We Finally Got To Meet Everyone

It was wonderful, and what a relief.

We had a relaxing, yet for me very anxious, morning sitting in Catie and Greg’s apartment catching up on emails, talking and drinking a lot of tea while Greg went bouldering at the climbing gym.  Around two o’clock we went out and got one of the many delicious schwarmas (like a souvlaki) that you can get around here at the middle-eastern take-out shops.  By the time we got back it was time to shower and leave.

It took a long time to get to San Carlos, we had to take the inner-city subway to the end of the line, and then change to what you might call the outer-suburbs rail system.  We actually thought we were really early but it turned out we had no time for dallying at all, so I’m glad that we did leave “early”.  When we arrived at San Carlos we were met at the train station by Brian, who took us back to his house.  As we stepped inside we saw some other people hanging about, who we instantly recognized from the Kiva website as the founders of that organization!  It was such a surreal moment, we recognized them from their website and they instantly recognized us from Jeremy’s “Turn that shit Up”.  So there were a number of people who we met, including one guy who is moving to Uganda in a few weeks, so we plan to be seeing him there.

We had a wonderful, wonderful evening talking about how we’d all met, what we’d been doing, how we’d come to this point.  It really felt like a meeting of positive energy, young intelligent minds, lives of different backgrounds meeting around a dinner table in San Carlos to figure out how we can help to make things better for those who don’t have a dinner table to sit around.  It felt empowering and I definitely felt some destiny in play, like I had been looking for that dinner table for the last year and a half.  We talked and exchanged ideas and I felt stimulated and excited.  It was wonderful.

Unfortunately our getting home was a little more difficult, as the “last train” wasn’t running on Sundays so we had to get a taxi to the inner-city subway just in time for the last train.  We got home pretty late but tomorrow we are starting in the office, so it will be up early for us.  We feel very welcomed, which is very reassuring after such a long, anxious wait to this moment.