Monday, March 29, 2010

AN AFTERWORD

A wise person, whose name I no longer remember, once wrote that it was not the Destination that is important but, rather, it is the Journey. Over the past month our GSE team set out to Thailand as a Destination but found out that it was the day to day interactions both with each other and with the people of Thailand, the experiences that we shared, the new-found knowledge, the joys and, yes, sometimes the frustrations that made the Journey so very important to us.

I have tried to chronicle this Journey for you in the entries that I have made into this blog, so that you too would experience Thailand vicariously through our experiences. I wanted each of you to share the Journey and, therefore, may have been a bit verbose with my daily accounts. For this I have no apologies.

I also wanted to share the Journey with my best friend, Bob Sekinger, who was completing a nineteen-year Journey with cancer, en route to his final Destination. Bob was a man who loved life and lived every day with relish. A Quaker and a man of peace, Bob, though not a Rotarian, lived his life in the spirit of Rotary – Service above Self. When, several years ago, I stared through the doorway at my own mortality, it was Bob who, with my wife and family, shared his strength with me and sustained me.

When I left Virginia in February, knowing that I might never see Bob again, we kissed each other and Bob promised to Journey with me through the pages of the blog. When I arrived back in Roanoke a month later, my wife told me that one of Bob’s few pleasures that month had been to live the Journey with my team and me every day. Bob had passed away the morning of our return as we were somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

We are all headed toward the same Destination. How we reach that Destination depends to a large part on how well we make the Journey. The GSE team completed an important part of their Journey on this adventure. I hope that, through the blog, I have shared that Journey with you and made it a part of your own.