what is missing

Covid pandemic shelter in place week 135039385, or whatever this is. I think we are in week 6 here in this house. 

Things I miss, in no particular order except that the biggest one is at the end:

1. Sunny Saturday afternoons on restaurant patios. One afternoon in February, we met a friend for pizza. We sat outside in the sunshine next to the sidewalk. That was nice. For that matter, I miss eating in restaurants in general. Even just for lunch during the work week. 
2. Stopping for coffee or a snack on a walk. Now I have to have everything with me that I might need: drinks, snacks, pup treats, diapers. No more almond croissants and hazelnut lattes on the way past the coffee shop. (The first (?) week we were doing this, when the coffee shop was still open, we stopped outside. J. went in and got a $100 gift card. "Thanks, man!" the barista said. "Do you want a free coffee or something?" But J. didn't want to touch anything. He just took the gift card, put it away, and sanitized his hands. It was a gesture, a hope. Someday, we hope, we'll be back. They will be back.)
3. Not worrying about what is on the things others have touched. I never ever before worried about the outside of a pizza box, or the plastic bag someone gave me to clean up the dog's poop when mine ran out, or the ball that our friends' 2 year old kicked into the street. This makes it much harder to give and receive those little kindnesses. 
4. Adult humans other than J. I feel very, very lucky to like my quarantine people so much, and I'm calling friends far more often, but I miss being less than 10 feet away from other adult humans.
5. Going to work. There's a reason I don't work from home full time. I like working in an office with other people.
6. Leaving the baby with someone else sometimes. Sometimes you need a break. Sometimes you need to talk to adults. Sometimes you need to get some solid work done without an exploring baby around. I miss being able to do those things. 
7. Not worrying about how close people are. I want to be able to walk right past someone working in their front yard and tell them how nice it looks, not swerve away from them into the  street like they have cooties.
8. Feeling reasonably, healthily secure when I think about the future. Just everything: jobs, houses, people, trips. 
9. Going places. The coast. The mountains. The Mitten. The dry state south of here where J.'s parents live. We have tickets to the Netherlands for the summer. What are the chances we'll make it there this summer? Low, I think. 
10. Not worrying so very much about the people I love. 

age

A guy at a coffee shop the other day said, "You have shiny jeans."

"I do," I said.

"I like them," he said.

Cue discussion of whether I'm too old to wear them, which is a joke. I laugh about but refuse to care about such rules. He said, very seriously, that he doesn't think anyone is too old to wear sparkles, as long as they want to wear them. (Then he said that I don't look my age, which was just politeness I'm sure, but is actually worrying me a bit as I look for jobs. I don't want to look like I'm too young to handle some fairly substantial responsibility.)

It was the second conversation of the day about age. In both of them, the conclusion was that things get better every year. Certainly I feel like I am a little wiser every year, however dearly that wisdom was purchased.

?

It turns out that I have a very hard time producing writing for public consumption during times of great uncertainty.

not packing

I should be packing frantically - and I will; oh, that miserable day will come - but there is so much to do in the meantime. Life does not stop so that one can conveniently move. It especially does not stop so that one can conveniently move when you have only three weeks between resigning from one job and starting another, and you have a house and a job and a town to wrap up before you can go.

I won't be finished when I leave, probably. I won't have a new place to live, probably. I will be crashing at the K.'s and throwing my stuff in their garage, probably.

I don't know that for sure, of course. I just have so few days between now and the beginning of the new job in which to find a place and so few days between now and the beginning of the new job in which to move that it seems impossible to get it all done in time to move into a place rather than just get myself and my stuff to Gone West and I can't think of anything after that.

And meanwhile, there are snowshoeing trips to take. (I went on Saturday and ended up in pain and bedraggled thanks to over-enthusiasm on the part of the other participant. Namely: we attempted too much distance and by the end all I could think of was a blissful parking lot where I could take the snowshoes off and put my feet right next to one another instead of artificially forced apart do you have any idea how much pain this will eventually cause your hips? I really cannot do the one I am invited on this weekend. There is no tiiime.)

And meanwhile, there are dinners with friends who will soon be 100 miles away.

And meanwhile, there are the same questions to answer over and over, to new people each time, about what I'm doing and why I'm going.

I can't even think ahead enough to imagine being back in Gone West. Every once in a while, I think of the bustling downtown in the summer, or the view of the mountain as the train goes over the bridge, and I feel a little shiver of happy, but I can't jump ahead of myself lest all the many things that need doing here not get done before I go.

