Exhausting

And in more than one sense, but most of all emotionally. I know that Hamburg is a city in which a lot of children live in broken homes or come from incredibly poor and difficult backgrounds.

( My students - a really good lesson, and two really worrying absences )

( Horror stories form members of the seminar I attended about children from difficult backgrounds in Hamburg - things I ought to have been able to anticipate )

I feel so silly. I knew these things were going on, but hearing people talk about them who had witnessed them made them more real, and more horrible.

Somehow, I am at the same time both sad and glad that I did not take part in such a more "difficult" trip instead of the six comparatively easy weeks at the kindergarten. I would have wanted to do something to make them - all of them - feel better - but I would have never been able to, and that, and the terrible burden of knowing that there are children who are raised in such horrible conditions, would have just about killed me.  This seminar really makes me want to find a way to reach out to children living in such difficult conditions and help them, one at a time, so that I can help without breaking.