~"God has been good..." -Winnie~

God is too good of an artist to create ugliness…Yet, the stench that rises from greed and personal gain sullies His finest masterpieces. Whether I stand on the clean brick streets of the states, or on the roads littered with cows, cars, and people in Delhi, I am staring out at His work. Yet, both in my homeland and in this foreign land His work has been carelessly tarnished.

How easy it is to forget one’s imperfections when stung by those of others…. Without condemnation, I ask ‘how many of us nurse the stings of imperfection, while forgetting to mind our own stingers’? India has blown life’s reality into my nostrils and for the first time, I have smelt truth. I believe that it is once we are able to acknowledge truth that we can see beauty. Mind you, this is not man’s definition of beauty, but the beauty that does not come in a box that has no price tag, and is completely free…Beauty is the persistence of life even when the imperfections of man attempt to damper its existence. Beauty is humanity in its rawest form… As I sit in the small navy van that our driver maneuvers expertly through chaotic traffic, I am silenced by the assault to my senses…Humanity in its rawest form stares unapologetically at me, daring me to turn away. It won’t allow me to close my eyes or cover my nose…It will not let me close my heart nor pull my shawl over my ears. So I sit in silence, and listen, and hear, and smell, and feel.

Today we hashed out the details for the national conference that Maitri is hosting. It surrounds the topic of Universal Access and AIDS/HIV prevention for women and children. Winnie was not there as she went to a conference to give a presentation that I prepared for her on “Driving Innovation at the NGO Level”. So it was just the General (Winnie’s husband) and us three interns. I must tell you about the General, he is quite the original. From my past experience of military boarding school, I was always in awe of our three star general superintendent. He was a demigod and we cadets were the lowly serfs. The General is nothing like this, he stands at about 5’8” and his gray eyes are full of humor, mischief, and laughter. There is never a dull moment when he is in the room, and though he may not be tall or big, his presence is larger than life. He seems to know everybody and their mother. The house is always full of someone coming or going. Many times they are visiting dignitaries, rich entrepreneurs, yoga instructors, doctors, barbers, and anything else that you can imagine…However, today, unbeknownst to me, I met two of the leading experts in the field of AIDS/HIV. Dr. Joe Thomas Ph.D., the first expert, told me to call him Joe because no one could pronounce his Indian name, he just had gotten off a flight coming from Rwanda where his last assignment was with FXB International AID. The second was a quiet fellow by the name of Dr. Purohit, he just happens to work at Harvard in the stem cell research lab as well as FXB International. Both have a long list of titles and professional appointments that I have not mentioned, but I can’t remember all of them, and plus it would fill a couple of volumes. I have always had this image in my head that brilliant individuals such as these two gentlemen were either completely anti-social and lost in the world of scholarly theory, or completely full of themselves. They were neither, and combined with the great character that is the General, we all had a grand ole time. Plus, a lot of work was completed over many cups of herbal tea.