"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work may be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps the oppisite of what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not of the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."

~Thomas Merton

The BF shared this passage with me before I left, and, during my time here, I am growing into realizing how true it really is. Ideas and ideals are beautiful and important, but mean nothing unless they can be translated to real people and real experiences. Being in a place like Pannai magnifies this reality. There were so many things that I hoped to accomplish, changes that I had hoped to bring to this place. And I've made some progress. I have reported abuses that i have seen, gotten some classes into the library, read to the kids and got them more excited about books. What my Western mind sees as "accomplishments", though, somehow don't seem as important as all of the time I've been able to spend with people. Hanging out with the girls during study time, talking with the women, carrying the babies around. It's not something that I can really explain, just more of a feeling. When Vatsala, the principal, introduces me, she says, "This is Chincy. She was here two years ago and she loves us so much that she came back again." I try to remember that and live up to it amidst feeling tired and dirty and and a little lonely all the time. This is starting to sound like a college admission essay, so I'm going to leave it at that.