this is why they designed the phrase "rolling on the floor"

(If this isn't as funny to you as to me, note one thing: tigers? don't live in Africa. also, go find Sudan on a map.)

(Found at: Jillian C. York)

up above

In the late afternoon, I stood at a window looking out over the city. The street grids lay before me, and the tops of buildings whose lower walls I see every day. There were more parking garages than I thought possible. Far off in the distance, I could see my building.

Things made sense from up above in a way they don't from the ground. Things I've been learning slowly, day by walking busing training day, were suddenly clear. I could see where that bridge comes into town, and the planes landing out at the airport, descending slowly into the trees. I could see how the land curves around the water, and the water around the land. I could see where the flat becomes hill, and how the houses rise precariously from the tilt.

I wish I could see my life as clearly right now. I have to make some decisions, and any one could be right, and any one could be wrong. And most of them depend on the decisions of other people, first. I want to see it laid out like a grid before me, like my resume does, now that I look back at the jobs in Rwanda, in Tanzania, in Liberia, in South Sudan. Except that grid has nothing to do with the world around me now. The map I have in my head doesn't transpose onto this life I'm living, and the choice I want most is something completely unexpected and, just maybe, completely perfect.

And then there is the health insurance desperation, hanging forever over my head.

where I've been

Well, well, well. Here we are. A. is in bed reading my book, the counter is covered in glasses and boxes and jars, and an oatmeal cake is baking in the oven, just beginning to give off that delicious baking smell.

My sister is here, and she has gotten me out of the little box that my life had become in the six blocks between work and here and the grocery store. We borrowed cars, yesterday and today, and went to the beach and the mountains. We sat at little cafes eating melts of avocado and spinach on seven grain bread. We laid on the sand reading books and talking. We clambered over mossy rocks and picked out smooth pebbles from the freezing water to roll around in our hands. We strode up the path just behind a woman talking about her experiences in South Africa. (I was eavesdropping. Blatantly.)

I feel almost human. "I'm so glad you are here!" I kept telling her today. "I feel free again!"

My friend S. works on Saturdays. I'm beginning to wonder if she'd lend me her car some or every Saturday in exchange for a weekly filled gas tank. Sitting alone beside a mountain stream once a week could make me a much happier person.

behold, the cranky

This happens to me every time I so much as open a document that could be interpreted as an attempt to look for a job. I am embarrassed to admit how many people I have snapped at today.

swooning in the heat

It's been a long week, and I woke up this Saturday feeling like I was teetering on the edge of okay. It could go either way. I put Wilbur on repeat on a song I love, a song I need, and I talked to some people I love. Then I set out for one of this city's myriad Public Events. I have somehow managed to move to a city full of people like me, people who never quite left behind their eight-year old selves, which means lots of Public Events that would be called nice for the kids elsewhere but here we call them awesome for everyone. Heh.

I was supposed to ride with some friends, and then plans changed and I was supposed to take the train and meet them there, so I walked a long way in the shriveling heat from the train to the park. Fortunately, I learned some things in Southern Sudan (and don't whine to me, wimps. this 100 degree weather is nothing. try walking for an hour under full sun at noon four degrees north of the Equator in a tropical swamp and then we will talk). I learned the following: take water (although usually I disobey this one, myself, so maybe I haven't quite learned it yet), wear sleeves (nothing like a blistering shoulder sunburn to make life suck, as I learned first on the Equator in Kenya in university. 36 hours home on the plane resulted in a t-shirt that was stuck to my festering blisters. yum), put sunscreen on your head where you part your hair, seek out every bit of shade. That's pretty much it.

Come to think of it, it's not even that hot here. When you are comfortable sitting in the shade, it's not really that hot.

So, Public Event. It was fun. My inner eight-year old was delighted. But after a while, when my friends had left for other activities, I got a little tired of the crowd, and I wandered off to sit alone under a tree. I got bitten by a tiny white insect, a bite that itched for quite some time, and I had to kill a very large bee out of fear of being stung. I wrote for a while, and I watched people climbing past me to the main event. I listened to the cheers from afar. All was right with the world. I had forgotten how I need trees, and how sometimes seeing only the same six blocks over and over starts to get to me.

On the way home, I stopped at a coffee shop to borrow their bathroom and procure something involving ice. (This is another thing. Do you have any idea just how lucky we are to have ice readily available? Nothing, nothing, nothing is ever cold in a place with no electricity.) I had forgotten the cardinal water rule, even though I had a water bottle with me, and I slumped on the counter and said, "I am too dehydrated to think of what I want to drink."

tea and sympathy

There is something every so comforting about tea. Coffee is tasty but, I'm sorry, not comforting like tea. You never find yourself thinking, "What I need right now is to sit down in a corner with a nice cup of coffee to cradle in my hands and then I will feel better." At least, I don't. When I need comfort, I turn to tea.

