What images burn into your mind? You know those moments that pass in front of you that you cannot forget? Search through your life and think of a few events.

As I search my own past, no matter how hard I try I can still feel the sensation of falling under a car from a motor scooter and the rear passenger wheel roll over my ankle. My mind can paint an image of my grandfather saying goodbye to my grandma at her funeral. Those are the images that haunt me with personal pain.

I find my mind drifts to how captivated I was by a beautiful smile and starlit eyes on my first date with my wife, or telling my niece that she would always be my special "Bugaloo" on the day her baby brother was born. These are the images that haunt me with joy.

This trip seems to be filled with images to haunt me.

-Children with extremely stunted physical development due to a lack of protein, but whose school is now able to provide an egg a week.

-Parents who send their children away from their village to ensure they can get an education

- Hearing the laughter from children who have been rescued from working at brick factories and are now in school.

These are the things that haunt me. Haunt me with hope.

“Why do you suppose they made you king in the first place?' I ask him. 'Not for your benefit, but for theirs. They meant you to devote your energies to making their lives more comfortable, and protecting them from injustice. So your job is to see that they're all right, not that you are - just as a shepherd's job, strictly speaking, is to feed his sheep, not himself.”

― Thomas More, Utopia

Ty Thayer