22 January 2010

i am here

I am here.

When I moved to Gone West two years ago, I had a networking meeting at which the networkee asked me how long I planned to live here. I (mentally) took a deep breath. I had been on the move since college, since I figured out that I could go back to the tropics in general and Africa more specifically and Liberia even more specifically. I was either going or wishing to go.

"Five years, at least," I said. "I have a five year plan here. After that, we'll see how it's going."

I had never committed to five years anywhere. When I moved to Rwanda in 2002, I was overwhelmed by the year for which I had signed up, and then by the second year when I signed that contract. When I left Rwanda in 2004, the thought of three years in law school, even with summers in Africa, terrified me. Saying that I planned to live in Gone West for five years - which was, frankly, a number that I pulled out of the recesses of my brain without really thinking about it - was positively immobilizing.

This is, after all, a city to which I moved on a whim. One day in law school, when yet another person asked me what I was going to do when I graduated, I didn't say, "I'm going to get a job in international law," as I had always done before. Instead, I said, "I'm either going to get a job in international law or I'm going to move to Gone West, Northwest." I didn't have a reason for saying it. I had never been to Gone West. I liked the sound of it, or I'd read an article about it recently in the New York Times, or it was completely different than anything I had done before.

I had never been here before Boxing Day, 2007, when I got on a 6 a.m. flight and flew across the country. It was raining and cold, and as we drove through town, I looked out at the low clouds and the gloom, and I wondered if this had been an even bigger mistake than law school or those three months in Southern Sudan.

When I moved here, I'm not sure that I knew that I had a choice. It felt like the only thing I could do. I could no longer live with comings and goings that were required in my previous life and so, almost against my will, I moved to Gone West. It seemed like the only place where I could have stability of home and friends.

I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to be here. I am happy here. More than five years, I can imagine a lifetime here. Every once in a while, someone sends me an email that says, "I keep expecting to hear that you have moved somewhere exciting," and I am relieved to remember that I am here, and I don't have to go anywhere.

I am here.

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