options

I had one of those moments today when you look at something, just briefly, and what your head registers is not at all what is really there when you look back. What I saw was a pickup with armed soldiers in the back. What was really there was a perfectly normal black SUV with a roof rack.

...

In the morning, riding the bus to work, I saw other people walking toward work, on the sidewalk, and I knew them, and it was a nice feeling to know that I live here, and I work here, and I know a lot of people, by name at least, to say hello.

...

I got a hard copy of the New Yorker that contains the article that inspired this post, and I was reading it while doing the elliptical this evening, and it all hit me again, the losses that we incur when we have to choose between the lives we love. They are nothing, these losses, compared to the losses without choice that come from fleeing your country after your home has been burned and your family members killed, but they are losses nonetheless.

I can be here, eating my delicious dinner of toast with cheese and tea while burning my spice-scented candle, but then I cannot be sitting in a make-shift shelter under a tarp eating warm, fresh flatbread with a cup of hot, sweet tea in a little clear glass.

I can watch the buildings on the far hill glow like fire in the setting sun as the bus crosses the bridge on my way home from work, but then I cannot be pacing under the overhang of the roof, trying to stay out of the rain and get reception for the satellite phone.

Things come back: the brilliant green of the grasses in the swamp in Southern Sudan, the view of Monrovia at night from just behind the Ducor, the Lebanese restaurant in Ethiopia with the huge circle of thin bread that we used to mop up far too much hummus and fuul late in the night.

You can't be everywhere; you have to choose, and you can't be everything, either.

A part of me wants to be an aidworker, that part of me that almost gave up law school for Chad in 2004, that part of me that almost gave up moving here for moving to a refugee camp on the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia 16 months ago.

I could go back to that - I have the education and the experience. But you give up many things, like stable friendships and, in many places, a diet whose vitamins come from real food rather than pills.

A part of me wants to work in development, to be J & K, in Honduras, or K & P, as they were in Uganda, a family with kids growing up overseas, like I did.

Still, you give up many things. You can't go to the same parts of the country as a lone aidworker would (the interesting places), and you can't go to that raging party in Juba with the open bar. You give up Christmas at home with your extended family, and a place to belong in your home country.

A part of me wants to be right here, but I'm always aware that here, too, you give things up. It is not "sacrifice" to live there, and it is not all wonderful to live here. To be here, you give up the feeling of possibility, and many places that feel like home. You give up the chance to sit outdoors at restaurants all year long, and sometimes, it seems, truer friendships in exchange for pleasantries.

We all make choices, and we all have losses. Sometimes, I almost wish I could be oblivious to my options, because the choice would seem much easier.

minutiae

Well, hello, long-abandoned space. I've been EXTREMELY BUSY, you see.

Okay, that's a lie. I haven't been busy. I don't know what I've been doing for the last few days. Certainly nothing of value, although my itsy bitsy shoebox apartment does, upon observation, appear to be considerably cleaner than it was over the weekend. Go me.

I even managed to take down my Christmas tree. Yes, I left it up almost all the way through January. I did this for several reasons: 1. sheer laziness, 2. pretty lights, 3. I only had it up for six days before Christmas and didn't feel that I had gotten my $6.50 of enjoyment out of it yet. I kind of miss it now that it is in a box under my bed, but I have to keep the tree at least a little bit special. Otherwise next December will be rather tedious and just like the other 11 months of the year.

Also, I finally managed to get my television to Goodwill. I bought that television at Goodwill for $20, and then it somehow got off channel 3 and I've never been able to get it back on channel 3 so I can't use my cable that I pay for and the tv doesn't get any channels without cable, so it has generally been a huge space-suck for months. And let me tell you: a studio apartment approximately the size of a double hotel room does not have space for useless things. But Goodwill is fifteen blocks away, and fifteen blocks is a long walk with a television in your arms. (A tv, even a small one, does not fit into a backpack, by the way.) So finally I took advantage of the fact that a friend dropped by to drop off some magazines to get a ride over there. Now there is more space on my table. Unfortunately, that space already seems occupied by a profusion of papers. Hmph.

Then I bought some red plates to put under my rapidly-multiplying forest of plants. (I am, by the way, turning into my mom. Yay!) Here's the thing about Goodwill: these plates were actually more expensive there than they would have been at Ike@, or even at T@rget. But they were not created just for my consumption, and that makes me happier than brand new plates that cost a little less. It seems a little scary that new places can cost less than old ones. Because something was used to make those new plates, and fuel was used to transport them, and still they are less than the plates that were dropped off at Goodwill's door by someone who had already used them? All wrong.

And there you have it: EXTREMELY BUSY. Obviously. (Also, apparently, extremely boring.)

on race and politics

I realize that I have an, eh-hem, mixed crowd here, politically at least, and so I probably should move on from the amazing fact of the amazing President Barack Obama (tears), but I can't. I just can't. Right up until Tuesday morning when he walked out of the Capitol onto that stage, I thought I was going to wake up and find that it had all been a wonderful dream and that some old white guy had stolen the election away.

Here's the thing about that moment, when he walked out there. The reason that it meant so much to me was that the two Marines standing on each side of the doorway were black. Did anyone else notice that? And I watched them saluting President Obama, and I felt the weight of 233 years of everyone, whatever their race, always saluting some white guy. I know that some (white) people will say that it doesn't matter, as long as the president is a good guy and has the right politics (whatever you think those are; let's agree to disagree).

But the fact is that it DOES matter. It does matter because it has ALWAYS, up until Tuesday, been a white guy. It hasn't been a white guy one time and a Hispanic woman another time and an Asian guy another time and a black woman another time. It has always, always been a white guy, and the rest of us have always had to salute him, literally or figuratively. And for members of the Armed Forces, who are disproportionately not white, and who are commanded by the president, who has always been white, it matters even more.

Given that I am white myself, I know that I can't feel the fullness of what this means for people of color in this country, particularly African-Americans, but I know that it matters, and that it is the reason why I wept rather than lept and screamed at the election and at the inauguration of President Obama. I have spent 13 years of my life living in places where the leaders are black, but most black Americans have not. This is the first time.

Every person who walked through that door, between those two black Marines, was white. Until President Obama. You may disagree with his politics and mine, but you can't tell me that the race of our new President doesn't matter or that you "don't see race." It matters, and it changes everything, for the better.

still the tears

I have, once again, been crying every time I see anything related to the new President. Michelle and Barack dancing? Tears. Photo of Michelle fixing Sasha's shoe in the White House? Tears. The President signing proclamations? Tears. I'm in love with all of them.

Do you think they need another member of the family? Like maybe a 29 year old white girl? I could babysit...

Right, they already have a Grandma for that. Well, if you hear of any Obama family openings (human roles only, please), let me know. I want in.

...

Isn't it beautiful to have a black First Family? I just keep looking at that family, at the two adorable girls and the elegant parents, and thinking how wonderfully they fill the White House.

A black, biracial man is the most powerful person in the world. (Assuming the US is still the most powerful nation in the world, which it might not be. Actually, maybe a Chinese man is the most powerful person in the world.) But regardless, Barack Obama is so perfectly presidential after eight years of watching Bushie bop around desperately.

I cried in Liberia the first time I heard a woman introduced as President, and I suspect that I will be crying for a while every time I hear Barack Obama introduced as President. This has been such a long, long time coming. So many years of slavery and Jim Crow and civil rights - and so much work left to do - but for just a few days, I want to enjoy this victory.

