Friday, August 19, 2011

Introspection, travel, and an overview

August 18, 2011
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

I’m back in the US, safe and sound. I wrote this in the airport before I left Africa. It’s good to be home, but I am so glad I went.

I’m sitting on the floor of terminal 2 in the Addis Abba International Airport in easy sight of the monitor that I hope will be flashing my departing gate relatively soon. I have been assured it will indeed appear there, so I will wait. I mean, I do have like two hours before my flight leaves which gives me plenty of time to find out which one of the eight gates funnels people to Washington and then, for me, to home.
And….even as I wrote gate number 6 flashed beside my flight number, my personal version of Dorothy’s tornado. I am now sitting beside it having gotten the cool seat beside the window that was still open because my ever-early self was one of the first passengers to arrive. It pays to be early…usually.
We left Jinja around 9:30 this morning and arrived in Kampala in time for lunch at a Mexican restaurant the girls love. Today, our meal was simultaneously symbolic and celebratory. This was the restaurant Christina and Mandie went to after picking up Meems, the little girl who, now, months later, is officially Christina’s daughter and is going home to America for the first time tonight. We had chips, salsa, queso, guacamole, and isn’t-love-and-God-beautiful margaritas together; a lovely way to finish off my brief stay in Uganda.
So far, all my flights/check-ins have been smooth. Ethiopian Airlines feeds you about every 20 minutes, which I LOVE, so I’m feeling full and happy as I wait for the next 13- hour installment of flight attendant-care. I am enjoying traveling alone. Not that I mind having people with me (I am certainly missing my amazing travel buddy, Courtney), but the chance to retreat into myself and think or observe or just “be” by myself while hundreds of people and sounds surge around me is somehow soothing. Proof in the pudding that I am indeed an introvert.
I stood for a few minutes on the front porch this morning, feeling the cool air and trying to realize I was leaving. I felt like I had only been here for a short time, while simultaneously feeling like I’d always been here. I don’t know if that means that I adapt quickly to places or whether I just have a weirdly bad memory. Who can say…
I wrote on my way here that I had the nagging suspicion that God was taking me to Africa not for me to give something, but for him to give something to me, and I think that suspicion proved true. Yes, when the babies were sick or when I dropped developing solution (I completely forgot what it’s really called) onto a few malaria tests at Katie’s clinic, I “helped,” I “gave.” But in doing those things, in hanging out with the other 5 girls in the house, in snuggling and cleaning and diapering the precious babies, in seeing what I saw, and slipping into life in Uganda, I received SO much more. Of most note, perhaps, was the gift of realizing that I, that we as humans, were not meant to live life easily. Our hearts and souls and bodies were not made for tameness or for the vanilla lifestyle we seem to try to build for ourselves. In the comparative “hardships” of life in a third world country when compared to my life at home, my heart responded to the needs that were there and it not only rose to the occasion to provide what was needed, but I felt alive and connected to myself and to what was going on around me through that lack-of-ease. I am certainly not saying that a life that has seasons of comparative ease is not good. Nor am I not saying that living a life that is hard somehow better or “truer” than any other. I am saying, however, that we were created with the ability and the desire to respond to need, to fulfill a position that calls on the strength we did not need when our lives were easy. It can’t possibly be glamorous; I only have had brief glimpse of it, and it is really not always pretty. But it is enlivening.
I consider this trip to be the perfect cap to my summer. While a cruise or something like that would have been wonderful (and I won’t lie and say that I did not think about that rather longingly at 2 am with a vomiting baby beside me), this gave me something I could not have received from a cruise or a road trip with friends. I am honestly not sure exactly what it gave me. In addition to my realization above, perhaps I received a better depth of perspective as I view the world, or a renewed sense of the beauty, annoyance and fun that different personalities can create when thrown together in confined spaces for extended periods of time. But all in all, I think whatever Africa gave me will be much longer-lasting, much more deeply-seated, and much less obvious than I expected. It might be a subtle change, it might be a drastic one, or it might be right in the middle, affecting some parts of me strongly and others only slightly. But I don’t think there’s a way you can come to this country and not be affected somehow, even if it’s only by the mixture of its immense natural beauty with its poverty. I am happy to be coming home, but I am not at all disappointed by my choice to spend these last days of summer in Africa. It’s the best decision I could have made.

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