It is but a shard, broken from the whole

And that is why I traveled there

8,000 miles and change away from my apartment

I arrived with nothing more than a backpack,

Bought a cheap cell phone in Kigali

Before I boarded the bus

Rocky, pockmarked roads through

Your Mille Colline

Packed like sardines, me the sole Mzungu

People speaking Bantu, Swahili and KinyaRwandan, while I could barely remember my French. I kept quiet and looked out the windows, knowing all eyes were on me.

I came here, Cyamudongo, to study life around a fragmented forest. I came with my notebooks and questionnaires and overly optimistic research plan. I came to see the comings and goings from this tiny protected area, surrounded by poverty so profound that my Western mind could not comprehend it.

What I didn’t come to do was play Uno with the park guards while the sun set over the Congo to the west.

What I didn’t come to do was stare down baboons as they crossed the trails in front of me, fully aware of their canine to head ratio.

What I didn’t come to do was to drink warm milk fresh from the sole cow in the village, a gift so precious I nearly cried.

What I didn’t come to do was fall so deeply in love with a place that I almost forgot it wasn’t home

And yet

I found that when three months has passed and it was time to depart

This little patch of green, the Inyoni singing in the mornings and passion fruit vines on the outhouse wall, the dirt floors and tin roofs and traveling an hour by motorbike to buy flour and coffee, this place so alive and somehow under the same sun as my nations cold and sterile picket fences,

This village, this country, this continent

Had changed me

And as I rode on the back of a truck through the tea plantations away from the forest, toward the continental divide and, beyond, the airport, I didn’t need to look back to know

Thunder would never sound the same