Just something to think about

A friend gave me this quote before my first ABI Service trip at Loyola. It most definitely applies for this trip too, well any service for that matter.

Everywhere in the world people are in search of love, for everyone is convinced that love alone can save the world, love alone can make life meaningul and worth living. But how very few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.
Therefore the first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking, a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own? So the first ingredient of love is to really see the other...It is in that act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is Love.
-Anthony De Mello SJ, The Way to Love

In Paul Farmer's book, Pathologies of Power, he writes that one of his goals is to bear witness to the sufferings and needs of those he cares for. This is my goal for the trip, to return and tell people of the things as they truly are in Rwanda. No rosey hue, no sugar coating. I hope that I can approach this trip without preconceived notions, a lofty goal I know, but important for me to attempt. As a second year medical student, I have not begun to care for patients, so listening to their stories and challenging myself to explore outside my comfort zone is crucial if I am to be useful to these people in any way.