting a book within easy reach. Maybe he was a terrorist, but the security guys have him now, and he’s not on the plane. Well, then who walks right onto the plane and past me toward the back? I started texting Jesse, telling him how much I love him, just in case the plane is going to crash (I don’t mention the man in any of my texts). Then, they closed up the plane and we took off.

Well, you know the end of the story. We didn’t crash. I didn’t die. In fact, I was sick right up until we got into Congo, and the first day we were there I felt remarkably, unexplainably better. No need for the antibiotics. This is all the more amazing because of what happened on our flight to Ethiopia. See, we did have a sort-of terrorist on board, but it wasn’t the man.

It was a little girl, elementary-school-aged. Who screamed at the top of her lungs, for nearly fifteen hours straight. That sleep I wanted to get? The sleep I was sure would aid my recovery? Nope. Didn’t happen.

I could try and describe it, or I can just show you.

All I can do is tell you a story. It was a Wednesday and we spent the morning at the church, running the seminar, playing games and talking about Jesus, or trying to anyway—we were never really certain what our translators were saying for us. But that’s another story. That afternoon, we piled into the van and drove to a feeding center. The road wound around the edges of Lake Kivu, so impossibly big, so impossibly blue, and as the city blurred behind us we looked at the lake, and I thought about the methane building beneath the surface. If it ever escapes, like it did in a lake in Uganda, it could explode above the lake and spread across the city and kill a million people. I turned my head from the lake and watched banana trees and mountains speed past the other windows. So much beauty here. I almost asked, how can you stand it? How can you stand to live someplace so beautiful?

We pulled into a village and stopped and we hiked past all these little falling-apart houses, we walked along narrow mud pathways, and I cursed the fact that I was wearing a skirt, that blasted skirt, and I wished for my hiking boots, but then someone would pause and help me cross a difficult part. We had a little band of children in hot pursuit, we were stared at by adults and teenagers, by girls who spoke to one another about us, not bothering to whisper because they knew we didn’t understand them, but you could look at their faces and understand enough. You could understand whatever it was, it wasn’t all that nice.

We got to the feeding center, a little wooden church building, and waiting for us were a group of kids, all chosen for the program because they were in various states of malnourishment. They each held a plate, and at the front of the dirt-floored room was a table with three large buckets of food: one of rice, one of beans, and one of cabbage. It smelled good. We took their plates, one in each hand, walked to the food table, had the plates filled, and returned them to the children. And then we watched them eat. I don’t want to describe it, watching a starving kid eat, because it feels like a violation somehow, it feels too intimate. I felt almost embarrassed.

What happens, we asked Papa Jean, once the children are healthy enough to graduate from the program? They stay healthy for about two months, he said, and then they’re usually back. There was a little girl at one of the feeding centers whose parents refused to feed her because they thought she had an evil spirit. A kid like that, she’ll always be back.

Near the other feeding center, they’re finding parents in the village who won’t feed their kids because there’s a feeding center nearby to do it for them. And so there’s talk about shutting them down, the centers, because you can’t destroy a village like that, you have to think about fifty years from now, you can’t handicap these people with your attempts at generosity.

But, that girl whose family thinks is evil—what do you do about that?

How do you not feed a starving child? But how do you do it knowing you’re causing more harm than you are doing good? And is it good that you’re really doing? When they’re just going to be back in two months?

We went outside the feeding center and stared at the mountains. We could see the lake from a clearing, between grassy hills dotted with banana trees. There were clouds building over the lake, and we hurried away, knowing what the little mud path would become if it rained. My calves were burning by the time we got back to the van. My stomach ached, and I was trying to wrap my head around my own thoughts.

We drove toward Mudaka, the little village where last year we’d seen someone Bishop said looked like interahamwe. On the way, we turned off the road onto a gravel driveway next to a little thicket of bougainvillea, and Christie asked Bishop where we were going. I looked out the window and saw the trees, recognized the road, and my eyes lit up.

