Her words. They were so mundane. They were spoken with the kind of matter of factness you would expect from a doctor after a clean check up. Maybe that’s why I missed them.

Standing on the front steps of Kidane Mihret orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, her words would have been easy to miss.  There, your senses are overwhelmed.  Your mind can easily be pulled elsewhere.  Maybe to the run down courtyard where the kids with no parents joyfully play soccer or climb on the decrepit jungle gym.  Or maybe your mind follows your eyes to the couple of soul-tired nuns, sitting along the crumbling wall, solemnly watching the children with no parents in their happy games.

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The smells never leave you. Perhaps more than any other sense, the sense of smell is the most memorable to me. Since I was a child, I have associated smells with so much of my experience…the warm tobacco pipe smoke of my grandfather wafting through the air in his woodshop. The sterile smell of the hospital delivery room where I met my first son. The smell of the woods behind my childhood home, wrought with the musty fragrance of leaves, earth, and the damp bark of the trees.

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