Baby

Yesterday I was social.

So now I am going to negate any personality points I would have received and talk about my social evening on a virtual platform.

I met up with a friend who I haven't seen before she left to study malaria in Uganda. IN UGANDA. She told me a story of how she assisted in two births, C-Section and vaginal. The medical assistant wasn't available and the doctor snapped up my friend's capable hands.

One of the babies, the family named after her.

Isn't that unspeakably beautiful?

I started to cry when she mentioned that small tidbit. She said it slightly offhand, like oh and I got an A on the test I completed blindfolded. If I had a child named after me, I would have T-Shirts made. I am probably still going to have them made and distribute them to family members so we can take a group picture to solidify an accomplishment I had absolutely no part in. Everyone grinning, in little stadium rows wearing red shirts that say "My friend has a baby named after her in Africa, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt."

This story makes me wildly enthusiastic about things I may have not been before. My friend will forever be connected by something so intricately personal to this little girl who will one day live and grow to have hands just like those who delivered her. It is not an immediate, perhaps typical connection, but it exists, and strongly. I believe in it like I believe in coffee and the cold light of mornings. I believe in it like a realization.

Somethings are easy to believe in; sports teams, democracy, microwaves. But somethings, like those hidden in the spaces of human conscious which we choose often to not explore as they may hurt or scare us, those things are difficult to commit to. And if you can find something that inspires you to believe...Go on and let yourself be a little in love. Because somewhere in Uganda, in a village full of people, there lives a baby named Kaitlin.