Here I find it's easy to get caught up in reveries. Something will remind me of a moment, and I'm suddenly back at Newton North, running endlessly around the track. Or I'll be back at Wesleyan in my sophomore dormroom. It is sad to think that such times are so far behind me. Idyllic times. But then I remember a course I took last spring where we thought deeply about the nature of time and tried to escape this concept as a linear thing. The notion of non-linear or circular time serves as a hopeful reminder that memories are not simply brief fleeting things, but rather the fabric of our existence folded over and over on to itself so that the past isn't far away at all, but merely wrapped in celophane. And it only takes the pressure of our concentration to poke through the thin layer of the present with which we are so often consummed. Here I find it's easy to get caught up in reveries. And then I'm jolted back into the dust, the smell of burning garbage, the shoeless children.



This is me at a Grassroot Soccer graduation, one of the many things I do. Zoom in on this picture. Through some bizarre lighting trick, part of the graduate's face is invisible. For argument's sake, let's just say that 1/6 of his head is gone. Imagine this is the face of Zambia. One out of every six people here is infected with HIV. It's hard to walk down the street with this in mind. How could four of the people I rode on the bus with be infected? Probably another two are and don't even know it. The hope is that kids who graduate come out of the program with more knowledge and therefore better decision-making tools. Maybe this way, future reveries will be filled with the satisfaction that a difference can be made.