Rumi says, "Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love"

I don���t have much for new experiences to share. I���ve been spending full days hammering at my computer and I feel a bit guilty about it. Regardless, I���ve got to get my project done.

One of the best aspects of this experience has been all the time I���ve had to spend thinking, observing, and reflecting.

I suppose this experience has changed me a bit. For instance, I use a toothpick almost daily even though I know my older sister hates them. It���s just that I haven���t yet eaten goat without strands of meat digging deep between my molars.

I still can���t muster up the nerve to wear my headlamp. I have very vivid memories of my dad���s softball games from around the time my little sister was born. I never really watched the games but I remember being amazed at all the flying insects and moths that swarmed the field���s lights. Sudan���s insects are much larger and more abundant than those at Pleasanton���s sports park. I am not comfortable with my face being like those light posts so I carry my headlamp in my hand.

I am still spending a lot of time trying to convince myself I���m not in a movie, or someone that arranges all of those power cables on the set. This is especially difficult when I sit in the village���s market. It���s surreal and majestic���unlike anything I have ever seen.

Some of the more wonderful moments in life, I think, are those when the thread that connects our life���s timeline and relationships becomes visible for a brief time. We get glimpses into how experiences connect and pull us in certain directions.

I keep remembering a moment when I was a miserable statistics major in my second year at Cal Poly. I was overwhelmed and disgusted with a statistical analysis programming assignment. In my usual overdramatic gestures, I wrote a message on a post-it note and stuck it above my desk: ���Note to self���never become a statistics programmer.��� That was when the whole Norm MacDonald ���note to self��� thing was trendy. I left that desk and that university for good a few weeks later in a station wagon. In my cloudy depression during that period, I didn���t want anything to do with much. At the very bottom of the list was statistics.

Seven years later, my very first course in graduate school was statistics. I didn���t remember much about the subject. In burying my feelings from that period, it seems some of what I had learned went under with it. I saw statistics as an accomplice to my misery.

Now I���m in Sudan. I don���t really know why. The thread has something to do with it and in a few years I will see it. It could be my interest in Dave Eggers novels. It could be the incessant, distant, academic debates at school about a solution for Darfur and Sudan. While unconvincing, if not disappointing, they have at least provoked curiosity. It could be that my uncle told me while we were in his waterskiing boat that he has a niece who studied in the same program as me. It could be that his niece answered my email and has a very good friend with a leadership role for this NGO here in Sudan.

So now I���m here in Sudan working with data analysis and database management. At times I���m violently struggling with programming language and my technical shortcomings. On occasion, my face even flushes with anxiety. I am totally overwhelmed but thoroughly and profoundly happy.

While I type thoughts some men are building a dining hall with large stones and without any tools more sophisticated than hammers. Women are washing our dishes and cleaning up after the lunch they prepared for us. It���s time I get away from this computer and attempt close the gap in our respective realities and understanding���that way I���ll actually have something to write about.