… and I’m back!

Fellow gmail users will recognize the above refrain.  Owing to the abysmal internet connection at work, I see it about every 10 minutes, so naturally I’ve chosen it for the title of this post.

The month of March was hectic.  I traveled to Arusha, Nairobi and Kampala during successive weeks all the while working on a grant proposal for our upcoming project.  I wasn’t sure what to write about my whirlwind tour of East Africa, having been in restaurants and offices and sensing that the ‘real’ cities were eluding me. I’m going to save my impressions of the other countries for a little bit because I will be back in Kenya this weekend and in Uganda in a couple of weeks.  However, I will note that my trip to Kampala treated me to my first East African street food, the ‘rolex’: essentially a deep fried chapatti topped with an egg-cabbage-mystery-veg-combo and then fried some more.  It was very hot and very salty.  I wont need another for a while.

Bouncing from city to city, I was reminded of how I love the feeling of setting foot somewhere new, seeing what people are doing differently, trying to figure out where I am and where I’m going next and almost inevitably seeing something humorous/beautiful/surprising.  The irony of course is that the constant readjusting required of travel and expatriate life is its most challenging and rewarding feature.

It might be because the rainy season is teasing us with heavy clouds and scorching temperatures or it may be that this time of year brings about a universal slump, but I’m not the only one who has been seeking reprieve from the challenges lately.  Inevitably, when you start to get discouraged, that’s when everything becomes difficult.  The power goes out, the glass you’re washing breaks, you forget your modem at home and are subject to unfathomably slow internet speeds and for the life of you, you cant manage to get a cup of coffee – anywhere.  You’ve got friends and family at home running errands for you, buying your vacations and doing your taxes.  You’ve got friends on the continent coming to pick you up, buying you sun dresses at H&M when they go on business trips and hooking you up with the ‘guy they know for that’.  In short, you are dependent.  Frustrated and dependent: a bad combination.

What’s more, I am acutely aware of the trivial nature of most of my challenges.  I can’t use my credit card.  Waiting for rides makes me late for engagements.  Broken glass means (a little) less sleep.  But vacations will be had, meetings will be delayed for other reasons and glass can be swept up.  In the moments of perspective that follow the rise of my blood pressure, I recognize this as a type of mental preparation.  In all of our lives, things will happen that won’t be easily brushed aside or forgotten.  If you are at all like me, some of those things will replay in your mind’s eye many times and even when that reel stops, they will resurface from dark corners in quiet moments.  I have seen many of the people I love bear these things with a poise and grace that I often cannot muster when I do something as inconsequential as forgetting the key to my office. 

I don’t mean for this entry to be unnecessarily heavy.  What I mean to convey is that I recognize that at the heart of it, I am learning survival tactics.  They are not the exclusive purview of the traveler, but for some of us, this is how we are building our reserves.