Settling back in...has anything changed inside?

Its been a few days since we came back from our trip. I m sure most of us are settling
into our daily routine again, and Meluaboh will slowly be a distant memory...
or will it?

For myself, even as i settle into the daily grind of life again, even on the bus,
having food at home, going to toilet, i can't forget how we lived in Meluaboh even
though we were living in the better part of the town...

As i sat on the air conditioned bus to work, i remembered the slightly run down bus which we had for three days during our trip. The exceptional skill of the driver who had to "siam" big holes in the roads there...and turning into narrow alleys...muddy trails to get us near to Ground Zero or to Rumah Temasek.

I remember telling and agreeing with Vivian on our trip back in Medan last sunday how much i missed my bed and bathroom...ha....now even as things went slowly back to normal, no more showering together in a communal bath....with sediment filled water. Stepping out of shower feeling semi clean and stepping on mud...or bathing in water logged conditions for the girls.

Faces of the children smiling....laughing and posing for pictures...of the boys at the orphanage joking around with me even though we understood probably less than 4 or 5 words of the other's language.

Burning midnite oil almost every night...to get the programme up everyday...Boon Liong and Hazel had to be so flexible to tweak the programme flow and we had to be creative with coming up with more new and interesting games to capture the attention of the children...

Xingfa shouting in front of the class...."I CAN'T HEAR YOU?"....See Meng leading "Dum dum di di" with the kids following delightfully...Vivian n Hazel teaching "How do you do"...Boon Liong conversing with fluent Bahasa with the teachers.....sweat sweat sweat.....

And most of all, the grateful and smiling faces of the children who were blessed by our English lessons (unprofessional as it is, we put in everything, each one of us, whatever we could).
Students coming up with gifts and pictures, requests for handphone numbers and email addresses, boys at the orphanage saluting us (alright...just me).....

I think all of us left Meluaboh with something...we touched hearts and we gave the children there a glimpse of the world we had in Singapore, something some of them might never experience in their lifetime.

All the ant bites, mosquito bites, tossing and turning, snoring, rashes, heat of the Meluaboh afternoon, half clean toilets....

It was worth it.

Have we been changed? Undoubtably...

But How?

Where do we go from here?

These are questions which i feel will help each one of us (the team) consolidate what we take back from the trip...do think about it and post post post.....