Perspective for when global health feels unreachable

I ran yesterday, for the first time since I had surgery on my leg four weeks ago. My usual slow-but-steady 5 kilometers. I did it again this morning. It has been years now since I have gone for so many weeks without running. (How did I become one of these strange person who runs so frequently? Bizarre.) It felt so good (except for a bit of leg pain)! I finished my run feeling deeply grateful.

I had forgotten how much I need to run - how those minutes of turning off my brain and making my body work are precious and healing. I did not realize how much I had missed it. It made me think of the other things that I know are healing and important for me and for which I should carve out time more regularly. Talking to the people I love, playing the piano, and writing top the list.

Still my favorite running picture ever: running in the Kass Marathon just like I run here everyday -- me working hard and surrounded by barefooted children easily keeping pace.

In the past 3 weeks at home in the US, I have been able to spend some time talking with the people I love (although never enough!), but the others have been neglected. I especially have a hard time writing for myself, for this blog, for my heart when I am writing writing WRITING for work. ('Tis the season of one grant application after another.) So, I choose to carve out a few of my precious minutes to write today.

I feel like I could write about a hundred sadnesses and frustrations from this past week while I have been in Kenya. The shooting in Charleston has my heart breaking over the systemic brokenness and injustice of racism and gun violence in my home country. The poverty and pain in which children here live everyday overwhelms me. The endless problems of this global health research program for which I am now responsible seem beyond my ability to solve.

It feels like TOO MUCH.

And yet, as Anne Lamott says, life is such a mixed grille - "hard, magical, brutal, gorgeous, unfair, hilarious, sweet, wild and mysterious, all at once." I cannot deny the magic, the gorgeousness, the sweetness.

I am grateful for my multinational team every single day. They are so smart and capable and hard-working. They love our children here every day through their work. I don't know what I would do without them. I trust them to carry out my ideas and a hundred other things besides.

I am grateful for my friends from near and far who cheer me on. You send me messages and pictures and words of encouragement when I need them most. You may not realize it, but sometimes, my ability to lean back into the enormity of the challenges here sometimes depends critically on those moments of connection and encouragement. For all the flaws of social media, your "likes" and comments sometimes help me to know that I am not alone and to press on.

I am grateful for the beauty of this country. Even if I am mostly confined to the hospital and the poorest parts, it is rich in the beauty of its skies and savannah and animals and people. The flat, majestic presence of the acacia trees light up my heart.

I am grateful for the opportunity to work to bring about health for the children and families of this country and countries like Kenya. Your children are so beautiful. It is my deep privilege to fight against the daily deaths of 17,000 children under the age of five. Even when it seems impossible, I would rather be in the fight any day.

Yesterday, Monicah, age 10, looked me in the eye and told me that her dream for the future is to become a teacher. "I wanted to one who can change the future for children," she said. Her eyes sparkled and shone with the power of her dreams. Let it be so.

So, here I am. Fighting, working, running, writing, practicing gratitude. Let it be so.