This seems to be the day of the run-on sentence. I think that means I need to go to sleep.

complicated

I kept keep hoping that the right answers will just fall into place: that somehow I will not have to make decisions but will just have the one right choice in front of me. It's very hard, after all, to give up any two of the sets of good things, even in exchange for another set of good things.

Right now I have two real choices, of the three possibilities I am contemplating, and I have to pick one.

I'm hoping that sleeping on it will give me some clarity, because at this moment I am divided right down the middle.

I have lists galore, in my head, in my notebook, in my email. I don't do pros and cons so much as just listing the things I like about each choice. 

When I was in Denver on my way to the Mitten two weeks ago, I had to go through a long hall and down some stairs to get to the hallway of regional jets ferrying passengers to various parts of the country. The gate just across from the flight to Greater River City was labeled "Universe City," and I felt a little flip of recognition. It caught me by surprise, because I used to feel that little jolt when I saw Gone West on a flight monitor. I never expected to feel it for Universe City.

And so it's all more complicated than it used to be.

tenterhooks

Tenterhooks.

That's a word, right? I know that it is, but it looks all wrong.

I am on tenterhooks right now. My life is on tenterhooks right now. There have been only a few times in my life when everything could change so suddenly but I wasn't sure how: at the end of college, when I got the call about Rwanda, when I left Rwanda, at the end of law school, when I packed up and moved to Gone West.

This is the world wide internet, and of course there are so many things that can't be said here.

"Which option would make you happy?" my dad asked, or something similar.

The truth is that none of the options offers unalloyed joy. This is what happens when you live your life in so many places: every place keeps a piece of your heart. There are always people to miss. 

I am relieved that the options are not completely under my control.

Something will happen. Something will be, and I will be glad for what it brings, and sad for everything it leaves behind.

I feel sick, sick, sick. I know this sick feeling, too. It feels far too familiar. This sick feeling is the reason I moved to Gone West. It is the reason I promised myself that I would never change cities again if I had to do it alone.

Two years and nine months after I moved here, three years after I made myself that promise, in August of 2007, in those miserable days before I left for Sudan, I am moving alone, again.

And I'm actually pretty pissed about it.

home alone

So, my parents are gone. I am sad to part with them and would like to keep them here waiting on me hand and foot (love coming home to clean dishes. love), but alas, they had to (so they claim) leave. Now I am back to whipping up five little containers of rice and beans to take to work with me for lunch instead of just taking the lunch as my mom handed it to me on the way out the door. Spoiled, much? (There was also the fact that they had a car and paid for everything. Sweet.)

Anyway, I'm back to my routine after an exhilarating five days of walks, waterfalls, and beaches. It's nice to sleep in a real bed again.

For various reasons, I may have to face that which I have been putting off for months: the decision about what to do next. My plan has been, for quite some time now, to ignore, ignore, ignore the need to make that decision. And it isn't that I can't keep doing what I'm doing, it's just that I may have to actively choose to keep doing it sometime soon (i.e., turn down something else), and that is more scary than just continuing to do it through sheer laziness.

I got a book out of the library, a book about humanitarian law (the law of armed conflicts, for you non-law people), and it reminded me of how much of my life I spent studying this stuff. Every paper I have written since 2001 (every paper whose topic I had the freedom to choose) has been about humanitarian law. It's been so much a part of my life for so long, and now it's just a book I take out of the library.

I have a dilemma: none of the jobs I really want to do exist here in Gone West. They are all somewhere else, generally across an ocean or two. And yet, I love living here. Except in the winter. (Which is most of the year.) And I also hate moving. And yet, I itch to go.

I guess that's really no different from the dilemma I've been facing since 2007.

...

Private note to the girl walking down the sidewalk in front of me today: if I can see the top band of your tights, your skirt is very likely too short. Either that or ditch the tights.

balancing on the verge

There is a man downtown who always carries a stuffed snowman. The snowman is almost two feet tall, and he has it wrapped in clothes, with a striped beanie on its head. I have seen this man with the snowman many, many times, and still, every time I see him, I think he is carrying a baby, and still, every time I see him, it startles me. "Is that... Oh. Right. The snowman."

...

At lunch today, A. and I sat outside, talking, as we do, about how we feel like we are on the edge of something. Something is about to change, but we don't know what.

"A woman from my church was telling me that she feels the same way," A. said, "And I told her that my friends and I have all been talking about that feeling."

