In the blink of an eye

It’s as though I closed my eyes for a second and woke up two weeks later. I feel like I returned to the U.S. yesterday, and years ago at the same time. On the last night the participants of the GYPA Global Kimeeza were in Uganda we had a reflection session where I gave them words of advice and preparation for the reverse culture shock and adjustment that they would face upon returning home. I gave these words with confidence backed by ample experience.

Is there really any way to prepare for it? I suppose readjusting hasn’t been as difficult this time as it has been in the past. I am aware of what the possible feelings and emotions are, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that feeling those things becomes any easier, it just means I am able to identify. I am almost able to trust that this too shall pass.

Last week all I had was time. What did I do? I thought. I thought and thought and I thought about how I should be writing my thoughts, but I couldn’t pick up a pen or type anything on my computer. Why? Maybe the first difficult part of readjusting back to life in America is the inability to articulate your thoughts. Everything you think and feel is too deep, too profound, too overwhelming, words don’t begin to describe, they just can’t.

Maybe it is the “European linguistic poverty” that Ryszard Kapscinski writes about in “The Shadow of the Sun”. Our languages have developed to describe or explain our worlds. Adequate language to describe non-European (or American) worlds simply does not exist leaving “Entire areas of African life…unfathomed, untouched even”. Maybe I cannot write about my experiences in Africa as they actually were because I have always subconsciously recognized that, as Kapscinski continues, “The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness”. I agree. I don’t know.

During my last weeks, last days in particular, in Uganda, I was firmly committed to what I was working on, namely identifying and implementing solutions to some of GYPA’s organizational challenges and getting One Mango Tree off the ground in the U.S. I was very conscious, while there, of how easy it is, upon returning home, to let the physical distance translate into emotional and intellectual disconnect between oneself and those left behind in Uganda and the issues you were just immersed in. Technology, while it does make the world of communications smaller, does not necessarily fill the void of distance. Two eight-hour airplane rides and two weeks time and I feel worlds apart from the people and the places that I am committed to working alongside. Trying to figure out how that works, how such working and emotional relationships can operate, is one of the more exhausting challenges of being home or being anywhere for that matter. Such are the long-term challenges of being, of feeling apart from what you are connected with.

Then there are the moments. There are two different kinds of moments I’ve been experiencing.

The first, and the kind that I experienced the most in the first few days home, are the moments where, despite how easily I blend right back into my day-to-day life in DC, I am struck by how different life here is. My old routine was to wake up, shower, eat breakfast, walk 10 minutes down the clean and clearly named streets of Capitol Hill to Union Station, get on the metro, and go to the office. The first few days I was back I would stand there and watch the metro approach, it’s lights flashing, horn blaring, and then the mechanical voice would announce that the doors were opening, closing, “next stop is...”… In such moments I would become acutely aware of just how unfathomable this phenomenon would be to regular Ugandan citizen. I think of movies that show the future – car-type things on the sides of buildings, flying cars, floating homes, stores that speak to the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they walk in etc. That is how the metro system would appear to many people in Africa. In this regard, America really is a different world, or at least the same world 100 years into the future. Thinking of how I would explain the metro system to a Ugandan and imagining some of their responses or questions, which I know would make most American’s laugh, I then think of the reversed situation. “How was Africa?” “There’s a lot of poverty there huh?” “Does everyone live in mud huts?” How do you explain to an American how unrealistic most of our perceptions are of African countries, of African people? Africa is just as unfathomable to the average American. How do you really bridge these divides? These are thoughts that come in waves, in moments, and less frequently with time. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The second kind of moment, the less intellectual kind, the more spiritual, deeper, more refreshing, more uplifting and depressing at the same time moments. For those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy, in a recent episode Meredith Grey dies, or at least goes to a place of limbo, where she sees Denny, the love of Izzy’s life (Izzy = friend of Meredith) who dies tragically just after proposing marriage. In this place of limbo, Denny tells Meredith that there are moments when he is walking around in the hospital (in limbo land) and he suddenly feels Izzy’s presence, he knows that she is in that exact same place in the hospital (in the earthly world) as he is. Those moments are what keep him going. At the end of the episode you see Izzy walking through the hospital and she stops and smiles, and you know that she is feeling Denny’s presence in that moment.

Moments where the world around you ceases to exist, you feel something else, you are somewhere else entirely. I don’t feel an individual person’s presence, but the moments are like that…

In the spirit of lent I am trying not to use public transportation during daylight hours. This means that after my run, which I am trying to do in the mornings, I walk to work, I walk to meetings, happy hours and everywhere I would normally metro to. Walking is giving me extra time to connect to where I am, to my thoughts, and it’s giving me moments where I connect to where I am IN my thoughts. As I walk past the capitol building and towards the Washington monument on my way to the office – one moment I am captivated by the environment’s beauty and aura of power, and I have so many questions about where I am, what I am doing here… the next moment I’m walking down the dusty streets of Gulu or I am breathing in the rich air of the Indian Ocean on the coast of Kenya. In those moments I am happy, and when it passes I have even more questions about where I am, what I am doing here, what I would be doing there, where am I going?

Uplifting…and depressing at the same time – such is the roller coast ride of choosing a life that continually gives you roots in a place and then uproots you, and moves you, again, and again, and again. It is a choice and not a choice at the same time – because it’s your decision, and yet deciding anything otherwise is impossible because it leaves you restless and unfulfilled. Yet choosing this lifestyle still leaves you restless and unfulfilled because you are always moving and wondering what is next and whatever is next never feels like quite enough.