I came home from filming in Uganda and Rwanda, stood in the middle of my kitchen, and was filled with gratitude for my floor.
Not my granite counter tops, refrigerator with ice cube maker or microwave.
My floor.
There have been many of life’s simple pleasures that I have been grateful for — malted milk balls (always at the top of my list), Cooper loving his big brother Barnes so much, a Coke after a run, walking out of the dentist able to feel my mouth—but a floor?
It’s not that the tiles are that amazing or I’ve done a particularly noteworthy job cleaning them —but floors seem to be in short supply in the homes of the girls we visited in the bush of Ugand, hours outside of Kampala. What first seemed incongruous, taking a bunch of twigs and brushing the dirt, eventually made some sort of sense in that it does reduce the dust outside one’s home. But it’s dirt. And the homes had dirt floors. Some with twig roofs. It was hard to be there more than ½ hour. But we were able to leave. I cannot fathom what it must be like to live in these conditions, and not temporarily.
We give lip service to being grateful to live in the ole U.S.A. but do we really have even a clue just how grateful we should be? The median income in Uganda is $681. That’s not enough for a floor. Carpet, wood, tile, linoleum, none of the above. I’m grateful to this country, my grandparents, my parents, David, for so many things. But first and foremost, my floor.
