“Hello, Jill.  Hope you are doing well and all your family members.  I am too fine.  Hope you are taking care during this surge of COVID 19 pandemic.  It is the same even.  The world has become a village.  It had been a village digital but this disease has too made it a village.  God knows of tomorrow.”

This is the message, exactly as it came to me this afternoon. It is from a wonderful Kenyan young man; I helped him spend a year on a dairy farm in Kansas some 15 years ago.

I am touched that he is remembering me today specifically.  I have had many messages over the past few months, from friends around the world—just as I, too, have reached out to many with concern.  Today was friends in Spain, Kenya—and Illinois and Minnesota.  We all share so much right now, even if our worlds usually are very different. 

It is a small but poignant silver lining of this international disaster.  And my Kenyan friend summed it up so well.

“The world has become a village.”