KHARTOUM, Sudan

The last time I arrived in a desert I saw the landing strip three minutes before the plane touched down. We arrived in a cloud of dust in the United Arab Emirates. The winds of the desert showed no mercy. Anxiety. The currency I pay every time I embark on another journey not knowing what will, happen. My destination -- villages where communities live in poverty challenged by high disease burdens, lack of medical care, limited educational opportunities and 1-2 meals a day...This is the reality and the basis for intervention. The thing you have to remember is that every situation no matter how difficult provides an opportunity to do something about it.

I’m a global nomad and on my way to Africa. The people who come into my life are my caravan. I carry their stories with me and each journey becomes a chapter in my book of life. My suitcase is packed with hope and determination. Six months after the desert landing in the U.A.E., the clammy palms, clenched jaws, and extra tug on my seatbelt returned in the skies above Sudan. "We will be experiencing turbulence as we fly through heavy cumulus clouds. It's best to stay in your seats and fasten your seatbelt for the duration of the flight," our pilot announced. I always take a deep breath when I hear that word-- TURBULENCE. The power of nature to thrash about a piece of metal in the sky.

We descend a thousand feet at a time through billowing clouds thick, a tunnel of eternal white. I hold my breath waiting to see the ground beneath; earth speckled with shrubbery. Buildings and houses like pieces on a monopoly game. Street lamps on a brite-lite board of the earth. The Nile, wide and curvy emerges.

The desert, peeled back by urban sprawl is dotted by brown mud houses and fringed by buildings and black tar roadways. A dancing Ferris wheel; rainbow sherbet lights of carnival rides. From each set of community houses stretch the Minarets of mosques. Tendrils of the tangerine sun dance about the cabin landing on a woman dressed in green, a cloth draped over her head. She recited scriptures of her Koran the entire flight from Frankfurt. Not once did she let her eyes shift.

The wheels hit the ground, skid and taxi to open runway. We speed past UN planes, white with elongated black letters. A helicopter waits for repair. It is not at every airport that you see UN planes. United Nations—a governing body meant to unite the world to declare what constitutes torture, to set standards for education, nutrition, health to represent the global voice under certain conventions, Human Rights, Child Rights, Rights of Women, Food Security. And yet serves another purpose, peacekeeping in times of war and disasters; complex humanitarian emergencies—a fancy term for the multifaceted causes that rip communities apart where governance is fractured or nonexistent and the lives of united people shatter.

I wonder what the eyes of those planes have seen; what kind of mission they flew--peacekeeping, food distribution, conflict resolution, refugee rescues? Have they seen the blood spattered canvas of the desert? Have they seen child soldiers and raped women fleeing for their lives? The door is thrust open and a bus awaits passengers; members of the Red Cross, a woman backpacker, two men in fatigues. A mother clutching the hand of her child. We are asked to remain onboard, as we are continuing to Ethiopia. The sky fades to melon and dissolves into the bluish-gray that begins the darkness of the night.