Good thing I found the tea shop.

On the bus on the way home, feeling slightly carsick because some annoying person had taken the ideal front-facing seat on the passenger side, I remembered how, back when I worked with kiddos in MI, we the staff had a team-building exercise once in a park. The boss asked a series of questions intended to help the college-aged group of us "get to know ourselves" and one of the questions was, "Where do you sit on a bus?" I always, if I have a choice, sit in the front on the opposite side from the driver, because it is the ideal place to look forward and therefore not become carsick. According to this personality test, however, sitting in this spot means you are self-centered because you don't want anyone blocking your view. "Hey!" I said, "I sit there, and it doesn't mean I'm self-centered!" [Okay, maybe a little.] "I get sick sitting anywhere else!" Fact is, I am still kind of annoyed by this little self-knowledge quiz of six years ago.

If something major happens to me and someone else has to deal with any part of my life for a while, I have to say that the most embarrassing part will probably be the stack of unopened letters from the loan companies who gave me the money for law school. In general, when I get such a letter, I toss it in the corner by the door, unopened, and hope that whatever I put on top of it will hide it from view. Good plan, self, good plan.

I'm disappointed at a grey Saturday. I don't mind clouds so much during the week, but I want brilliant sun on the weekend so I can go on a long ramble in the afternoon. Those long walks keep me sane, even better when they bring me to new places. I'm getting weary already with the same blocks I see every day. I walked last night from the train to a park, rather than take the bus. I walked through neighborhoods like so many close in to Gone West: houses a random collection of styles from the first half of the last century, little square yards with large flower beds and very little grass, dogs staring out from bay windows. We all shared my gabi from Ethiopia at the park, sitting and lying on it in grass that looked deceptively smooth until one sat down. S. brought her brother and a friend, who I had never met, and I thought again about how I expected, when I moved here, to be outgoing and take initiative and I thought that by seven months in, now, I would have a whole crowd of friends. But I'm the same person here as I ever was, it turns out, and I feel shy and a little turtley at the prospect of charging into new groups of people, of calling people I've met once or twice or even a dozen times.

the whelm of consumerism

In December of 2003, I came back to the US from Rwanda after 13 months. Just for a few weeks. My sister and I went to a W@lgreens with my camera's memory cards, and I printed hundreds of pictures. It took a long time. It took hours. During these hours, A. and I wandered around the store, contemplating purchasing... something. Some sort of snack. Except that I couldn't handle it. There were just too many options. I walked back and forth along the snack aisle, just staring. And I didn't buy anything.

This is a problem I normally have only for a few days after I come back from Africa, although it was somewhat exacerbated on return from Liberia and South Sudan, which are virtually completely lacking in amenities like, oh, supermarkets. Liberia has grocery stores but no supermarkets and South Sudan has, um, hole-in-the-wall dukas. Nada mas. (When I worked in Rwanda, one of my colleagues working in Mali came to Nairobi for a meeting and went positively nuts at the supermarkets. "There is nothing like this in West Africa!" she kept saying, "Not even in Dakar!" as she bought more and more to carry back with her on the plane. I keep wondering about Lagos, though. Surely there are supermarkets in Lagos. Also, this was five years ago.)

Anyway, I can handle drugstores now. Also supermarkets. I march on through and buy salad dressing and toothpaste and my favorite cheese. The only time it gets to me is when I try to buy a snack. Even gas/petrol stations overwhelm me when it comes to snacks. I cannot buy snacks. I cannot buy chips/crisps. I cannot buy candy bars. I cannot buy cookies/biscuits. I just can't do it. I wander down the aisle, and then back, and then I leave with nothing because there are just too many possibilities. I did it again today.

---

Speaking of language idiosyncrasies (note use of multiple possible words up there) and how my brain is confused, here is something that happened to me a while ago:

Me: Can I have some of your chips?
Friend: Only if you call them fries.
Me: ... [thinking] ... Oh, right. Can I have some of your fries?

---

Quote of the day today: "Community living is only okay if everyone is smoking the ganja every day."
(ID of quoted person withheld by request)

it's getting to me

I stepped into the elevator, looked down, and thought, "Hm. Skeletonized blood spatter.* With a smear."

...

