HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?????

One year is OVER. 
Today was my last day at the Hospital. 
This hospital in Nzara where I have worked for the past 4 months since I was evacuated from my beautiful Ezo. 
All the nurses and patients, nuns and staff were so sad. Some were crying.
I had all I could do, not to cry and keep to it "together". 
So grateful for this amazing experience.
My friend Dr. Daniel Doyle, a cardiologist from Australia  who also comes to South Sudan to help sent me such an appropriate story today via email. 
It is called the "The Mighty Life of Oliver Sacks" Captured by Norman Doidge. 
Appropriate for me today because it is about being grateful for our experiences and our journey. 

The last part reads:
"Perhaps because gratitude does not always go unopposed. Psychoanalysts have
often seen gratitude as having an emotional opposite, envy. Sometimes a flash of
envy can be a helpful sign, a spur that tells you, "You know, you really want this – try
for it."
But very often, the envious person sees something wonderful in the world, and
instead of appreciating it, attempts to make the envious feeling go away, by
devaluing or denying its worth (those grapes were sour, anyway); or he or she may
try to spoil or destroy the envied object in reality. If one does this enough, one ends
up feeling starved, because one finds oneself living in an emptied world. The envious
have a particularly hard time growing old and dying.
They cannot tolerate the fact that the young, and not they, have their lives before
them. They feel pain, and emptiness. We speak of people being consumed with envy
– but filled with gratitude. It's paradoxical that, by acknowledging that there are
wonderful things in the world, and that we are incomplete, we can feel filled up –
even as we bid the world farewell.
Ms Edgar told me that her atheist friend sometimes liked to be read, of all things, the
Bible. When I think of Oliver's last days, I think of a biblical sentence that I've always
found instructive in the twofold art of living and dying.
It reads, "And Abraham died … full of years."
Not emptied

I hope when I die someday, they will say, "And Rachael died.....full of years". 

I feel full of joy, gratitude and full of years.
Tomorrow I will go to Yambio for a CMMB celebration of my year volunteering here with Safe Motherhood Project.
Then on to Juba.
Then to Boston Via Dubai.
Some time next week I will arrive back in Boston.
Unless I decide to go somewhere else immediately..... (just kidding)(not really)

I am SO SAD to leave these beautiful people and this broken country.
As you know I have been all over the world, to every continent except Antarctica and here in Ezo, Western Equatoria, South Sudan I lived really  "Golden" months of my entire life.
I am so grateful to God that I was allowed to know this and live this gratefully as I was here, that it was a special time in my life.
I treasured every moment and lived every moment to the fullest. 

Everyone was so wonderful to me.
I have no regrets, Thank God. 

Even the day I was kidnapped by the Rebels, they did not physically hurt me and now I have the BEST story of my entire family for the rest of my life!!!! hahaha!!!!! 
I am so humbled as usual when I finish one of these trips. 
God the creator of the universe, the almighty ONE looks at little insignificant, sinful, selfish me and LOVES ME!! 
God sends me the greatest people in my life, the greatest experiences. 
Who am I to deserve this treatment of favor? 
Wow!!!!! 

Thank you South Sudan. 

Thank you people of Ezo, Nzara, Yambio. 

Thank you CMMB. 

Thank you Diocese of Tombura- Yambio. 

Thank you Comboni Missionary Nuns. 

Thank you Staff of Hospital in Ezo and in Nzara. 

Thank you all the patients who entrusted their lives to me. Their health to me. 

GIVE THANKS TO THE LORD FOR HE IS GOOD; HIS LOVE ENDURES FOREVER. 

Psalm 107:1