thought processes

My friend J. called me this afternoon and asked, "Could it BE any more gray out today?"

"Well," I answered, "it could be a darker gray."

"You need to stop using the happy light," he told me. "It is making you annoyingly happy."

Then he hung up on me. Or I hung up on him because I thought he'd hung up on me. Or something. That part isn't clear.

But you wouldn't know that I'm annoyingly happy by the fact that I spend my time on here whining about the darkness, the eternal darkness of the Pacific Northwest in winter.

An acquaintance sent out an email alerting people to the fact that he has accepted a job in Hawaii and is moving there. Jerk. Living my fantasy.

A question that one might think to ask, given the title of this blog, is why my weather fantasy involves Hawaii or, say, Southern California, not some country in Africa. There are a lot of reasons why, but they boil down to these:

1. I can't practice law in Africa. Not in most places anyway. And really, I wouldn't want to practice law in Africa. I can imagine few things worse than some white girl coming in from outside and playing lawyer in Africa. I am not arrogant enough to think that Africa needs me. I could do something law-related, but I could not practice law. And I do want to practice law, so I have to be in my own country for a while.
   
2. The lonely, the lonely. In the direction that I was headed in international work, one spends at least a few years working in the middle of nowhere. Obviously there are people even in the middle of nowhere, but often there are language barriers, and frequently there is no one with whom one shares a culture. I have lived overseas for too long to feel the need to pretend that I never need to be around people with whom I share a culture. I need it. Everyone does.
   
3. Stability. International work almost universally involves frequent moves, at least until one has the seniority to avoid it. And even if you are not moving, people around you are. This can be avoided by exclusively choosing to be friends with people from the country where you are living, but see No. 2, above. When I moved to Gone West, I wanted to have friends who I could count on to be in my life for more than a few weeks or months. I wanted to live in the same place for long enough that it felt worth my time to put pictures on the wall, and buy bookshelves.

At some point, you have to make a choice about what you want most, and the truth is that while I do want to live in Africa, it is not the only thing I want. I was reading Africa blogs this morning, and feeling all nostalgic, and then I came across an article in the New Yorker about Chad, and it included these paragraphs:

One night, she took me to a tiny restaurant run by two Chadian women. She drove through the dark, chaotic streets of N’Djamena in her agency’s jeep, past sheds and mud-brick buildings where groups gathered around small cooking fires, past an endless procession of people along the road, all coming into view and going out again as the headlights swept by. The restaurant was in a dim, stony courtyard lit by kerosene lanterns, and consisted of a few plastic tables and chairs. She knew the women who ran the place and greeted them warmly. She ignored the cold stares from a table of men drinking beer in the shadows.

Over a meal of fried plantains and bony fish from the Chari River, she told me that, among the variety of aid workers, two broad categories stood out: the runners and the seekers. The runners were fleeing their past lives; the seekers were looking for adventure or enlightenment. She was a runner, she said, but offered no details.

She went on to say that she had reached a point in her life where she must make a choice. She was thirty-three, young enough to return to her country and try to establish a life with marriage, children, and a home. Or she could continue on as she was, with reassignments every few years and little chance for marriage and children. “Look around,” she said, “and you’ll see that this business is full of women thirty-five to forty-five who are strong, competent, good at what they do, and single.” She had never had a long-term relationship. She must make a choice, she said. It seemed to me that she already had.

Jonathan Harr, "Lives of the Saints", The New Yorker, January 5, 2009

Fifteen months ago, in Southern Sudan, I looked around and saw the same thing. It is mostly women (rather than men) from the West who go to work in Africa,* and they are some of the most amazing women I know. They are beautiful and independent and, well, lonely. They make friends, and then those friends leave, or they do. I didn't want that for myself. I wanted to have good friends, who knew me well, and I wanted to date, and I wanted to be a part of a community in which I could truly participate, not just forever be that person from outside.

I read that description, though, of N'Djamena, and I miss it all, even though I've never been to that particular capital city. I miss crowded streets and tiny outdoor restaurants. I miss those ubiquitous plastic chairs. I miss firelight and lanterns. I miss the whole grilled fish. I miss the camaraderie that I had with friends from so many countries. I miss it.

But most of us have to make a choice, someday. (A few lucky people - scowl - get it all.) The girl in those paragraphs made hers.

And I made a different one.

* It would be fair to criticize the fact that I am primarily talking about Western women here, when there is an entire continent of women and men already in Africa, but the fact is that I am a Western woman, and that is what my experience in Africa forever will be. I cannot become someone else.