Day 232, Year 8: Trip to Boston
Date: Sunday, June 23, 2013
Weather: Partly Cloudy and Warm
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Three of my best friends from my teaching days have all moved from Concord, New Hampshire to Portsmouth, on the coast. I received an email from one of the friends on Thursday night letting me know that the college-aged son of another one of the friends had been air-lifted out of a remote village in Nepal and treated for typhoid fever in a hospital in Kathmandu. Then late last night I got another email telling me that Matthew was back in the United States and was, in fact, in Massachusetts General Hospital. I was Matthew’s first grade teacher, in addition to being very good friends with his parents, so I decided to drive to Boston today to see Matthew, Detta and Tom. It has been a harrowing week and half for all of them, but Matthew is now on the road to recovery . . . with just one little bump. They found gall stones and he will have to deal with that, but late in the day, they felt he was doing well enough to release him from the hospital. Matthew attends Middlebury College in Vermont and spent the last semester in Alexandria in Egypt learning Arabic. Then he flew to Nepal for a six-week stay, now cut short, to check on a project he helped start a couple of years ago–helping the women of the village learn how to market the tea they are growing. And if his health allows, he will fly back to Egypt in late July for a two-month internship in an international economic development office. Matthew is totally dedicated to trying to help people in underdeveloped parts of the world come up with sustainable ways to support themselves and to helping facilitate the sharing of ideas and skills of successful projects in one country with people in other countries who can benefit from a similar project. He has big ideas and quite an impressive resume for a junior in college and we all hope this health issue won’t stand in his way. I’m confident that he’ll be in Egypt in just a few weeks. Good luck, Matthew, we’ll be sending our positive thoughts your way.
