phone call

I woke up this morning to a phone call from a long number that ran off the screen. Africa, I thought, and it was. Satellite phone, I thought, and it was. It was an old friend calling from N'Djamena, Chad.

I had almost forgotten that I have friends in most African crisis zones. It is really a very small world, this relief work business, and you inevitably run into the same people on opposite sides of the continent. I was sitting in a Thai restaurant in Monrovia, once, when a girl at a table across the patio looked familiar. We eyed one another from afar for a while, and finally she came over and we recalled that she had done an internship in my little town in Rwanda three years before. She was working in Sierra Leone.

I hung up the phone this morning and started looking for international jobs, and caught myself staring at an advertisement for one in the very place I promised myself I would not go, not without serious changes in myself: Southern Sudan.

The friend who I talked to this morning is looking at going to Darfur next, and I pointed out mutual friends of ours who have already been there, and I realized that there really is nowhere new. Anywhere I go, I might run into someone I already know.