Here's the thing...

I arrived back in DC late Monday night - having left in a blizzard and returning to summer – which made me feel as though the weather had decided that spring just wasn’t worth the effort. Apart from someone kindly declaring a federal holiday there wasn’t much fanfare for my return. A Chinese woman on the plane next to me puked on my feet when we landed, which robbed me of that thrilling moment of touching down on American soil. It was strange to leave Indonesia just when things in the relief effort were getting started and my three months there seemed both very long and very short. The past months have blurred together in a whirl of helicopter flights, stories, articles, earthquakes, snorkeling, and housing and fishing projects. At the end of it, I find that most of the work I did was on a computer in an office - mundane and removed from people’s lives. It never quite seemed to live up to the romantic moniker, ‘humanitarian aid’ it had b...