17 January 2009

one of those days

On the weekends, when I don't have to run off to work half-awake, when I'm procrastinating on fitting in all the errands that must, must be done today, when I look out the window and the sky is so blue that it hurts me in my stomach, sometimes it all catches up with me. I made some calls to former colleagues in Rwanda this morning, and as I talked to them I looked out my window here at the blue sky that could almost be mistaken for Rwanda's chronically blue sky were it not for the fact that I'm cold even inside.

Do not start living in multiple places, people. You will leave parts of yourself in every one of them, and you will miss them all.

I talked to my two former colleagues - almost my only two colleagues from those days, although they worked in Kigali and I worked in Kibuye - and it all came back to me: waking up at the Beausejour, eating toast and passion fruit with thick, milky tea in the sunny dining room, driving over to the office on the cobblestone streets, the noise on the street outside as we went over the accounts or wrote reports or met with partner organizations.

I talked to D.'s daughter, now 13, and I have nothing to say to her but to ask her the questions that adults ask teenagers they don't know, about school and her family, and when I ask if the school she was going to when I knew her has a secondary school, the way the rest of the world says it, she says, "Yes, I'm in high school," and I remember that it is run on the US system. High school. Of course.

I am getting old.

It's funny, because I'm happy here in Gone West. In many ways, I'm happier here than I have been since my family left Liberia in 1990. I don't know how much of it is this city, where I have a place and where I am freer to be whomever I want to be and where I have a job that I love. Some of it, maybe a great deal, is just getting older and more content, more me. I like myself and my life at almost-30 far more than I did at almost-25. I know myself much better.

But I miss the people, and the job, and the place I had in Rwanda. The sound of C.'s voice, grown-up but still the same lilt of Kenyan-Rwandese-American English, the way I switched to giving the numbers in French to the other D. and almost gave them in Kinyarwanda just to be sure, the way the first D. says, "God bless," at the end of a conversation: I miss the life I had there.

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