"Uh oh," I said, "I hope she hasn't been feeling that way for 40 years or something."

"Yeah, that's the problem," she said.

So we sat there, munching our favorite meal of the week, a cheap, road-side food tradition that we've been trading off paying for (which I can very nearly afford now that my law school loan situation has been resolved - avoid law school, folks!), and thinking about a country that we both miss.

I've been feeling this way for a while, like anything could happen, like I could wake up tomorrow and find that I'm living a different life. It scares me and exhilarates me and yet sometimes I wonder if this is how people get stuck: they think that life could change at any moment, without them doing anything, and so they don't change anything themselves. They just wait for it.

I'm not ready for change, not quite yet, but I also know how these things go. I can't wake up in late October as the days are getting miserably short and suddenly decide to move someplace warmer. And so I'm doing the work now, hoping that something comes through at just the right time to spare me from another long, hermit-like winter further north than humans were ever intended to live.

rainy afternoon

We looked out the window in the afternoon and it was pouring rain. It seldom rains like that Gone West, where "rain" tends to be more like "mist." Rain was pounding down and leaping up from the sidewalk. It was almost tropical.

I miss rain like that. I miss violent weather. It doesn't rain hard here, and it doesn't get hot, and it doesn't thunder and lightning, and it's all so mild. I like my weather to be a little more threatening. I like feeling a little scared of the wind and the rain and the thunder and the waves.

S. pointed out a job opening in Sudan for an organization I know and love, and then we went to church. I spent much of the Easter service doodling about it, drawing sketch maps of Juba and writing things like, "$$$," because Juba is.

The pastor said, "Everyone needs community," and I wrote that in my scribbling, too. Because we do.

And that, my friends, may or may not be the very problem.

standards

We were talking about international job options, and I began to think of my criteria for places I'd be willing to work.

1. No places where I am actively shot at/bombed on a regular basis.
2. No places where my home base does not have cell/mobile phone coverage, meaning no place that requires a Thuraya, except out on trips to remote areas. Any phone that requires one to stand out in the elements so the phone can see the satellite is completely ridiculous. I refuse to live in a place that remote. (I can't even say "another place that remote" because Tiny Little Town in Southern Sudan now has mobile coverage. But it did not when I was there.)
   

...

Yeah, that's pretty much the whole list. Desperate (economic) times call for desperate measures.

About that job in Afghanistan...

sunday afternoon

The very best way to spend a Sunday afternoon is napping in the yellow glow of my parents' living room, on the world's most comfortable couch, covered with a down throw, and then groggily waking up to take a bike ride.

The second best way to spend a Sunday afternoon is napping in the bright sunlight of the K.'s family room, on the floor, covered with an afghan, and then groggily waking up to chat about world politics.

The third best way to spend a Sunday afternoon is napping in the speckled shade in M. and T.'s yard in Kibuye, in a hammock, under the lake breezes, and then groggily waking up to swim in the lake.

I spent my afternoon the second way, today, dozing off during the basketball game.

We stopped at a goodbye party for a friend of S.' who is going to Iraq for a year. It was strange, because most of my goodbye parties involve people who want to go to the place they are going, but this guy doesn't want to go, and it reminded me of the mixed feelings that I have about moving again. I want to go. I want to see everything in the world. I want to live everywhere. But I also love the comfort of having a routine and familiar people around me. There are innumerable things I miss about each place I have lived.

S. gave me some potting soil and we picked up free to-be-recycled pots at the nursery on the way home, and I re-potted my rosemary and jasmine plants on my kitchen floor. When I came back from the gym, my apartment smelled like earth.

perfect

Today was a beautiful, perfect sunny day, the kind that starts with clouds of warm breath in the cold morning air, with jet trails across the eastern sky, the kind that warms up enough to walk outside at lunch with coat unbuttoned and friend complaining that she'll sweat if I make her walk up the minor slope from the library, the kind that welcomes sitting in the park in the sunlight, soaking it in and reading a new library book, the kind that makes me look around and think, "I'll miss this place when I leave," and then it's all confusing, because I have no plans to leave, but somehow the perfect day makes me think that I will, someday, maybe even soon.

i interrupt my early night of sleep for this broadcast

I'm not quite sure who it was that authorized letting me loose on the world, but I think my release upon the earth was negligent and should be revoked. Also, that person should lose their loosing license. This morning I mailed two checks to pay two bills. At some point during the day, I realized that I forgot to seal the envelopes. Nice work, that. Anyone want to steal my identity? Anyone? Anyone? Here, HAVE IT.