* Skeletonized blood spatter occurs when a droplet of blood begins to dry (the edges dry first) and then the inside, which is still wet, gets rubbed away by something. Don't ask me how I know this.

Here, it appeared that someone probably stepped in it.

Now I'm writing like a lawyer. How annoying.

Sunday afternoon ramblings

I waste most of my weekends, but I was determined to make something of this Sunday afternoon. I set off to my usual park, where I wrote for a while and nearly fell asleep in the grass with my top half under the gentle shade. I rolled my jeans up to my knees to get a little brown on my legs where they tend show under skirts. Time passed. Frisbee and soccer players came and went. The sun chased me further and further under the tree.

At last I got up and walked again, somewhat aimlessly. I finally headed in the general direction where I thought there might be a gelato place. There wasn't. Instead, I ended up on a street that I would have said was far too far away for walking. This city often surprises me that way. Things are more compact than they seem.

I didn't find gelato there, either, but I did find a tea shop. I have a strange reluctance to go into new restaurants by myself, as if they were intended for someone other than me, but enter I did, to find a wonderful world of tea that I have been missing since New York. "Is it as cool as Nearby Little Tea Place in New York?" my sister asked later. "No," I said, "because they have more of a menu, so you don't have to be quite so in the know." But they do have almost as many lovely teas, and it has that lovely smell of tea when you walk through the door.

I got a latte of black tea with roasted coconut pieces and sat in front of the window, reading the New York Times in hard copy. Happy.

On the way home, I succumbed to my new laziness of housekeeping and bought dishwasher powder. Until now I've been washing dishes by hand and using the dishwasher as a drying rack, but my laziness has now exceeded my cheapness. That and I heard that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand. That was all I needed to let the lazy win.

the crazy

Sitting in the park, listening to Wilbur, playing Sudoku, I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced over. It was an Aimless Crazy Man, of which there are many in Gone West, and he was standing in the shade with the hood of a winter coat over his head. I accidentally met his eye. "It's hot!" he said. "I need the shade."

A few minutes later, I saw the way a woman on the sidewalk looked at me as she walked past, and I knew he was standing behind me. Right behind me. I'd seen him do it to other people. I turned around and looked at him, a foot or two behind me as I sat on the ground. "Use the sixes." he said, "I like the sixes."

"You know," I answered, as kindly as I could, "I came here to be alone."

He flared up, angry. "It's a public park, b%^*&! I will kick you in your back and break every bone!"

I continued to stare back at him. If I have learned anything in the years of my life, it is that the anger and the crazy do not mix. I stared at him for a while and then I turned deliberately around, put my ear buds back in, and continued the Sudoku.

The next time I saw him, he was standing immediately next to someone else.

choices

Five years ago this month, I was living in Rwanda. My sister had just left for the US on the same plane as my boss, and I was truly on my own in Africa for the first time. Days later, my friend and coworker D.'s husband died. He was 35, and he died of pneumonia. 35 year old men do not just die of pneumonia, not anywhere, not even in Africa. It's not such a different place than here. He died of AIDS, and we all knew it, although we none of us said it.

I have written before about his wake, how I sat on the floor in their bedroom, holding D. while she cried, while his body lay on the bed behind, a bandage wrapped around his head to keep his jaw closed. How I felt honored to be a woman among women where women handle the weight of death, and how I wanted to cry, "I'm not old enough for this!" I may not have written this part before, but that night when I slept in my own bed in my hotel, the Auberge Beausejour where I always stayed in Kigali from the first night I spent in the country, I woke up in the dark afraid to turn over, afraid that I might fight a dead body there next to me in the bed.

I got an email from D. today. She asks if I've forgotten about her, and if I can send some money. She had meningitis and was in the hospital for a month. It's from the "syndrome" she says, and I know. She hasn't had a job since I closed the country program for the organization I worked for in Rwanda. Jobs are hard to find, and she doesn't have many qualifications.

I don't know what to say. How can I say that I fall behind every month myself, that I'm more in debt than I was last month or two months ago, that I owe more money to two banks than she has ever or will ever see? How can I say that I need this money for organic milk and a nice interview suit when she has four kids who need food and school with an unemployed mom and no dad? How can I say that I bought new contacts this month and I thought longingly of a trip to Africa, that I went to Ethiopia for the month that she was in the hospital with meningitis?

