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.

• Attended a Q&A in which Gary Kasparov (yes, THE Gary Kasparov) spoke about strategy and chess and business.  I wanted to buy his book but they only had Portugese versions.  This, for obvious chess reasons, was clearly the most awesome thing.

• Interviewed with Partners in Health for a possible job in Rwanda, which just happens to be the country that my former country director is now in.

• Seen an FC Porto game that started off with a great goal from a header.  I went there with Sam and Liz and some of their friend’s from the Magellan MBA program here in Porto.  One of them had a bunch of free tickets, so we settled down in the absurdly cold weather to watch a little futbol, and I bought a scarf proclaiming my allegiance.

• Been on two wine tours with Liz, in which I learned more about port wine and wine in general than I’ve ever known.  They were only about a half hour each, and at the end we got to task a couple of different flavors of port.  It was all around a good time.  And Liz and I got a chance to have a little heart to heart about life.

• Walked around a lot with Sam and talked about all kinds of things ranging from what readjustment is like to whether the pastries here are filled with egg yolk (they are).  We drank some amazing hot chocolate and ate cream pastries.  We looked down on the riverside from the metro bridge and I discovered I have a newfound fear of heights, which makes sense because I haven’t been higher than fifteen feet off the ground for over two years (if you don’t count plane flights), and a love of all things mediterranean, especially red tile roofs, stone streets, and cheap but good wine.  We ate franchisinhas.  (Which translate to “little French girls” and are composed of two pieces of toast in between which have been sandwiched cheese and four different kinds of meat, the whole of which is then smothered in beer sauce and covered with an egg.)

• Bought a wool coat, a scarf, a turtleneck, socks, and gloves.  In two weeks I have gone from semi-urban Niger style to full on urban Europe style.  Identity crisis may or may not be looming.

And that is that.  I have to give a great thanks to my hosts, who have provided a fantastic in-between place for me to spend a little time in my in-between state.  Really, I don’t think I could have asked for a better place to slowly detox from my second evacuation and get ready to return to America.

Here are my notes on Kasparov’s talk, if you are interested.  Mind you, it’s not a quote, more of a paraphrase:

• We should remember that it is not enough to learn from our mistakes.  Learning from our mistakes is easy.  More difficult but also important is to learn from our victories, because in every victory there will be things that you could have done better.

• Strategy is what you do when you have nothing to do, tactics is what you do when you have to do something.

• We have entered an economic phase in which we don’t innovate.  We only copy things that we have already innovated and make them smaller.  This generates much less new wealth.  We do this because we want the profits without having to take the risk.  As a result living standards are being maintained by using credit.  There is little investment in the future, little investment in a future capacity to produce (as in infrastructure and education).  As a result, we are seeing the death throes of this type of economic organization.  Capitalism will survive, but there will be a new venture, a global venture, that risks once again, and though often failing, also makes huge strides because of its willingness to risk.

• You can no longer meaningfully differentiate between different nationalities because the availability of information is leveling the playing field across geographies.

• 100 years ago chess was a jewish game, and that exemplifies a peoples’ desire to succeed in a facet that they have available.  Marginalized populations tend not to be able to become successful leaders of society, so they become extremely good at other things?

• The role of emotions in chess/strategy: emotions are not helpful in a game, but emotions are important to help us stay sharp.  It’s not about being unemotional, but rather splitting your emotions off from your personal decision-making system.  This is why it is important to know your own strengths and weaknesses, because it allows you to strategize so  that your character is operating from a position of strength when you are making your decisions.  For example, if you are introverted, you should strive to face decisions when you have the time alone to do so, as opposed to when you are surrounded by people.

• Why is Kacparov a household name?  Because the matches played between Kasparov and Karpov were political and they made front page of the newspapers, they took on the dynamics and hopes of society, so it became about more than just a chess match.  Beating Karpov was a signal to Russian society that something could change, that communism could be defeated, that there was potential for hope.

Pretty interesting no?