I'm working a normal person schedule right now, and I'm blown away by how exhausted I am all the time. I have no idea how people live this way. And really, seriously, I have no idea how they manage to do anything but work. I can't. I get up at 6 a.m. and ride the bus to work and work all day and come home and fall over with exhaustion, scarcely to move again until 6 a.m. the next day. (Part of this may have something to do with the fact that, as recently I figured out, I need to bring more food with me during the day and just forget completely about that nice idea of a hot meal when I get home. I am just way too tired and hungry to cook when I get home so I eat whatever I can find and then I still have a hypoglycemia headache all evening from the extreme dip in blood sugar that occurred approximately between 4 and 6 p.m. Might as well resign myself to some years of eating all cold food.)

I was talking to another lawyer (ha! I just said another! lawyer! no, the bar results are not out. don't ask me about them. I'll fill you in if/when I want to talk about it). Anyway, I was talking to another lawyer today, who had done some international work prior to settling in Gone West, and he talked about feeling like there was a ceiling in international work that he could not break through unless he had some practical legal experience first. "See!" I wanted to say, "That's what I meant! THAT is what I MEANT." Only of course he had no idea what I meant because he hasn't been listening to me rant for the last few months about how I need U.S. legal experience even if (when) I want to work overseas again. Mostly, I like to tell people that I felt like I needed to work in the US for a while to understand my own legal system before (if ever) I go tell other countries what to do with theirs, that I felt like it would be arrogant, right out of law school (okay, ever), to presume to tell other countries what to do with their legal systems. (Many, if not most international legal positions, even INTERNSHIPS, involve some sort of advising/consulting.) But I have to admit, having some US legal experience will be good for me and my CV, as well.

hometown weather is on tv
i imagine the lives
of the people living there
and i'm curious if they imagine me

they just want to leave
i wish that i could stay

keep on coming
these lines on the road
keep me responsible
be it a light or heavy load

keep me guessing
these blessings in disguise
i'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes

~faith my eyes; caedmon's call

what we lose

In the summer of 2006, when I was in Liberia, some friends and I went down to Buchanan for a weekend. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon and visited one of my father's friends, settled into a little guesthouse, and toured the town. We went to the house I grew up in, and we walked down to the Fanti Town on the ocean.

I woke up early the next morning and went for a walk. I didn't go back to our house. I didn't need to see it again. I just needed to be in the town, alone, without other foreigners to whom the town had no real meaning. I walked down an unfamiliar road and, when it ended, I kept going along single-file paths through yards and next to houses. I greeted people when I saw them, in English or in Bassa, and they all smiled and greeted me in return. I came to a house for the blind, and a young blind man, hearing that the kwi-poo was coming, stood in front of it, beaming, hand stretched out to shake mine.

I met the Liberia Christian High road and turned west. I walked past the house where the grandparent-like missionaries lived. I walked past the house where the two good friends my own age lived with their Liberian father and Jamaican (? - er, something Caribbean) mother. I walked to the river and along it, and then I turned back. I took a few pictures. I took a picture, at his request, of a twelve-year old whose legs didn't work, who pulled himself by his arms up onto a little stool to pose proudly for the photo. I stopped to chat to a man who wanted to talk about the hope he had for the future of the country. I walked alone, but I had scarcely a chance to be alone. I felt like I had come home.

This morning, waiting for the phone call telling me I am approved for my first real, independent, adult apartment in a U.S. city (it came; I am approved), I keep thinking of that walk, that morning in Buchanan. That is what I'm giving up to be here, to live here. I want this. I want to be a member of a bar and practice as a lawyer. But I also want morning walks in Liberia, and the two don't fit together very well. For the first time in a while, probably for the first time since I went back to live in Africa in 2002, I'm having trouble being both of my selves at once.

the streets of my hometown (quote)

I was driving this early this morning, in the dark, in the rain, down the main street of my (U.S.) hometown. Buchanan, Liberia, will always be my first hometown, but this city is where I learned to drive, where I had my first job, where my parents were born and raised, and where I come for the holidays. Surely that qualifies it as one of my hometowns.

