Six weeks on from Niger, I’m writing this as I sit on a plane headed to New Mexico.  My hair is a mess and my head is pounding.

In Boston I discovered a city and rediscovered friends.  I feel like I’ve never done so much in such a short time.  Highlights include:

• A six-mile run with Allie and Jake in below freezing weather that culminated in beer and pizza and led to my decision not to work in Rwanda for the present.
• Seeing Gregory Alan Isakov live in a small bar venue with a couple of friends who I haven’t seen in years.
• Eating a ton of pizza.
• Snowboarding in Maine with an awesome group of people, where we stayed at a huge cozy lodge, and drank hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps.  Some of us woke that morning at 5am to hike up to the peak and see the sunrise, but my boot (which I borrowed from a friend) shattered half-way up, so we had to cut it short a bit.  The rest of the day was spent snowboarding in great conditions.  We had sushi that night in Portland at a restaurant called BenKay, which was delicious.  We didn’t get back to Boston untill 11pm.  At that point we’d been up for 18 hours on only four hours of sleep, and I had to wake up again at 5:30 to catch the flight that I’m on now.  I packed and made it to bed by 2.
• An indoor ultimate frisbee tournament in Maine, where we slept at Eric’s family’s house and they made us delicious breakfast in the morning.  He has a great family and I got to talk to his parents about their beekeeping.
• Seeing Bobby McFerrin live in an improv show with students from Berkelee College of Music.  It was a wonderful show with no instruments but a lot of really cool vocals.  We need more celebration of spontaneous music.
• Meeting with Stephen and visiting a local fabrication cooperative, and then having a beer at a little bar with a Jazz/Blues open mic.
• Having dinner with Katelyn and Chambers and then going to an engagement party for some ultimate frisbee players.
• Poker night with the guys, drinking gin and tonics and losing to the guy who didn’t know the rules (comme normale).
• Dinner with Eric’s coop, which was a ton of fun and let me meet a bunch of people from all over.
• A couple of movie nights with Allie and Jakers.
• A conference at Harvard Law on poverty and the psychology of inequality.  It was pretty interesting, but a lot of the research seemed awfully removed from what the real world is like.

All in all it’s been a really good couple of weeks back in the states.  I struggled with deciding whether to go to Rwanda, but in the end I decided that Rwanda felt like putting things off for another couple of years, and putting things off is not what I want to be doing right now.  I’ve mostly felt good about this, though there have been occasions when, being afraid of slipping into a job I don’t really want to be doing, I wish I hadn’t.  There is a whole image that I associate with the United States that involves working a boring job day after day and never enjoying the more interesting, deeper sides of life.  I don’t think I will fall into that, but at times the fear is there and it makes me want to turn around and head back to Africa.

I haven’t had too much trouble adjusting culturally.  Grocery stores are still pretty overwhelming.  Not in the sense of causing a breakdown, but just because there is so much choice.  People ask me to get a snack and I don’t even know where to start.

What does readjustment mean?  So far it hasn’t meant insensitive questions or feelings of how “good” life here is.  It hasn’t meant pining away in cold dark rooms wishing I was still under the hot sun.  But it has meant feeling a disconnect between who I am here and who I was there, and struggling with a way to reconcile that, and the fear that I will lose what I worked so hard to learn while there.  It has meant feeling not really at home in the states, and knowing that I don’t feel at home in Niger.  It has meant knowing well what I want but not knowing how to create it.  Readjustment is just a word, but the process is so ambiguous that at times I can’t even tell what I am feeling.

I plan on making one more post to put up a slideshow, and then that will be the end of this blog.  Thanks to all of you who have followed for the past couple of years, the comments you have left (especially you random guests).  Thanks for partaking in this sharing of my experience.