I am constantly meeting people and hearing their stories, I am reminded of the Canterbury tales about an ancient pilgrimage whose format is pilgrims meeting and telling their stories. Tone made me cry.
I walked beside a women who said she left South Africa 30 years ago to marry an Austrailian soldier who was in a UN peacekeeping force, Her father was black
and her Mother white and they were poor, but her father felt that the most important thing was her schooling, his friends said, why educate a girl, but his father was insistent, this was the way out of poverty, and a girl might need to make her own way. She recounted walking barefoot to school. When she got there the nuns gave her bread with gobs of peanut butter, she can still remember the taste of it, for lunch they gave soup that had a strange taste, it had protein powder mixed in. Now she volunteers each year, with her husband, and sometimes her children at a hospital in Cambodia.
I have not done volunteer work, my excuse is that had too much work to do and everything I did was socially usefull. What will I do now?