Bringing it Back Home

As I think back on the last five weeks, I see snapshots of everything that we’ve done like they were a stack of glossy postcards. From standing on the edge of the world at The Cape of Good Hope to leaping off the edge of the world record bungy bridge spanning the Strom River Valley, it’s clear that we’ve experienced and accomplished things that we’ll talk about and remember forever. However, it doesn’t take a world record bungee jump or a dip in the freezing Atlantic with Great Whites to make those incredible memories. It can be as simple as diving in to a deep conversation with people you barely know or fitting more people in a taxi than you ever thought was physically possible (26 to be exact). Our five weeks here seems to have been short enough to force us all together, but still long enough to form great and lasting friendships. Together, we’ve been challenged with questions that demand the perspective of our entire lives, and together, we’ve waded through those deep thoughts that will hopefully produce an answer for each of us.

It’s a bitter sweet reality to know that all of our pictures, stories and experiences simply won’t do justice for the real thing. We want to tell everyone about everything that we’ve done here, but only those who really experienced it will know how truly breathtaking that sunset was or how that joke had us all doubled over in side splitting laughter. Along with hundreds of other instances, it’s these moments that make our friendships valuable and completely unique. For many of us, we might as well have been exploring a new planet for five weeks; some of us left the States for the very first time, and many of us for only the second or third time. We ventured into a place where the letters TIA (This is Africa) are the only necessary response to anything that goes wrong or doesn’t go as planned. Anything we did had the potential to be a complete adventure, and, for those of us that were able to embrace that, it made the trip that much sweeter.

Yesterday morning, Friday, June 17, we had our last lesson here in Cape Town, and we learned about gratitude and how important others are in our life stories. With that in mind, I’d like to finish this blog post with gratitude. Parents, supporters, friends, brothers, sisters, and the multitude of others that I’m probably leaving out, we can’t thank you enough for your love and support. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we surely wouldn’t be here without it. It has been an amazing adventure of learning and self discovery, and we owe it all to you. We love you and can’t wait to see you Stateside!

-Hamilton Bolton