Bishop looked at my smile and said, “Do you know where we are?”

I said, “Yes, I think so. Are we at the nun’s place?”

He grinned.

“And ice cream?”

He laughed that quiet chuckle of his.

We all got out of the van and the sky was cloudy and the air was warm but not too hot and we ate ice cream out of Styrofoam cups, surrounded by gardens, by cacti and birds of paradise, in the hush of the convent, the peace an actual physical presence.

Then we piled back in the van and bumped over a torn-up road to a tiny one-room church. And later, as we left the church, the sun was setting and we were told that Fiston’s aunt had died and we drove back to Bukavu in near silence, Fiston nearly motionless in his bright yellow shirt, sitting in front of me like a tall skinny lantern, a faint glow as the lake darkened.

I was glad it was dark, so no one could see the tears in my eyes as I watched the lake again, as I watched the dark shapes of trees, as I thought about two months and the death of a mother’s sister and how the ice cream tasted so much better than it actually was because of the place where it was. How can you stand it, how can you stand it.

That’s why I haven’t found the words for Congo yet.

When occupying a window seat on a sixteen-hour flight, it is your moral obligation to lean toward the window and not on the armrest toward your flying companion, who can only lean into the aisle so much before getting pummeled by the drink carts and people heading for the bathrooms. Unless the person has indicated she’d like to snuggle, which she didn’t, you should angle yourself toward the window, taking advantage of all that extra space you have on that side. (Also, it would be great if you’d close your window shade and turn off your light if you’re intending to sleep—which the pillow over your face indicates you were.)

Eventually, I gave up the struggle to maintain space between me and the man in seat 23A. I figured, what the heck, this is a sixteen-hour flight. I can continue this contortion game or just curl up in my chair and lean my back into his right arm and go to sleep. Which I did.

Congo changes, or at least challenges, your sense of personal space. There, they’ll cram sixteen grown people into a bus the size of a small minivan. Seats are just suggestions, and no one buckles up. When people speak to you, it’s not uncommon for them to hold your wrist or hand while doing so, or to sit so close their hip touches yours.

On our last morning in Bukavu, Bishop, Rachael, Rebecca, Clay, and I crammed into a taxi the size of a Honda, Bishop up front and the four of us in back. I sat half on Rachael and half on Clay and remarked, “Clay and I have never been so close. Literally.” Just before we got back to Bishop’s house, the taxi got a flat tire and we literally tumbled out of the back seat when the doors were opened, falling into the open space of the road and walking the rest of the way back, the sun warm and the air busy with dust and the sounds of cars and crows and a church’s choir practicing.

One last glimpse of Bukavu as we drove off...

It’s hard to comprehend that a few days ago, I was in the middle of Africa. Today, I’m doing laundry, washing the red Congo dust out of my clothes, and I’ve unpacked everything and put away my suitcase–which may be on its last legs–and last night I ate Papa John’s pizza (imagine!) and Jesse has the day off and we’ve been rearranging our bookshelves, and overall I just feel a little dizzy. Disoriented. I need to go grocery shopping. I need to trim the maple tree. These are the things I am thinking about today, along with questions about the psychology of poverty and the complexity of trying not to do more harm than good. The trip will take a while to mentally unpack. It was confusing in a lot of ways, exciting in others. More details to come, once the room stops spinning.

I’m almost fully packed. Yana shared a link to this: 10 Days in a Carry-On. I know Sabrina knows how to pack light and pack well, but I am a hopeless over-packer, though a lifelong dream of mine has been to pack all my necessities in a bag small enough not to hurt my back. Did you see Up in the Air? You know when George Clooney packs his bag? And it’s so neat and tidy and planned out? I was drooling. And not over George Clooney.

Well, while I still have to take a big bag to Congo, this time around I managed to squeeze a ton of stuff in and still have room left! Success!

Some of the stuff I had to pack...

Voila!