I can't, and so I never answered last time she emailed, probably the last time I wrote about this. I stayed silent, and I didn't act. She is desperate, and I am... well, I feel helpless, but the truth is that I am not helpless. I make choices, and if I am completely honest, I have chosen to spend my money, what little I make, in a thousand different ways these last months, and none of them helped her. Not at all.

off again

I do this every single week: I get on a later schedule on the weekend and I go to bed far too late on Sunday night, resulting in starting the week exhausted. Every single week I vow to get up earlier on Sunday morning so I can go to sleep earlier, and every single week I fail. It's just impossible to get up at 7 on a Sunday. Not possible.

homecoming

I ate myself sick on Liberian food, mixing greens and rice together with a spoon while an elderly white woman nearby said, too loudly, "This is so hot. I like spicy food, but I can't even eat this." Colors swirled around me, women in sparkling headties and men in embroidered shirts. I sat out the Grand March, but joined the dance floor under the ceiling fans when the unstructured dancing started, to West African music. After a while, I requisitioned a baby, and bounced him gently to the beat of the music. I leaned down and smelled his silky black curls, and ate yet another bit of toasted coconut ball. The woman sitting next to me told me about her daughter, running around with a thousand little braids, and how the girl's father is Liberian, how she's glad that she can know this part of her but she wouldn't let her visit, not until she's grown. I drank three glasses of water in a row, and finally surrendered the baby to walk home in the cooling air, wishing to go back two years in time, or forward, and be back in Liberia.

abdication of principles

I have reached a new low. So low that I don't even want to admit it. So low that I hardly dare mention it for fear that my dad will make fun of me incessantly for the rest of my life, even though he's since been converted by evidence of the terribleness perpetrated by this place I am about to mention.

Back story: I wear contacts. I do not wear glasses. I have glasses, and they are dandy to have for such occasions as fire alarms in the middle of the night (here in Gone West) or pee breaks in a pit latrine in the middle of the night (back in Southern Sudan) or I don't really know what else because that's all I've used them for. I didn't have them on any other Africa trips. I just went blindly about in the dark. But I don't wear my glasses in real life, because they make me dizzy and I misjudge distances and they give me a headache, all of which I consider to be bad things.

Unfortunately, I am on my last set of contacts. I am on my last set of contacts and panic is setting in because they may tear and I can't get any more because I don't have health insurance and I don't have money and I borrowed money from my parents for the contacts but my prescription has expired, which means a $300 visit to the cheap eye place. Why do you even NEED a prescription for contacts? It's a racket.

So I have made a terrible concession. I looked up the W@lm@rt Vision Center, and I'm calling it tomorrow. Patronizing W@lm@rt goes against all of my principles. I feel dirty.

But yos, I am dead broke. It's this or blindness.

...

I was walking along today, talking to myself, as one does, (WHAT? you know you do it, too) and I caught myself saying to myself, "Is that tomorrow or next tomorrow?" Yeah, no one says that here. It's a Sudanism. Amused.

some people think it's a good thing

Okay. I'm bored. I mean, I'm not BORED, but I'm a little bored. It's just... everything works here, you know? The biggest excitement I've had lately is schedule changes on the train. No one leap up and get too excited here. The other day, my train stopped because there was a mechanical problem with the train ahead of us and I walked the rest of the way to work. But how is this even a story? If I'd just stayed on the stupid train for five more minutes, they would have fixed it all and I would have gotten to work, probably still on time.

Our car slid off the road into a swamp when we were racing for a plane because our airstrip was too muddy for the Caravan to land once in Southern Sudan.

That was a story worth telling. And I told it, here. But oh, sob, weep. My train was delayed. They fixed it. Big deal.

The problem is that there are safety nets. I'm not big on super scary things. People think I am, because I travel to places like Tiny Little Town, and Liberia. But I would die before I bungee jumped or sky dove. (I say this, but I would probably do it. I would fret and worry, and then I would get over it and jump and love it. So I take that back.) I don't like super scary things, but I get so bored when everything works. I actually love places that have ditches too deep to be safe all along the side of the road. I love places where you get stranded ten hours from nowhere, with no cell coverage and no one to call even if you had it, and you have to hitch rides with random lorry drivers. Everything runs so smoothly here, and it's so very boring.

all the cool people are in Southern Sudan

I've been missing Rwanda a lot lately. It may be the weather, these lovely, sunny 80 degree F days like every day was in Rwanda, or it may be the concept of staying in one place for a while, the panic that I have to tamp back at the idea that this, here, is it, is home. I miss the turquoise waters of Lake Kivu stretching in front of me every morning, and the walks down the little path where tiny boys herding huge cows greeted me shyly. "Amakuru?"

