the path not taken: a mother and her aid worker daughter
by nikki meredith
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both…
Robert Frost
“Mom, please tell me….if it’s going to be too hard on you, I won’t go.”
Caitlin and I were sitting outside at Emporio Rulli, our neighborhood Italian Bakery drinking tea on a shimmering fall day. She was scheduled to leave soon for Darfur where she’d be working as an epidemiologist with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The news from the region was dreadful. In a pitched battled against settled farmers, an armed militia group known as the Janjaweed were on a rampage, burning down villages, killing men, raping women. Children were starving. The year she was scheduled to go, the fighting had reached a peak and the conflict was then considered one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. I got a knot in my gut every time I thought of her embarking on that particular journey but there was more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »
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