And funny, it really does feel like my victory, and the whole country's victory. I read something, somewhere today that said that the reason we love Barack Obama is not because he will fix our country but because he gives us the confidence that we can fix it. I agree, and I suppose we had better get started. Right after we all repeatedly watch this video of the President and First Lady dancing last night, singing to each other. I plan to cry every time I watch it.

Number 44

I feel some kind of obligation to write about President Obama, but the truth is that Inauguration Day felt anticlimactic to me. We elected this man MONTHS ago. Where have you all been? Why hasn't he been running the country since then? He's been my president since about 8:30 p.m. on November 4, 2008.

It also felt anticlimactic because, well, it was a normal work day. Funny that, how the world does not stop so that I might watch the inauguration. I missed the moment. I caught the "so help me God" at the end, but I missed the very moment. I missed history.

I should be more upset about that. I am sad, a little, but I'm not upset. This is how life goes. On. And as I said, I have thought of him as our one and only president for over two months. (George WHO?)

The transition was accomplished, for me, when President Obama walked out onto the platform. His face, calm and resolute, made it all real to me. He is exactly the President I want and we need.

...

Five things I want to remember:

1. "I, Barack Hussein Obama..." - We have a President whose very name links us to the rest of the world, instead of dividing us.
   
2. The Chief Justice saying, "Congratulations, Mr. President."
   
3. This quote from the front news page on my yahoo email: "A jubilant crowd of more than a million waited for hours in frigid temperatures to witness the moment as a young black man with a foreign-sounding name took command of a nation founded by slaveholders." (I don't know about that "young" part, but I suppose that, comparatively, he is pretty young.) "A nation founded by slaveholders..." I almost believe, today, that we may someday overcome the past that cripples us.
   
4. The tears in the eyes of Bakary Kamara, an immigrant from the Gambia, in this photograph in the New York Times.
   
5. A campaign sign in the window of an apartment on my way home from the store tonight that read, "President Obama." It's finally true.

Congratulations, President Barack Hussein Obama. I am honored to call you my President. Officially, at long last.

at the top

I climbed a mountain today. It was just a little mountain - 2.5 miles up the trail and 2.5 miles down - but it was the tallest mountain in its general vicinity and at the top, looking out over the series of snow-capped mountains that form the proximate slice of the Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire - Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood - I felt victorious and strong, as one should feel at the top of a mountain. I looked out at the world stretching in water to the west and in wooded hills to the east, and I was content.

On the pebbles and shale of the trail, I thought of Rwanda, as I have so often lately. I told S. and E. that they should see it. "We could climb Bisoke, which is a dormant volcano," I said, "and see the gorillas and hike in Nyungwe to see the colobus monkeys and maybe climb Nyiragongo, the active volcano, if there is no fighting in Congo right then."

But what I want to do the most is walk out the peninsula at sunset and smell the fishermen's cooking fire and watch the boys swim the cows back from the little island and see, from afar, the smoke rising from Mt. Nyiragongo.

Despite that, the top of a little mountain was enough today. I looked out over the world, and I was content. It is possible, it turns out, to miss a dozen places and a hundred people, and still be content where you are.

I walked out along a little ridge and sat on a rock high above a chasm. My stomach felt a little funny every time I looked down, but I stayed there anyway, and I looked down anyway. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear a plane that I could not see.

someone else's words

How hard it is to escape from places.
However carefully one goes they hold you -
you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences -
like rags and shreds of your very life.

~ Katherine Mansfield

you have a boat

I meant to go outside today. It was all pretty out there, and I was going to ride my bike to RE1 and look for hiking boots. But then I got caught up in catching up on some emailing and got a headache from looking at the computer screen (this happens to me at work about three days a week) and then I spilled hot tea in my lap and now I am icing my lap.

So my advice to all is this: do not attempt to hold your tea upright between your legs while reaching over to get your computer. It will hurt, unless your tea is lukewarm, in which case there is no point to it anyway. In that case, make some new tea.

I have been slightly obsessed with this plane that landed on the Hudson. I love planes. I love them partly because I am a little afraid of them. Like a rollercoaster, they wouldn't be any fun if they were completely and totally safe. And I seriously need to learn how to fly them myself.

Given that I lived for a year four blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center in New York, given that I have friends from law school all over that city, the words "plane crash in New York" made my stomach drop into my toes. When I opened the NYTimes website, I was flabbergasted. "People survived that crash!" I told my coworker. "They are standing on the wing!" And they even rescued the plane. If I were in New York, living where I lived two years ago, I would have walked over to the pier where the plane was tethered, just a few blocks from my apartment. That is where I walked when I needed to get out and see sky.

It is not just because it is New York. I swore off New York, after all, when I left there, beaten and exhausted from three years of city chaos and law school. (I think now that I might have liked that city better if I'd had a happy light back then...) But watching ferries converge on that boat, I kinda sorta thought I might be willing to go back. It is a city, after all, where bike messengers stop to help you carry your couch up five flights of stairs. And, as it turns out, a city where commuter ferries pull the survivors of plane crashes out of the water.

How, I kept wondering, did people know what to do? Then again, what else can you do? There are people in the water, and you have a boat.

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.

choices made

I have been thinking lately about the one time, when I lived in Sudan, when we went to Bigger Town Three Hours Away. Bigger Town lay over the river and through the woods, er, over the oil fields and through the swamp, and there was really, genuinely nothing there. It is a mark of the extreme deprivation I was experiencing, trapped in a compound of five mud tukuls and a cement office, that I still remember this trip in so much detail. The big deal in Southern Sudan is permanent structures, as I have recently mentioned. One finds oneself, like a builder, asking questions like, "Are there permanent structures in your town?" Let's put it this way: I could probably have counted on two hands the number of permanent structures in Bigger Town. (I could count on one hand the number of permanent structures in Tiny Little Town.)

From the way my colleagues had described Bigger Town, I expected something of a, I don't know, grocery store. My expectations were not high. I had seen what passed for a grocery store in Elsewhere and in Juba. (Think neighborhood convenience store in most of Africa or Latin America - a few bottles of water, a few packets of Omo, a few shelves of biscuits.) But I expected something. DO NOT BE SILLY. There was no grocery store. There were market stalls. Oh, and a shelf of BEAUTIFUL, GLORIOUS Pringles, at the petrol station.

My favorite part, other than the little three-wheeled, motorized cart-things that I called rickshaws (and desperately wanted a ride in, but that wouldn't happen until Ethiopia), were the water carts, and they are the part I keep seeing in my head. The town was full of men and young boys driving donkey carts that were nothing more than a barrel on wheels, carrying water. Half the town was flooded from the rains, but potable water was scarce, and therefore valuable - worth carrying around in barrels. I was fascinated by these things.

(Please-ignore-excessively-pale-arm-and-armpit-in-mirror-thank -you. This photo was hard to get from a moving vehicle.)

Only days before the trip to Bigger Town, I had faced the decision about whether to stay or go. As some of you know, I came very close to leaving Southern Sudan early, for a thousand different reasons. (And that is not a decision I ever expected to face in Africa, because living in Africa has always felt so familiar to me - and yes, I know Africa is not a country, obviously I know, but there are some similarities within continents, even one as vast as Africa.) One night just before the Bigger Town trip, Visiting Colleague and I were talking about various things, including how there really was not much in the way of concrete things for me to do and so on top of culture stress and heat and pit latrines, the days stretched endlessly before me while I tried to think of useful (or at least not harmful) things to do when it was too hot to move. I came very close to breaking down, and Visiting Colleague asked me straight out, "Do you want to leave?" and I said, "I don't know." (Mostly I said "I don't know" because I would have started crying if I'd said anything else. I really wasn't sure, just then.)