So I was driving down the main street downtown, in the dark, in the rain, and I was suddenly aware of how very many times I’ve driven that stretch of road, beginning when I turned sixteen, when I worked at a bakery downtown and I had to drive there early on fall mornings, in the dark, in the rain, to open the store on Saturdays. During and after university, I worked with emotionally impaired kids, often starting at 7 a.m. I drove that road from our old house, and again from our new house after my parents moved. It is the beginning of the stretch of road that remained the same, wherever I started.

It runs past the hotels and the restaurants and the shops. It is five or six lanes wide, but only for a little while. A stubby road.

I drove, and I parked, and I went in to hang out with lawyers, again. I’m trying to learn. I watch, and I ask questions of whoever will answer them. As we stood around, waiting for something to happen, I looked out at the rain falling on the snow and realized how very long it will be, in another place, before I can again say something like what I said today: “Was it the winter of ’98-’99 that it snowed 24 inches in 24 hours?”

You can only say things like that when you stay in one place for a while. I never do. Not in the last five years. Not even really in the last ten. I feel at home in many places, but I have few (no?) real homes.

day 29 :: regarding the law

My sister is working every day, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on the list of Things That Must Be Completed in Order to Take the Bar Exam. It’s going well. Unfortunately, all this sitting around and completing tasks has coincided with some of the shortest days of the year. I hate short days.

So I was getting a little crazy, cooped up inside while the weather outside is Low of Negative 15 (120 degree Fahrenheit difference from current temperatures in Sudan), and I decided I had to DO SOMETHING. I thought about working, but that would require references, and I don’t want to waste my professional references, which I shall need come, oh, March, when I look for a real job, so I came up with a new idea.

This afternoon, after completing some of the items on the list of Things That Must Be Completed in Order to Take the Bar Exam, I drove to the county seat and found the courthouse. It was conveniently located on the main road.

I was the only spectator in the little district courtroom with church pews and brown checked tile floors.

In fact, it is apparently so uncommon to have spectators for a normal day of non-jury hearings that the clerk and the judge and three different lawyers started conversations with me. It was my first taste of what the name of my law school can do among lawyers outside of New York.

“Where did you go to law school?” the judge asked.

“[School That Sucked My Will To Live]” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “I applied and didn’t get in there.”

“Oh,” said one of the lawyers, “that’s a really good school.”

Until now, I’ve always interacted with people in New York, to whom the school is not surprising because it is, you know, in New York, or non-lawyers outside of New York, who stare cluelessly.

I went looking for a particular lawyer’s office (suggested by the court clerks) after I got tired of the divorce case whose rebuttal I was watching, and ended up driving on a desolate, hairpin turn mountain road. It went on so long without any sign of a turnaround or a bit of civilization that I got a bit worried.

Then I finally made it back to town, overshot the office again in the other direction, stopped at a gas station and finally found it. Now I have plans for next week to tag along with an actual lawyer and learn some actual law-like things. Or something.

day 9 :: still no internet time (i type this nonsense offline, ya'll)

This morning I woke up with pink eye. At first I thought I just rubbed something into my eye, but it got worse instead of better and then I got my mirror and looked in it and there was nothing there and my eye was completely pink and I remembered that pink eye starts with a feeling like something is in your eye. It’s been going around here, lately. I’ve been so rude as to not shake hands with people after a few too many experiences in which I shook someone’s hand and said, “How are you?” and they answered, “Well, I have this eye problem.” It was too early to go to the hospital, so I just lay there and thought about how much it was going to suck to have to wear my glasses, which make me slightly dizzy, for days at a time. Finally I squinched my eye closed, because it hurt less that way, and tried to go back to sleep.

Obviously the eye was fine the next time I woke up.

…

Remember how I’ve recently gotten all brave and gone to the latrine in the middle of the night? Yeah, that’s over. Last night I went to a party at the compound of the European NGO that runs the hospital and was informed that all the women there have little buckets that they keep in their rooms because “almost all the snake bite victims we treat are women who had to go out in the night to wee.”

Little bucket it is.

And no, don’t ask about the logistics of that. I will say that it’s very nice not to have to actually get out of bed, find clothes, put them on, go to the latrine, come back, take the clothes off, and get back into bed. By the time I’ve done all of that, it’s usually impossible to get back to sleep. So the little bucket is quite nice.

I also met someone at the party who, after hearing what my next plans are, five minutes after meeting me, just looked at me and laughed and said, “You’re not going to make it in [Reasonably Big City in the Western Half of the US]. It’s going to make you crazy with boredom. You’ll be back in Africa within a year.”

