Today was the first day I spent amongst the people to whom i will be dedicating the next three years of my life. today i went to visit 6 families living with AIDS. And amongst those three families, one can find everything from hope to hopelessness, from strength to weakness, from determination to resignation. the first family we visited was a single mother with 6 children, five of which are hiv positive living in a small, dirty one room house in the middle of two gang territories. the children are in the process of leaving school simply because they dont want to go and their mother is too tired and overwhelmed to demand otherwise. after leaving that family we went to eat and the only way i could force my eat was to forget the truth of what i had just seen. to forget...to abandon compassion......that´s what i did, so that i could be comfortable. there is a hindu-buddhist concept of not being attached to the fruit of your actions which i believe has a lot to say to people involved in working for change in the world. if you work for change hoping to see that change, despair abounds. if you become able to work without a concern of what the end result will be but focused instead on developing the relationships with those you work with and thus participating in their lives, then the end result which will never be seen is no longer an acceptable. but does that then mean that one has given up on wanting to see a world encompassed by the reign of god.....
that´s all for now....