One of my Sudanese colleagues used to make me laugh when he quoted another Sudanese friend of his who said, about the state in which we lived (and by state, I mean governance area, not condition), "Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai. I don't know why God created [this state], and I don't know why people live here."

I didn't actually say that I did not want to leave, but somehow the mere fact that I had the choice and I chose to stay changed my attitude completely. By the time we went to Bigger Town, I was finally beginning to enjoy my stay. It feels, when I look back, like the beginning of the good stuff. By the end, I didn't want to leave. And now? Now, I would go back, even to that same Tiny Little Isolated Town, in an instant.

(More on the trip to Bigger Town can be found here. I just went back and read much of October and November 2007 and I laughed out loud, several times. I was funny in Southern Sudan.)

cash money

I don't have my W-2 yet, but I started a 1040 and calculated my (federal) tax refund today based on my last paycheck in December.

I think I'm going to get $500 back.

I am blown away. I had forgotten, with all those years of school, that one could actually pay taxes and then get them back. For the last four years, money has been something that one borrows and is given, and then has to try to live on. Taxes are a joke when one is making $5000 in a year and paying $40,000 in tuition. Would anyone like to tax my -$35,000? Anyone? Anyone? You could give me a few thousand dollars, maybe?

Even before law school, I was working overseas (making virtually nothing) and took the Foreign-Earned Income Exclusion for at least two years. Obviously I have paid the taxes required of me, but I haven't been required to pay all that much in the way of real US tax money since 2002.

But in 2008, I had a real job and I paid real taxes. I feel so proud of my little (prospective) $500 refund. "That's my money!" I want to exclaim, like a proud parent. "I earned it, and I'm getting it back!"

I am awash with ideas of what to do with it. "It's burning a hole in your pocket, huh?" someone asked me today and I said, "No! I want to invest it! Maybe I can open an IRA! I am going to have savings!"

I am exuberantly and excessively excited.

(Now that I said that, just watch: I'll have to pay money to the state. Oh, and I owe my parents money. Durrrrr. Forget it. I have no savings. Nor any excitement.)

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.

way up north

I feel drunk with tiredness. For a normal-length week, this week has felt interminably long. I guess it makes sense that I would be particularly tired this week. I probably never quite caught up from having arrived back home at 12:30 a.m. Monday morning.

There were Multiple Things going on tonight, but I ditched all but the quiet of dinner with a friend because, as I said to a different friend when we were talking about maybe doing something, "I am too tired to be nice to people, and I don't have to be nice to you."

I woke up this morning from that deep dead sleep, the one from which it feels nearly impossible to claw your way to being awake and upright. It does not help that it's still dark when I wake up. I know that I am dwelling on this darkness, but it feels so fundamental. Something is missing, and that something is light. I think I need to move back to the tropics. I do not miss the changing seasons when I live in Africa. In fact, when I lived in Rwanda, I felt personally affronted when the weather back in Michigan was nice. My mom would tell me that it was 80 degrees F and sunny in Michigan and I would think, "Hey! That's my weather. You are supposed to have cold and snow and rain."

I woke up every day to sunshine in Rwanda.* I slept until I woke up, and I usually woke up around the same time every day, without an alarm clock, feeling rested. Ditto in Sudan. There is something about going to bed in the dark and waking up when it gets light that feels very natural.

I think I've just convinced myself to move back to the tropics. This northern weather is for bears and raccoons and mammals that can hibernate. Not for people. There is a reason humanity came to be in the tropics.

The summers here are glorious. Everyone tells me how the summers in Gone West make the winters worthwhile, but I'm not convinced that the trade-off is adequate, not when I know that there are places in the world where you can have that gloriousness all year long. In the summer, as we sit outside at cafes, I find myself thinking, "Yes, this is nice, but in Rwanda you can do this all year long. It's never 100 degrees, and it's never 40 degrees. It's just always a happy, beautiful medium." I have to find a way to get back to that. I was not intended to live way up north here. I need some sunshine, year round. Hawaii? Hm.

* Okay, not quite every day. It was mostly-sunny about 350 days a year in Kibuye. And then about 250 of those days it would rain for an hour or two in the afternoon or evening, and then it would be sunny again. I really miss that.

hibernating

The one good thing - the really basically only good thing - about the short days of winter is the moment, which happened to me today, when you look at the sky at 4:56 p.m. and it isn't quite completely dark. I almost cried with relief. Two weeks ago, it was dark at 4:30.

This evening I was sitting and enjoying my new favorite supper, the delicious combination of nutty toast and sharp cheese and golden tea, and I felt quite pleased with myself for discovering it and then I realized, oh. This is what the Dutch eat all the time. I am not the genius I thought I was. In fact, I am nothing but an imitator. But, genius or imitator, these three things together are delicious. I wonder if I am genetically predestined, from the evolution of generations of Dutch before me, to love the combination.

I still feel the urge to hibernate. I don't want to go anywhere after work but to my warm little room. I wonder how people lived this far north lived before electric lights. I wonder if they just nestled into shelter with fires and warm furs and didn't come out until spring. That's what I want to do. I want to stay warm and dry and all snuggled up.

one more new year

Someone had the brilliant idea to hold a concert in 20-degree weather on top of an ice rink. I was perfectly bundled in sweater tights and wool socks and long underwear and two sweatshirts and a knee-length down coat and armwarmers and a big scarf and a hat, in a manner similar to a toddler unable to bend at the waist after bundling. Every part of me was warm except my feet. Stupid ice rink. My boots are snow boots, allegedly good down to -32 Fahrenheit (which is something low in Celsius too, and that’s all I know). And did I forget to mention the sweater tights? And also the wool socks?

I still got frozen feet.

So then I went to warm myself by the warming station and my feet hadn’t even gotten unfrozen yet when some guy tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Your coat is smoking.” And lo, I had set myself on fire at knee level.

Fortunately, my coat didn’t burn through so much as it melted.

We left. If you can’t get warm without going up in flames, it is wise to leave. So we missed the dropping of the ball, a ball which appeared, from what I saw during the concert, to be suspended on a cable from a crane. Once again, my life is held together with duct tape (although in this case, an entire city’s life seems to be held together with duct tape. Improvisation, baby.).

J. turned off the light in A.’s apartment at 11:34 p.m., and I woke up from my dozing and protested, “It’s only 25 minutes to midnight! Can’t we stay up for 25 minutes?” but apparently they could not, so I brushed my teeth and read Breaking Dawn and wrote until my clock beeped 12:00 a.m., whereupon I said Happy New Year in the direction of J. and A., and J. groggily responded, and I was asleep by 12:03 or so.

I would complain of my own lameness were it not for two factors: first, both J. and A. are in college, and if college students can’t stay up until midnight, an elderly lawyer like me cannot be expected to do so. And second, who made up our current calendar and gave this day meaning, anyway? It seems so arbitrary that I can hardly mind missing the exact moment of year switching. It would have been one of my best New Year’s Eves even if I’d fallen asleep for good at 10:30.

Carry on.

yesterday

Driving in Gone West that last night was like driving on a pitted dirt road. The truck bumped and bounced over the ruts created by too many cars with chained tires on un-snowplowed roads.

