A memory.

I'm 15 years old. My hair is short and crazy and I'm coated with a thin layer of dust. EVERYWHERE. It's up my nose, in my ears, in the corners of my eyes.
I've just spent ten or more hours in a bus on an endless road in a strange land. If you could call it a road. At some point the asphalt stopped and it was just dust and potholes and craters. I know the drive was impossibly long, but it's funny, I don't remember time passing. But I remember listening to Veggie Tales' "Barbara Manatee" on Sarah's iPod over and over and over. We'd driven through jungles, at least to me they were jungles. And passed fields of sunflowers and tea plantations and rolling hills. We passed through cities with strange names like Gulu, and others that escape my memory.
Finally, after hours of uncertainty and getting thrown around by bumps, we arrived in Kitgum, Uganda. A city on the border of Sudan that is still recovering from a devastating and horrific war.
War. At 15 that word makes me nervous. Will we be safe? I wanted to know. What will we see? What kind of stories will we hear?
It was pitch black when we arrived at the house we would be staying at for the next week. And there's not really much electricity in Kitgum.
We're being led to our room, and it's separate from the rest of the house. It's a short walk from everyone else and everything, including the toilet. I'm covered in dust from the endless drive, tired and hungry. And I'm in a place that, if you'd told me just a year earlier that I'd ever be, I wouldn't have believed you. I might've laughed at you. I'm walking on a dirt path with Sarah, a flashlight in my hand, towards our room.
When we're about halfway there, I look up.
And I see something I know I will never forget for as long as I live. The sky is covered, splattered, PACKED with more stars than I've ever seen in my entire existence. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and, for a moment, I can't breathe. I can't move. I just stand there, under this African sky. This black night that is littered with so much light, so many clusters of endless constellations and planets and galaxies that God all made.
I've never felt so small. I've never seen such a....well, such a sky.
They just don't make 'em like that back home.