mEGAN'S HeartworkS NoteS Archive

November 2010

Hello Heartworkers,

Thank you to everyone who took part in our meeting last night. I have such a sense of deep peace and stillness within me as I run around town doing errands. It felt like last night we sat with so many issues that are out of our control, but what we brought to these issues was a sense of hope and love. This is really all we can do. Karen, who's husband is sick and we are doing the movie fundraiser for, showed up unexpectedly at the meeting. When she left, to go home to her sick husband she hugged me and said "I feel like a completely different person than I did before I came here."

This sums it up. We did not and can not change her circumstances. We did not even do anything last night to help her family...and yet, being in a room filled to the brim with other women who choose to take risks and reach out, healed something in her.

This morning I received this email from Katie Meyler. You must, must, must read what she is experiencing. Amazingly clear that life is so much bigger than my trip to Shop-Rite this morning. She is the BHS graduate who's foundation More Than Me is educating children in Liberia. This letter has stunned me to my core. What a woman...We are blessed to know her. I can't stop looking at the pictures.

Thank you for all that you bring to my life.

Love,
Megan

Letter from Katie Meyler

Dear Megan,

I'm in Ethiopia, on an extended layover on my way back home to the USA.  The past few months in Liberia have flown by and I feel more like myself then ever!  This year 31 girls got to go to school, some for the first time!  The stories would make anyone's eyes well up.  Some of the girls are orphans to war, others have mothers who prostitute, and none of the families we work with make over $400 a year.  I lost my phone the other day and I wanted to be upset and pout and stomp up and down but instead I ate chocolate cake and celebrated being alive, these kids teach me over and over that my things should not be the source of my peace.  They own no material things but laugh all day long.  We have so much to be happy about and its not just our hot running water, our paved roads, or the light switch that we are privileged to turn on and off as we please, it's our breath, our heartbeat and each other. 

I got Typhoid in rural Ethiopia while visiting a project.  I don't think I've been that sick in all my life.  I went to the hospital after a few days of diarrhea and fever.  We better never complain about the health care system in the USA, although there is always room for improvement, we all need to take a visit to an Ethiopian "hospital."  I felt bad for being there like my Typhoid was a stubbed toe.  It was the middle of the night and dark, I laid in the arms of a woman I didn't know who played with my hair while I silently cried.  I cried not because I was sick or in pain but because the entire hospital echoed w/screams of a family who had just lost their mother.  One of the daughters sounded like a howling dog.  It was a cry that stabbed me in the heart and scared me in the realest ways possibly.  We don't let ourselves feel the same way they do here in Africa, we have so much to learn from each other around the world. 

I sit with the people here and I never cease to be amazed or envious at how they take care of each other, they live Heartworks in their daily lives and it made me think of you, and the group, and my older sister's face when she saw the gifts for her baby that no one had ever met and I wanted to say Thank You again.  You guys are this Ethiopian village in Bernardsville or least you are walking that way. 

So many stories to tell.  See you soon. 

All my love,
Katie

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