I stood waiting on a street corner in the snow between an apartment building and train tracks, orange Ethiopian scarf pulled up over my head and around my shoulders, soaking up big flakes of snow, watching each car and hoping it was the truck. The train had been packed with Christmas Eve revelers, one of whom walked up to me and said, “Do you like tea?” When I nodded the affirmative, he offered me a selection of tea bags from his pocket, Stash brand. I declined as politely as I could. His friend was animatedly telling a man about his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, so Tea Guy went over and offered that guy some tea.

I fell asleep later on the K.’s couch, warm flax seed sock against my feet, while S. placed decorations on the windowsill at her mom’s direction and N. lolled on the floor looking up at the lights. S. woke me to stumble out to the truck and into her roommate’s empty bed. In the morning, I forgot to roll up the sleeping bag she gave me, and I sent her a text from the airport, apologizing.

…

The airport early on Christmas morning was crowded with people tired but pleasant, until our flight attendant “overslept” and we could not board for an hour and a half after scheduled departure. Then there was muttering. The woman making the announcement had a strong accent and a terrible loudspeaker, so few people over in our corner heard a word she said. “What did she say?” they asked me, the unofficial interpreter, over and over. “What did she say?” Finally a mom with two kids running early morning circles around an empty desk said, “Are you Area 2? I’ll just watch you and when you go, we’ll go.”

…

A. and I went walking in the dark and wind. We lay on our backs in the cold road, staring up at the stars. I told her about Orion, how you can see him when you stand in front of our old house in Liberia, how he is visible in the tropics all year long, but here you can only see him in the southern sky in winter. He makes me feel at home.

…

It is the sixth day of Christmas now, and it still feels like Christmas. I am three books into the Twilight saga, and after everyone is asleep, I sit by the Christmas tree and write. I have barely used the internet in almost a week, and it’s freeing to sit and wave my hand aimlessly when A. frantically announces that the wireless isn’t working. “Oh, well,” I say, sounding exactly like my mom. “Oh, well.”

grgnashbattle

I had two snow days this week, which should have left me plenty of time to clean my apartment and pack and catch up on emails and be all ready to leave for Michigan early on Christmas morning, right?

Wrong. I spent much of those two days fighting with a virus on my computer.

grgnashbattlethwackbeatfightscowl
(picture me with an angry face smacking the heads of two little plastic soldier figures together)

I didn't exactly win the battle, but the virus is currently held at bay, enough that I can plug my computer back into the internet without constant poppings up of warning messages telling me that my computer is full to bursting with viritical files, and also deathdyingcatastrophy. It only took one virus scan program, one history-deleter program, two days without internet, two anti-spyware programs, four sets of instructions, uncountable hours of scanning the computer, and a lot of pulling out of my own hair. I am practically bald now.

In other news, I saw Slumdog Millionaire, which was surprisingly good. (Surprisingly because I don't have tv, so I don't see commercials for movies, so I don't know about them, so I don't particularly want to see any movies, so I am surprised when I do see them and actually like them.) Anyway, despite my increasingly old and miserly ways with regards to movies, that's a good one. Except sad, despite some element of melodrama. I didn't expect sad.

It was all snowy here and pretty and there was great occasion for mocking of the people from the Pacific Northwest who had chains on their tires and of snowplows that got themselves stuck in snow drifts, and I did a lot of tromping through snow, and it looked like there might be a white Christmas, and now a few hours before Christmas it has started to rain. The indignity of trying to run last minute Christmas errands in the rain is just too much. I wash my hands of this place and I shall move on to Michigan, where there is real snow. And where no one bothers with chains on their tires.

snowfall

When I woke up this morning, er, afternoon, and saw that it was snowing, I thought to myself, in a rather self-satisfied manner, "I have everything I need in this apartment. I have no reason to go out into that. I shall just admire it from the warm indoors."

Five minutes later, I remembered that I'm out of cinnamon. Durrrr.

Whatever. I substituted pumpkin pie spices for the cinnamon in my morning (okay, fine, afternoon) homemade coconut chai. It wasn't as good, but it sufficed. 

Then I got an email from the library letting me know that I have six books on hold ready to pick up. Durrrrrrrrrrrr. I could really use something new to read.

It's still snowing out there. 

how lovely are thy (plastic) branches

When I was seven or eight, I bought a little fake Christmas tree from one of my teachers who was leaving Liberia. I paid one dollar, although I can't remember if it was one Liberian dollar or one US dollar, and whether that difference mattered at all at the time (the Liberian dollar was pegged 1 to 1 to the US dollar for a long time). I think it had one single strand of lights, with some replacement bulbs, and I became very skilled at inspecting and fixing every single bulb and every single wire in the string when the lights went out, which they did often because they were the old-fashioned kind of lights in which the failure of any one bulb results in a failure of the entire strand.

We set the tree up on a table in my bedroom, and surrounded it with presents, some bigger than the tree. It was magical.

This year, I had a vision of tromping through snow (I think there was a soundtrack of lovely carols in my vision) and cutting a tiny Christmas tree for my little apartment. More carols would play as I lovingly decorated it with family heirloom ornaments perfectly sized for the little tree.

That didn't happen. I don't have a car, first of all, nor do I have a saw, or a tree stand, or, for that matter, money. Or even ornaments. And Christmas has just jumped forward in time, it seems. It came far too quickly.

I put up some white lights in the window, and I figured that plus Handel's Messiah and the gingerbread candle were holiday cheer enough.

Then someone brought a little fake tree into work. I was not immediately won over by this tree, because it was shiny. Green, but shiny. Another childhood experience of mine involved a shiny silver tree that my school in Liberia used. Every year, we had to sort 500 million (or so) little branches and try to put them into the right slots and cover up the places where branches were missing. And did I mention that it was silver? We had a hard enough time re-creating a culturally US American-like Christmas in Liberia (tropical weather? anyone? palm trees instead of pines?) without adding silly things like unnaturally colored fake Christmas trees. I never really accepted the color of that tree.

I was intrigued, however, by the low cost of the shiny green tree, and the proximity of the store that sold it to my work. Convenience beat out aesthetics (despite the fact that W@lgreens, purveyor of normal matte forest green fake trees and pretty much everything else a person could need other than food, is something like six entire blocks from my apartment), and I came home with a shiny little green tree.

It's actually two colors: bright shiny green, and matte lime green. It all looks very odd in the harsh light of day, but in the evening, after I added colored lights (colored lights are for trees, white lights for other decorations, I think), and a set of little round shiny ornaments, it suddenly looks, well, sparkly. Festive. Not unnatural after all. I have my own little tree in my own little apartment.

No carols magically played, though. I had to start the Messiah cd myself.

heat

I am, frankly, disappointed in the weather service. They had me all geared up for ferocious weather and snow days and now the sprinkles of rain are very anti-climactic. We need to step things up here.

The good news is that the return of the drear of winter has started me thinking about Where To Go Next. Yes, it is true that the plan was to stay here indefinitely, but um, has anyone noticed how early it gets dark here in early December? Less than nine hours of daylight is just not realistic for me. Yes, the summers are brilliant, and it's fantastic that it stays light for 15 hours a day in June, but I don't think it's a fair trade. I would like to keep up a more steady dose of sunshine all year long. I am beginning to plot my escape, although the escape that I am planning may take a few years.