I miss the road through the mountains from Kigali to Kibuye, on which I knew - I still know - every curve. I knew which curves required slowing down and which you could take at full speed. I knew where the trucks were likely to pull out on the other side of blind corners, straining and groaning to get up to speed on the hills. I knew where I had to turn off my a/c in order to keep power in my own baby Land Cruiser. I knew where I had space enough to pass even though I couldn't see around the next curve. I knew how the buses and trucks would take the inside of the curve, even if that meant driving in the wrong lane. If you don't think you are going to die at least once on the drive to Kigali, I used to tell people, then watch out for the way back, because your brush with death is still coming. I can close my eyes and drive that road: up the long hill out of Kigali, through the streets of Gitarama filled with pink-suited prisoners, over the bridge into Ntara ya Kibuye, past the waterfall, next to gleaming inlets of the lake, and finally around one last blind curve to the roundabout in Kibuye. I am aching to drive it again.

In the park where I sit most evenings, a group of African men from all over the continent play football (by which I mean soccer, oh US Americans). If I ignore the perfect green grass and the white guys playing frisbee in the background, if I close my eyes and listen only to their voices, I could be back, somewhere in Africa. When I walk home afterwards, though an apparent utopia of grass and flowers, swingsets and bikes left tumbled on the front walk, I feel a bit of a jolt to be in this place instead of that.

A week or two ago, I was reading through my posts from Southern Sudan last fall. I realized that a year ago, I was getting ready to go to Southern Sudan, where I was miserable. To be fair, it was not all the fault of Southern Sudan (despite the HOT, which I have discussed in unending detail). I didn't really give it a chance, because I was so tired of leavings and arrivings. I wanted to be and to belong. So here I am, attempting to be and belong. Africa doesn't come up here unless I bring it up, usually, and entire days and weeks can go by with the people I meet never knowing that I am anything but a new lawyer who recently moved to Gone West. I have to accept, I suppose, that this place, this country, will forever be only part of me.

It seems lately that the authors of every international blog I read have up and moved to Southern Sudan. When they write about how difficult the place is, I can only grimace and nod my head in agreement. And yet, as they point out, there are people and beauty and joy there, too. I miss even that Tiny Little Town in Southern Sudan, even the mornings where I was sweating before I even got lotion on my face (lotion+ sweat = disgusting).

One of these bloggers posted a photo that I saw this morning: my favorite little bird in Southern Sudan (see this post). It's from the back, but you can see the little red blush-spot on its cheek. I smiled and, for a moment, I could be both parts of me.

observe:

Since I have to go to bed immediately, I shall here place, instead of the long post I have been composing in my head, the following inane observation:

I think they have started adding rosemary to my favorite salad dressing.

The end.

(Aren't you glad you stuck around for that?)

bird brain

Some days, for various reasons, I need to exit work through a set of double glass doors. They lock these doors at five p.m. and one has to go through a smaller side door, a fact which I am incapable of remembering. Today I crashed directly into the glass doors a mere fraction of a second after someone said, "The doors are locked!" because she knew, as everyone does now, that I would run into the glass doors. "Don't mind me!" I said, retreating through the smaller side door, "I'm like a bird slamming my head against a window! I never learn!"

some title

So! It's Sunday again. I have no idea how that happened. I just woke up and there it was. I don't know what happened to those days in between, either. I'm pretty sure they happened... yes, I can go through and find at least one memory per day, so they did happen. I have just been blog and internet lazy. In my defense, the weather has been lovely, and every evening I face the internet v. walk dilemma and generally choose the walk. Because it's pretty out there! Unfortunately, I still feel as if something is sitting on my chest when I spend too much time in unfiltered air.

I was beginning to get worried that there was something more wrong with me than allergies (like lung cancer! hypochondria, again) because shouldn't springlike-ness be over by now? Shouldn't allergies by over? By July? But then I overheard a conversation in which random people downtown were discussing how a mere two weeks ago their allergies got to the worst point they had ever been and they were forced to seek prescription medication for the first time. So perhaps this is just the penalty one pays for the drawn-out winter/spring that never ends. Although it appears to have finally ended. HALF WAY THROUGH JULY. I never thought I would make favorable comparisons to Michigan, but! I have. I have actually caught myself saying longing things about how Michigan weather is beautiful starting in May.

In other news, since I have nothing interesting to say, I will inform you that I have become obsessed with the library. This may be another reason why you never hear from me. Every time I hear about a book I want to read, I just log into the website and request that it be put on hold, and then I prance over there on my lunch hour and pick it up! It's brilliant. Now I have lots of interesting books, and I read them, and the internet is boring by comparison. Even my internet. So. See you in a few weeks.

(I'm kidding. I hope.)