The first night I was in Rwanda, I was asked to facilitate group discussion among the thirteen students and five faculty members who were about to spend our ten days there.

So I did what I usually do when I am asked to teach. I came up with fourteen questions that dealt with various abstract aspects of our time in Rwanda. I asked about the complications implicit in being there as Westerners. I asked about the complications of identity politics and race. I asked about the complications of economics, of disparities, of poverty and power. I asked about the genocide and about its legion of lingering horrors.

After I had passed these questions out and encouraged students to contemplate them in their journals and then prattled on for some thirty minutes expounding on the questions, I delved into even further complications—the complications of emotional responses.

I told the students that every day they would be asked first in a small group, then in a large, only three questions. First, what was good today? Second, what was bad today? Third, how are you?

As the week progressed, I thought more and more about all the questions I’d formulated, and the more I thought, the more complicated they became—even a question as apparently simple as “How are you?” grew to be nuanced with a litany of caveats and qualifications.

I wanted the kids to know that it would be alright if they felt “too much” or “not enough.” I wanted them to know that whatever response they had was right and that they could honor the pace at which they processed all this stimuli.

But all altruism and responsible leadership aside, I wanted to know those things for myself. I wanted to know that when I felt numb or over-stimulated or cried out that I was all right. I wanted to know that there was no one way to respond that I was just not “in on.” I felt insecure and troubled and convinced on a really deep level that whatever my response to Rwanda was, it would probably not be the “right” one.

Into all this confusion, enter my friend Jim, the man who first began this trip to Rwanda several years ago. He confessed to us that first night, after all the abstract discussion, after all the questions, after all the analysis, that he was himself pondering on the plane from Addis Ababa to Kigali why he was coming back to Rwanda, what he was really trying to accomplish or what he would even be able to accomplish there. And he also confessed that, like me, the more he contemplated these things, the more he became lost in the murky waters of the questions he was asking himself, the less able to act.

And so he shared with us the metaphor that helps him when he wonders why he should return. It’s the metaphor of the stepping stone—one tiny spot of solid ground for your feet in the midst of mud and rain.

One sure, true, small, achievable thing.

As he put it, to completely understand what happened in Rwanda, to make sense not only of the genocide but of the economics, the racism, the colonialism, the hatred, the hunger for power, the negligence that led to it and that have proceeded from it, one would have to be engaged, and possibly then mired, endlessly in debate and that what typically proceeds from debates like these is nothing.

I remember when I was in college that a professor of mine once stormed out of a meeting we’d organized to discuss what our school’s role should be in responding to the very real issue of child slavery worldwide. I’m not sure, but I think he was muttering to himself “Damned Presbyterians!” as he walked out.

When we asked him about it later, he simply said that he got frustrated because we kept talking and talking and talking and endlessly providing rationales and scenarios, but no one was willing to come up with a plan. No one was willing to provide a single, declarative sentence.

I am of the people who like to talk and to talk and to talk, to think and to think and to think. I like to read and then read some more. I like to formulate judgments slowly and only to act when I am certain of positive outcomes, well thought out and fully accounted for.

Unfortunately for me, precious little in the world is willing to wait for me to make perfect judgment calls all the time. My students wait to be taught in real time, with real distractions, with real personalities of their own. Lives fall apart in real time, with real distractions, with real personalities of their own.

And so we proceed from stepping stone to stepping stone, carefully across the muddy yard, gingerly perhaps at first. But we proceed. In Rwanda, I thought of the widows who had begun their own collective and were now self-sufficient. I tried to think of small, achievable stepping stones I could help with—solar panels, weather-proofing, windows, a bread slicer, soccer balls. Good, this is good, I thought to myself. Good.

Rwanda is an idea—a jumble of ideas, many of them the kind of ideas that torment us at night—guilt, despair, fear, heartbreak. But Rwanda is people too, children clapping in syncopation, their bare feet pounding red earth. Rwanda is land too, crenellated hills that will continue long after I will. The people. The land.

These are the stones I clung to in Rwanda, and I pray in days to come they teach me how to move like her children have learned to move, gingerly at first. And then…And then.