Not only that, but I'm all nostalgic now. You know things are bad when you spend your time longing for a place where you thought every evening, "Tomorrow I am going to have them get me a flight out of here." Yep, I'm missing Southern Sudan, palm-sized spiders and spitting cobras and smelly pit latrines and all. I rationalize this by telling myself that I actually enjoyed Tiny Little Town by the end. The last two weeks or so. Before that, I would lie in the darkness in my mosquito net every night, shrinking into the center of the bed to avoid things getting me through the mesh, and think, "Tomorrow, I am asking them to book me a flight out of here. I can't do this anymore." And then in the morning the sun would rise and I would take an outdoor shower and everything seemed great. 

And that evening, I would lie in the darkness in my mosquito net, shrinking into the center of the bed to avoid things getting me through the mesh, and think, "Tomorrow, for sure, I am asking them to book me a flight out of here. I can't do this anymore." 

There were things going on in my head other than worries about bugs and snakes - it was not Tiny Little Town's fault that I was so miserable. I would have been miserable in a great many places right then.

And to offset the fretting that my head was doing, there was strong, constant sunshine, so strong that I put sunscreen on the part of my hair even when I wasn't going anywhere. Just the 50 meter walk from the tukuls to the office was enough to burn my wimpy pale skin. I found myself missing that sun today. When I stand waiting for the bus in the 24-degree Fahrenheit cold with the wind somehow finding its way through my layers of coat and scarf and multiple sweatshirts, I miss the weight of hot sun. 

I would take hot sun over cold wind anytime. I would blame this on a childhood in Liberia, but my dad is the same way. We are creatures of the tropics misplaced in the temperate zones of the earth.

not quite connected

So, it's cold outside. There is some little snow on the ground, which promptly turned to slick ice after much hand-flapping and frantic running in circles by apparently this entire city. Why, yes, I have indeed been doing some mocking of my new city and its frenzied reaction to an inch or two of snow. I was particularly amused by the chains on the tires. I lived in Michigan for 12 winters plus a lot of other winter visits, and I have never in my life seen tire chains. Even last December in the mountains in Colorado, no chains. But then I come to Gone West, with its little smattering of snow, and everyone puts chains on their tires. I laid on the couch and laughed.

The gently falling snow was a perfect backdrop to a morning of baking and frosting Christmas cookies. S. and I took over her parents' house (they are off to warmer climes) and threw tray after tray in the oven. Now I have far too many cookies in my fridge. Someone needs to come take them away from me. Even yesterday, a work day, I managed to eat eight of them. And then I felt just a little bit sick from all the sugar.

...

I was thinking yesterday about tapes. Do you remember tapes? Those things we used to put music on? I remember a few times, when I was little, tearing tapes apart, and I had an urge to do it again: to twirl that shiny ribbon out of the plastic casing until it curls everywhere, and to feel that satisfying snap when you stretch the tape until it breaks. And then to stomp on the plastic case. 

groups

I am the only white person at the table. The other girls are Jamaican and Ugandan and Liberian and Cambodian and African-American, and we are shouting above the music to talk about turning thirty and the pluses and minuses of various types of grad school. When we go down to the dance floor, I am, stereotypically, the worst dancer, but I happily dance anyway, until we slowly all stop dancing and stare at one another and wonder aloud, "Who thought this song was a good idea? You can't dance to it at all!"

Someone comments that she is tired of holding her purse, and I drop mine into the circle of dancers. Everyone follows, and we laugh at the way we dance around our stack of purses. "Does anyone have a camera?" someone asks, but no one does, except for phone cameras without flash. A guy pushing past laughs, "Look at that pile of purses!"

It is awkward, sometimes, to be the only white person in a group here in this country. I am much more accustomed to being the only white person in a group in Africa, but in this white city, it is less familiar. It's a good awkward, though. It is only fair, in a place where my friend often has to be the only non-white one at a party, that I should take my turn. It is not and cannot be the same, but it's fair that I should be uncomfortable sometimes, being the only one, as some people must be the only one much of the time. I'm not even bearing my share of the discomfort, not in my occasional evenings. 

time

Every now and again, people on the internet post lists of six or seven weird things about themselves. I am not in the mood for seven, but I will list one that occurred to me in the middle of the night: I cannot sleep with a lit-up clock next to my bed. Oh, I used to have a digital clock with green digits next to my bed, with all those bright dashes letting me know exactly when 2:35 am became 2:36 am. But one day, maybe during or after college, when I started to sleep less than I should have and worrying about getting more sleep. 

I was tired of waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, "I only have two more hours to sleep and I am so tired." So I got rid of the clock with lights. Since then, I have mostly used sweep-hand clocks and, more recently, my mobile phone. The thought of having a lit-up clock next to my bed warning me that I only have this much more time to sleep, no, THIS much more time to sleep is just... well, I refuse to live that way. So no lit-up clocks for me. 

(P.S. Blogging in the morning! I'm practically an early bird now. Okay, that's a lie. I hate getting up early. I am strictly an evening person.)

trailing

I think I am forgetting what the sky looks like at any time but night. One morning this week, I had to wait a while for the bus and I actually did see some sky, with two planes pulling jet trails across it. I love jet trails. They make me want to go places. In only two homes in my adult life have I looked up at jet trails and not silently called out, "Take me with you!" Those were Rwanda and Liberia - the rest of the time, I have wanted to be on a plane most days. 

Not that flying is any fun anymore, not in this country. It's still pretty fun internationally. It's always going to be fun to sit in Amsterdam with crowds of people heading home to everywhere in the world, checking monitors for flights to Islamabad and Beijing and Johannesburg. 

flowery

My sister is bored with stories about Rwanda and Sudan, and wants to hear about my life right now.

Amused.

I am not sure it's clear just how boring my life is right now. My days go as follows: get up, happy light, work, home, decide if I have time to go to the store/get some exercise, try to get to sleep in time to get 8 hours of sleep before the happy light must be turned on again. Repeat, interminably.

If I talk too much about the present, you will be begging for stories about more interesting places and times. 

The only interesting things happen at work, and I talk not about work. Work is off-limits, because I would like to keep a job. Oh, and occasionally I have a social life. But I am not anonymous enough here, despite having detached my name from this space, to write about such things. 

So, fine. A story about life. Present life.

Okay.

At lunch today, I went to buy flowers for a friend's birthday. Google informed me that there were several places within walking distance, so I stopped first at the one whose website looked the most locally-owned. I have an odd shyness about going into new stores or restaurants, and so I lurked in the entryway, looking at the tulips in buckets outside (white only; boring). When I finally went inside and explained what I wanted - cut flowers for a birthday; this is not hard - the clerk merely told me I could go look at the flowers in the buckets outside rather than offering to, I don't know, MAKE UP A BOUQUET. So I walked out, and kept walking. It wasn't so much a lack of service that drove me away, it was a lack of the friendliness necessary to overcome my slight new-store phobia. 

The second place was in a basement. And there were even fewer flowers visibly available. I walked out before the cashier finished with the prior customer.

The third place was one I see from the bus every day, but a little further away. It was crowded with color and smelled richly of plants. The woman behind the counter beamed at me when I came in, and the man in the back made up a bouquet for exactly the amount I wanted to spend, full of the limited number of colors I wanted. 

(I do not understand the urge to make a multi-colored bouquet in the depths of winter. There is a limited time for such things, and it is May and June. For the rest of the year, I prefer to limit my color palette. In this case, I stopped him at various pinks and a few blues - "No, not three colors plus white, three colors including white." I think he was disappointed, but nice about it - and I declined the Christmas greens. People with December birthdays have to share enough with Christmas. At least the birthday flowers should be clearly representative of something other than the holiday. He gave me palm fronds instead.)