Hmph.

boring

I feel sort of boring lately. There really isn't much to describe in TLT once you cover the tukuls and the airfield and the swamp. Also, what with the rain and the mud, I haven't actually gotten to leave the territory since Thursday. My days (even Saturday and Sunday) look pretty much like this: get up, shower, try to find something to eat for breakfast with varying success, head to office, work on computer for a while, eat lunch, work on computer for a while with maybe some breaks to have meetings, eat dinner, watch some tv (so far some bad movies - have you seen Date Movie? worst move ever. worst. - some sports, some news) and go to bed, usually by 10 p.m. And then get up to do it all over again.

I could switch to writing about things like issues, but I find that most people who write about issues are, well, boring. Apologies to anyone who does write about issues. I'm sure you are the exception. But generally, it is very hard to write well about issues. Also, I have a problem with being told what to think and therefore with telling people what to think, even though I have strong opinions myself. When I read those books that tell a story and then extrapolate to tell you what the story means, I get helplessly irate. Give me the STORY and let me make up my own mind about what it means. I want to snatch the story out of the writer's hand and say, "Let me see it MYSELF." Christian books and authors seem to be particularly bad about this, which is why I have stopped reading them almost completely.

One of the blogs that I used to read, which has since turned into a daily photoblog, said that the blogs she most enjoyed reading were those that captured moments of the joy in life. I liked that, and I've tried to do some of that this summer, in Michigan and then here. I haven't always managed, especially since I've been here in TLT. I find myself enumerating (okay, whining about) the physical difficulties and dangers of living in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, but the truth is that they are really not that bad - not anything I haven't lived with before. And they should be, as they so often have been in the past, superseded by the joy of sitting in an open air mess hall in the evenings hearing stories about everyone's respective countries (which other than mine and a European country, are Uganda, Kenya, and Sudan). I can't capture that feeling this time, though. Always before, every single time I've been in Africa, I've felt sheer joy at being on the continent. Homecoming.

This time, I feel uneasy. I feel like I'm in the wrong place. I feel like I shouldn't have left Michigan. I was feeling this way even before I left the US. I like to blame the Larium for the fact that mere hours after I took it (also hours after saying goodbye to my grandmothers) I switched from great excitement over this trip to South Sudan to dread, not about arriving in the place I was going to but about leaving the place I was in. It was harder than ever to get on a plane and the joy of being in Africa has only come in snatches.

I've been in too many places in the last three years. I've had three or more addresses a year. I've met and lost too many people. Doing it again - moving somewhere for three months - feels too hard. It is the moving again, not the pit latrine, that makes it hard for me to be here in TLT.

I could, and I would love to, live in Africa again, but I'm starting to feel a need to have some stability, and some friends who last more than a few months, and I'm in the wrong field if I want that in Africa. The law field for a US American in Africa seems to require either living and working in the most remote, conflict-filled areas (refugee camps, etc.) or some experience to offer in a more central location. I don't yet have the latter and I am no longer willing to do the former. I am not willing to move every few months or years. I am not willing to lose many of my friends even more often than I move, when they move. I am not willing to live in team housing with no space but a bedroom that is really mine.

This is essentially a rant to explain why I spent my afternoon today looking at apartments in a relatively big city on the West Coast of the US. I know people who thrive on the movement, the new faces, the changes, the new places. I don't. I need a home, a base. I don't even like backpacking vacations because I hate being in a new place every night.

I had a home in Rwanda. I had my books on a shelf and my food in the cupboard and my candles in strategic places for when the power went out. I knew my way through the house in the dark so that I didn't even need the candles. I had friends who I could call when I was bored. I had favorite walks in the hills. I felt safe. I haven't had that since, and I need it.

So I'm moving to Relatively Big City in December, and I'm taking the bar exam in February. And I'm going to try to find a job. I'm going to find a little apartment and own my own furniture and dishes. I'm going to learn to be a real lawyer.

I know that I will miss Africa. It is half my life, nearly. I also know, though, that I will be back. I can't stay away long. But when I come back, I know now that I need to make sure that I'm really coming back, to live, not just flitting around short-termly (other than vacations, obviously, which I will totally do - I have people to visit, after all).

Outside, six or seven men are trying to push-start the car in the perfectly flat yard. It's really not going that well. They've been trying for fifteen minutes. There isn't even a slope. Oh! They got it. The battery dies every day, and they charge it with a solar panel sometimes, but I think the solar panel was someone else's and we gave it back. Or something.