Because, for once, they had to confront how hard they had worked not to see me.
My mother reached for the bowl of potatoes and asked whether my next trip would be safe.
“I’ll prepare for it not to be,” I said.
She nodded, then asked what the team needed.
I told her.
And this time, when I explained that we moved medicine, equipment, and people through places that had stopped functioning, no one reduced it to paperwork.
No one called me the family disappointment.
No one called me soft.
They simply listened.