The flowers are beautiful, and that flower shop is my new floral home in Gone West. Not that I buy flowers that often. Say, twice a year. But still. I am a new loyal customer, twice a year. 

random Rwanda photo

B. and C. (Budaha, Rwanda, 2004)

This momma and baby make me smile. It makes me crazy when people portray Africa as all sad and hopeless, so I love B.'s smile in this picture, and the way she looks at C, the way mommas look at their babies all over the world. (The dirty hands and clothes are because I interrupted the day's work in the garden. You would be dirty, too.)

my whole life is held together with duct tape

At church this morning, they piled greenery in the corner of the basement and a woman made bows out of wide stiff ribbon. I gathered a fistful of pine and holly and tied on a bright red bow. I stopped at the store on my way home, and bought too many groceries, and stuffed the greenery under my arm so I could carry all the bags. 

Back home, between the smell of pine and the gingerbread scented candle, Christmas seemed to have arrived. The only thing missing was the music. I have a couple of Christmas albums, but none of them seemed quite right. Since the reading in church, I had been singing, "Oh, thou that tellest good tidings to Zion... Lift it up, Be not afraid!" and suddenly I realized that what I needed to really bring Christmas into my apartment was Handel's Messiah.

There were difficulties. I do not have a functional cd player (the cd/dvd drive in my computer is broken - everything I own is broken, it seems), and buying the 53 songs of the Messiah on iTunes would cost, well, $53. Minus 53 cents. So $52.47. That seemed like a lot, considering that some of those songs are 19 seconds long. 

Determined, however, I called around until I found a store that had the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir version of the Messiah in stock (this is the version my mom has; I asked her), and I went downtown among tourists and sparkling lights and homeless people to buy it for $13.99. I am now listening to it on the tiny, old, portable dvd player (c. 2000) that my friend gave me when my dvd drive broke. It plays cds, too, apparently. The sound isn't very good, though, and my next step in bootleg-ness is to figure out some way to connect it to my iPod speaker.

I am surprised to find that I know nearly all the words to nearly all the songs in the Messiah. I expected to find come parts of it unfamiliar, but I do not. I suppose that it makes sense that I would know most all of it, since we have been listening to it every Christmas season since I was born, first on numerous tapes in Liberia, and then on cds in Michigan. 

I am singing along, "Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice greatly!"

It has been a long time since I could start Christmas this early. For the last six Christmases, I have been in Africa, in law school, or in between places. I had quarterly reports and then exams and then bar applications to worry me. Despite the feeling that I never quite will catch up and that days have fewer and fewer hours in them, I have more time to enjoy this season than I have had in many years, and I am enjoying it. 

I wonder if I have the space to roll out cookie dough.

seasons come

Outside the restaurant, someone decorated the maple trees with white holiday lights. The leaves still cling to the branches, fewer than before but still golden and red and orange. We haven't had a frost, yet. It is intriguing, and oddly beautiful, these beautiful colors lit only in patches with clear white light. 

neither here nor there

The sky is clear blue, but it's not quite enough for me. It's only December, and I'm already craving warmth. I am making do with blankets and turtlenecks (turtlenecks = my new favorite thing), but what I really want is hot sun shining on my face. I have been procrastinating going out into the wind all day long. I have errands to run, but they don't seem to be getting done.

Someone asked me which country I would most like to visit again. Rwanda, I said. Definitely Rwanda. It has been over three years since I last stood among those green hills, and I miss it. If I had money, I would long ago have purchased my house in Kibuye from its absent owner (he was somewhere in India, allegedly...), and I would go there for vacations, to sit on the stone patio and sip milky tea spiced with ginger and tea masala. Maybe I would go there this Christmas. 

Five years ago, I spent Christmas in Rwanda. I had moved to the country two months before, and I knew no one because I had spent most of my time since arrival traveling. I had just gotten back from meetings in Uganda, and I drove from Kigali to Kibuye on Christmas Day. I took greenery from the pine trees around my house and I made a little Advent wreath with the greenery and five candles. I called my family as I opened the presents they had sent with me. I have never been so alone at Christmas, but there was something beautiful about it, too. I didn't feel as sad as I expected to feel. I was quite content, actually, in my little house all alone. 

I was thinking earlier about all the places I've been, and how each of them owns a little piece of me. I wonder if it would be easier, this life, if there was only one place where I belonged, if only one place owned me. I envy people who just belong, and they know it. But I know that I would not give up the places I've been, not one of them, and maybe I own a little piece of them, too.

I made tea with milk and ginger this morning, and looked out my window at the blue sky.

hibernation

In college one time, T.'s mom called her on a Friday night, and said, "Oh! I was expecting to get the machine! I was going to say, 'I knew you wouldn't be in your room, because it's Friday night, and only nerds are home on a Friday night.' But you are home..."

I feel this way most Friday nights: I want to be a nerd. I could go out, there are possibilities, but after a whole week of telling myself that I just have to get to Friday and then I can rest, I want to rest. I sometimes go to bed earlier on Friday than on any other day.

This is particularly easy to do now that my apartment is cozy and it's cold outside. I put white lights up around my window a few days ago, for the holidays, and now they glow. My couch has no arms, but now that I've moved it perpendicular to the wall, I can lean against the wall and stretch out my legs. I wrap myself in my gabi.

As it gets colder outside, I want to hibernate. My happy light keeps me from being sad, so I'm just perfectly contentedly cucooned in my red and orange den. The world can come to me, if it wants something. I will be the one curled up with a book.

i really needed a desk

Two days ago, I went to the office supply store to buy some new pen refills. The particular office supply store I went to has two levels, and as I descended the escalator, I saw, from afar, the most perfect little desk. It sat off in a corner, alone. It had little pigeonholes above the desktop, and a cabinet underneath. It looked like this:

world's cutest desk

I fell in love immediately. I went over to it, and touched it, and admired it, and looked around for a price tag, of which there was none. 

I had no hope of being able to buy it, but I thought I'd ask anyway. As the salesman looked at the desk, searching vainly for a price tag, I said, "It must be free!" (My mom always says this when something has no tag on it.)

"I think it's close to free," said the salesman. 

The computer showed it for $110.99, which is not close enough to free for me, as I told the salesman. So he magically hit a few buttons and suddenly it was on clearance for $24.95, which is affordable even on my pathetic little budget. (I looked up my exact job in Michigan, and it pays almost $5 an hour more than I make here. With a much lower cost of living. Durrrr.)

I bought it. 

Then I had to beg my friend S. to drive downtown with her car to retrieve my lovely new desk, which she did, because she's awesome, and I took it home, only to go to bed. (Not with the desk. It is awfully bulky and heavy, otherwise I assure you I would have snuggled with it all night long. I was that excited. DESK DESK DESK!)

I tackled it last night, sitting amidst wood and screws and "hidden connectors," (can assembly of these things be any more complicated? do they do it on purpose?) and I moved my furniture around to make a place for it. I felt accomplished. I have a little living room now, off in the corner of my studio, and the pigeonholes on my new desk are already filling with three-hole punchers and envelopes. I have storage space.

The one little problem is that spending two entire nights on the desk has left me with no food in the cupboards and utter chaos in my apartment. I am likely to trip on a random left-over piece of styrofoam at any time. Or a recordable cd in a colorful case. Or a magazine. Or a paring knife. I have the desk together, but I haven't quite organized myself around it. 

