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By Root 1013 0

here day in and day out. I was sitting in a makeshift shanty, on the bare dirt underneath a scrap of canvas, when I heard a kitten crying plaintively. I panicked. It freaked me out so deeply, I knew I had to flee or I was going to stand up and rip the slum down to find that cat right now now now now, or I was going to freeze and sit there and listen to this little mewling sound and completely lose my mind. I was afraid I was on the verge of going emotionally somewhere far, far away and not coming back. My brain was flooded. Of course, I was transferring the grief of ten thousand and my own triggered, vicarious trauma onto that one kitty cat, and I had just enough sense left to know it. Somehow I stumbled to my feet and started walking away. And then the children of the shelter brought me back to this world. They surrounded me to say goodbye and sent me off with an echoing chant that sounded like bells in the distance:

Oom shanti shanti shanti … oom shanti shanti shanti …

In the car, Marshall asked me if the smell of poop had bothered me when the boys were on my lap. “No,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, when awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was asked by a journalist what she intended to do with the million-dollar gift.

“Feed the poor people of India,” she said.

“You couldn’t possibly!” the journalist cried. “Feeding the poor people of India would cost far more than that!”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But my God simply asks that I try.”

And so I try, too. Mainly I try to have a little peace inside, which in some measure I can take out into the world with me. God knows the world needs it. I have carefully examined what happened on this trip to India, my attitude and my resentments toward the treatment of the poor. This is what I have chosen to remember in future trips: Accepting something doesn’t mean I have to like it. It simply allows me to accept reality as it actually is this minute, and then move into the solution, rather than obsessing on the problem. Today, I believe we all need solutions, so I choose the process, again and again, of surrendering, accepting, suiting up, and showing up … and letting go of the outcome.

Although sometimes the outcome lifts my heart.

After I returned home, I was shown a tape of Shahrukh Khan recording a powerful public service announcement for PSI/India. My little orphans Neelam and Komal had been invited to the taping, and they were clearly thrilled to be sitting with the most famous star in India. After he finished, Shahrukh called Neelam to stand beside him and announced that it was his great honor to present her with a scholarship from Ashley Judd and the Rai Foundation that would take care of her education all the way through a master’s degree. As she accepted the certificate, her serious, beautiful, shy face lit up like the rising sun.

Chapter 20

THE WHITE FLOWER OF RWANDA

In the Highlands with my Scottish and Irish heroes, on my fortieth birthday.

Si tu me connaissais et si tu te connaissais vraiment, tu ne m’aurais pas tue.

(If you knew me, and if you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.)

—FELICIE NTAGENGWA

celebrated my fortieth birthday—April 19, 2008—in the Scottish Highlands with Dario’s family and some dear friends, roaring with laughter, running a sack race, and winning the caber toss on the front lawn of Skibo Castle. Five days later, I was in a hotel room in Kigali, Rwanda, gazing out my window at the African sun setting in dazzling shades of orange and red. My last time on this continent, the original home of us all, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I was nearly distraught. Everything, but everything, provoked a cry: My first African tree! My first African bird! My first African friend! I was returning to my cradle, and everything had the heightened drama of a seeker’s first pilgrimage. This time around, I was grateful to be emotionally sober (not somber—sober includes great mirth). Not that I was casual about this journey; far from it. I was simply … simpler. My gratitude, awe, respect, and even