(And no, I am not sitting at my desk now. Don't be silly. Desks are for storage, and for looking cute. It's couches that are for sitting with a laptop.)

safe

I’m not certain that I expressed myself clearly yesterday, because I got a comment asking, in my opinion, in which African countries it is safe to work. What I was trying to say yesterday is that I feel very safe in Africa. In general, I have felt unsafe far more often in New York and in Gone West than in any country in Africa. I, personally, would work in any country in Africa.

(In fact, if anyone has the perfect job for a new lawyer who doesn’t have a lot of experience in her own country and who does not want to be a know-it-all and who is tired of moving around every few months, send it my way. I’d like to live in Kigali or Kampala or Dar es Salaam, just as an ideal, but any reasonably sized city will do.)

When I first moved to Rwanda, some wisdom was passed on to me: if you look around and people are going about their lives, if children are carrying water home, if women are stopping to greet one another with vegetables on their heads, if boys are driving the cows home, if a man in an ancient suit is carrying his Bible and a cane, then everything is fine. I have lived by that ever since. I look around, and I greet people, and I have found, so far, that someone has always warned me if I am heading into danger.

Everyone in the world takes precautions, depending on whether they are in the city or the country, whether it is day or night, whether they are male or female. The key is not to avoid a country as a whole, but to make sure that you are aware of what is going on around you and that you avoid danger when it arises. Talk to people. Ask questions (but not offensive or sensitive questions). Be a part of your community. If you and your neighbors are friendly, they likely will stop by or call if there is trouble, to let you know what is happening. And you should do the same for them.

I would work in any country in Africa, but I would not go blindly anywhere in the world, not even here in Gone West. I read the newspaper and ask questions of people who live in my new place. I explore slowly. I follow any safety precautions mandated by the organizations I work for (within reason, of course – situations can change). I am as friendly as I can be without causing additional problems.

Every place I have gone in the world, I have found more good than bad. No place is completely safe, but few places are incurably dangerous. People have helped me, and I try to do the same in the US.

…

Random conversation:

Other Person: I am sick of Hawaii. I was stationed there in the Navy and there’s nothing left to see. My wife keeps wanting to go, though.

Me: Maybe you could go somewhere in the Pacific where you have never been. Then you could both be happy. How about Fiji?

OP: I would never go to Fiji. Westerners get kidnapped there all the time.

M: [Eyes narrow.] I would go to Fiji. I would go to any country in the world.

OP: Would you go to Baghdad?

M: [Thinking]

OP: You are actually thinking about it?

M: Yes, of course, I would go to Baghdad. But I can’t afford it. So someone would have to pay my way.

 

[30] finale

The Town Bar, Southern Sudan, 2007

This posting every day thing has been really hard this year. It was much easier last year, in Southern Sudan, when all I had to do was open my eyes and write about what I saw, because everything I saw was new. It wasn't always interesting, being in Tiny Little Town; it was just easy to write about. I spent long days doing nothing but hiding from the sun under my porch and working on writing a training guide. It was far too hot to work in the actual office, which had, according to rumor, been designed by someone from the colder regions of Ethiopia. The office, therefore, had one window in each of two rooms. The windows faced in the opposite direction from the direction of the wind. And there was no ceiling under the metal roof. So it was essentially a box of concentrated heat under the 105+ degree sun. 

The only relief from the monotony was a walk on the airstrip at sundown, with a snake or two thrown in on particularly exciting days, or a trip to the hospital with a stool sample, or a ride into town to sit outside the tiny grocery store, drinking whatever cold beverage they happened to have that day. The grocery store was a container. You know, one of those containers they use on ships, to carry goods across the seas? The ones that fit on a flatcar of a train, or on a tractor-trailer base? It was the short length, the half-size. No one builds permanent structures in Southern Sudan. Everything is a mud tukul or a container or a prefabricated metal box that must be air-conditioned in order for human beings to survive inside it. It's the first question anyone asks when they hear about a new hotel or business or project: "Did they build a permanent structure?" The answer is almost universally no outside of Juba, and it's usually no even in Juba. 

The biggest excitement of a week in Southern Sudan, if you could get it, was a drive to Bigger Town (the state capital, three hours away) or to the Nile. Of course, that depended on the road being okay (i.e. not flooded) and no one flagging you down on the way and saying, "Maybe you don't want to go there." If there is one thing I have learned in Liberia and in Southern Sudan, it is that when someone says, "Maybe you don't want to go there," down that road, along that beach, you really, really do not want to go there. No, really. You do not want to go there. There are guns, most likely. 

People in the USA sometimes ask me if I'm scared when I'm in Africa, and the truth is that I have very rarely been afraid. I was far more afraid of bugs and snakes in Southern Sudan than I was of any human beings. (Although we did joke that my headlamp was a perfect target should someone want to get me.) I was scared momentarily in Liberia when it seemed that expatriates were being targeted, but just for a moment. One night I stood on the balcony at work, looking out at the ocean, listening to the night sounds, and I tried to be afraid, but I just couldn't manage it. It was so beautiful. And I was never afraid in Rwanda. In fact, I used to forget to lock my doors at night. 

[29] fashion

I no longer have a functional television (the infrared sensor broke, so I can't change the channel, so I can't get it on channel 3, so I can't use cable, so I get no channels clearly). If I want to watch television, I have to go down to the little gym room in my building. If there are few other people there, meaning no guys who have taken over all the channels for sports, I can watch a show for a little while. Yesterday I happened upon an episode of Wh@t Not to We@r, which I used to watch sometimes back when I had tv.

Fashion has been bothering me for the last two years. Why must women's clothes be so unflattering? You know it's bad when the skinniest person in the room looks bad in the current fashions. (I know, I'm totally buying into the current Western perception of beauty here. I don't actually think the skinniest person in the room is the best looking - often that person is not - but I am trying to make a point.) Those babydoll shirts - not okay. Those shirts that poof out right on the bust - not okay. Those shirts that look like a bubble with a band around the bottom - not okay. And no, pairing it with skinny jeans or leggings does not make it look okay. It still looks like a bubble on a stick, not a human body.  

Why is it so unacceptable in current fashion to have shirts, in particular, that actually fit and flatter? It is downright annoying. It's so difficult to shop, because there is nothing normal in the stores, plus I have to actually see all these women wearing terrifically unflattering clothes, and I want to pull them aside and tell them to change, but that's rude, of course. I'm ready for some new trends. 

[28] this post is about underwear

My mind is a very unfortunate blank this evening. This is the apparent result of too much play and too little work. A four day weekend is turning my brain to utter mush. 

I have resorted to blindly glancing through photos on my computer, hoping to find something, anything, of interest. 

There wasn't anything, really. I did find this:

Okay, that is perhaps interesting only to me. That is my tukul in Southern Sudan. I lived in that miniature house for three months. I would show you a picture of the inside, but 1. there is a logo that would give away who I worked for, ruining my pleasing fantasy of anonymity, and 2. there is nothing to see. This tukul contained the following things, while I lived in it: bed (with mosquito net), two plastic chairs, one teetering camping table, one fan that kept breaking, and two suitcases, in which most of my stuff stayed. It felt like a major life-enhancing change the day I got around to hanging a clothesline so I could dry my underwear somewhere other than on the arms of the chairs.

Here's a thing about Africa: you wash your own undergarments. Everyone does. Underwear is dirty, so you cannot ask someone else to touch it. It would be terribly rude. In Southern Sudan, we had women washing our clothes by hand, and they washed everything but the undergarments (they were not pleased with the shorts I wore to bed, either, thinking they were underwear despite some ineffective cross-language attempted communication). I washed mine in the shower, and then hung them about my room, a strategy that only took me, oh, two years in various countries to figure out. Always before I had a big underwear-washing party periodically. Except in Rwanda, where somehow I managed complete oblivion to the whole concept. The lady who helped me keep my house and myself in some semblance of cleanliness (more than full-time work and hand-washing clothes are incompatible occupations) was kind enough to wash my underwear as well. I'm not sure if she did it because she figured I was clearly completely inept, or if she was just incredibly nice. (I was completely inept, by the way. I still have not figured out how that weird mop-substitute floor cleaning mechanism they use in Rwanda works. It's like a big rubber squeegee that you use on your windshield. Only for the floor.)

[27] last minute Thanksgiving post

It is 11:42 p.m. and I am barely making this daily post thing. I have just been having far too much fun in a world without internet. I went over to my friend S.'s house last night, she of Dutch-family-that-has-taken-me-in fame, and we baked far into the night, in preparation for oodles of eating. We walked into her parents' house this morning with armloads of sugar and carbohydrates in cooked form. My pumpkin muffins were raved about, as was the beer cheese bread that I read about somewhere on the internet (I cannot for money remember where, and I have neither time nor internet speed to google it).

At the Dutch-American version of church this morning, we sang "Sing to the Lord of Harvest," which is one of those classics that reminds me of being little and singing around the piano on Sunday nights in Liberia. My parents favored the thankful sorts of songs, and the old hymns, and I loved the marching type songs, until about the time when preteen angst set in, when I changed my preference to melancholy songs like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

(I knew this preteen thing had occurred due to the discovery of the ages 8-12 preteen category on the back of some of of my books; when I announced it to my mom, she said, "Well, then you are probably old enough to turn the shower on and off by yourself," even though we didn't really have a shower, we had a bucket on a hook with a spigot on the bottom. I changed my mind about my entrance into the next developmental stage, immediately.)

I have eaten until I could hardly move over and over again today, and learned several new card games. I laid on the floor and let a two-year-old crawl on my head, and hoisted him up giggling on the bottom of my feet. I heard stories and laughed, and ate again, and topped it all off with a nice little soak in the hot tub. Not to mention just a little more beer cheese bread.

And now I shall go home, and go to bed, full of the delightfulness of this holiday.

[26] this is really how i think

I saw the sunset as I got off the bus coming home from work. I had expended my entire lunch break - on a day of brilliant sunshine - inside, talking on the phone to my Momma. (Good news! I have a ticket to MI for Christmas.) I wanted to enjoy the last few moments of light, so I went directly to the roof of my building without passing go (no $200, either, sadly). 

The few clouds in the sky were all in the west, turning pink and then scarlet and then lavender above the lights of the city. The first star twinkled, and I wished on it. I'm never sure if I believe in wishing, but it feels good sometimes to throw a little piece of hope out to sparkle in the air. A helicopter took off from a building downtown. I watched it, remembering suddenly how a helicopter came every morning and evening to Tiny Little Town when I was in Southern Sudan.  It landed just over on the airstrip, swooping so loudly over our compound that I thought it was going to crash on my head every single day. I was occasionally in the shower in the mornings when it came. It was the only time I regretted the open-air shower, because I worried that the pilots could see right down in there, if they flew over in just the wrong arc. 

Usually I loved showering on the concrete slab with a few little frogs in the corners. I loved looking up at the blue sky or the clouds or the stars while showering. Many days, it was my favorite moment of the day. I would hang my old clothes on one nail and my new clothes on another. The towel went over the door, and I propped a bar of soap and my shampoo on the wooden frame, halfway up the corrugated metal wall. The water drizzled out of a barrel propped up high. It even had a proper showerhead on the end of the pipe, which got clogged with lime or grime sometimes (due to the use of well water hauled from over by the hospital), but was easily cleaned by a few minutes and a paper clip.

It is, as I have mentioned, very hot in Southern Sudan. It is virtually never too cool for a cold-water shower, and the cool water in the morning is not even invigorating. It's just pleasant, because you are already sweating. 

When I looked around, I realized that I was still in Gone West, a little shivery in the wind under an indigo sky. My phone beeped a message. I picked up my purse and walked back into the warmth.

[25] around town

"That's a really little bike," I said doubtfully to the guy getting on the elevator. He was normal-sized, maybe 6 feet tall, and the bike was really small. Kid-sized. Too many instances of disappearing toys and clothes in Liberia and disappearing bikes in the inner city in Michigan have made me mistrustful of normal-sized people on little bikes. 

"It's not for riding on the street," he said. "It's for BMX stuff. Dirt-biking."

"Oh, right." I nodded.

"That's a really small bag," he said.

I was carrying a little shopping bag for my library books. 

Er. Yes. Little bag. (Weirdo.)

On the street outside, a Japanese couple with a baby in a sling stopped me and asked me about the Nike store in less-adequate-than-broken English. (Nike is almost the Greek word for victory, did you know? Three years of classical Greek, and that's about all I remember.) I know even less Japanese than almost any language on earth, but I managed to convey, I think, the following bits of information: ten minutes walk, bus on next street, bus 6. 

On the corner by the park, two middle-aged men were handing out little salvation cards and one guy wore a sandwich board about Jesus. "Jesus loves you and wants to save you," one said as he held out a little card. "He will always love you." I smiled at him, but kept walking through the rain. 

[24] pretty happy; slightly bitter

It is a banner day. A big, once-a-decade day. A day that I have been anxiously anticipating for at least two weeks. 

I got my new passport in the mail.

I may be mostly broke, but I could not face the idea of living without a passport. My old one expires in January and I renewed early to avoid the terror of even a few weeks without a valid passport. (I know. Most US Americans don't have one. But it makes me itchy to think of being unable to travel. I need at least the possibility.) I wrote the $75 check, and it was probably the best money I spent all month. I am actually pleasantly surprised that it only took two and a half weeks from mailing off the application to the little stiff envelope in my mailbox.

It's a dandy new passport, all pristine visa pages and stiff front pages (I ignore safety admonitions and carry my passport in my back pocket in airports, so the old one is all comfortably battered and soft like a good t-shirt).

I confess to a little bit of... um... uncertainty about the new design. It's very... active. I first saw the new passports in the visa line in Nairobi last year, where a naturalized Kenyan-American had a sparkly new passport while I had an old crumpled one full of African visas. We traded. I looked dubiously at the stylized photos - must there be fields of grain on the visa pages? quotes about freedom? - and he admired the visas in mine. I'm still not convinced. The back page has a satellite on it. That's just odd. 

But regardless of the design, I am thrilled to have a new passport. I actually look normal in this photo. (In my last one, I looked like a convict. I have seen better mugshots of drug addicts. Drug addicts who were severely high when the photo was taken.) 

So today I tore open the envelope of "official US government mail" today and snuggled with my new passport. Then I made out with it for a while. I can hardly let it out of my sight. The one single sad moment was when I noticed that the passport number is different. I will have to memorize a new one, and I was so attached to the old one. I could rattle it off in my sleep. 026...

The date is okay, though. I can remember 21 Nov. 2008 and 20 Nov. 2018 as the date of issue and expiration. (What? You actually open your passport to look at the number and dates when you fill out immigration forms? Amateurs.)