So I think this is goodbye. Three months on from my return to America, my life is sprouting green shoots much like the trees of Boston are sprouting new leaves and flowers. Adapting adapting adapting. Adapting has been my life for three years, and it continues as I try to get used to what it is like living in the United States again, as the poignancy of my return begins to fade back into normalcy. There is a lot of joy here.
But it is a strange kind of normalcy, one dotted with unexpected mourning. Strange things catch me off guard and send my heart racing back to Niger and to the people there that I miss. I have been, finally, processing the loss of our sudden leaving, and it is an enduringly sad loss. Of course seeing my pictures and the video below bring up those emotions, but so does sending in a resume or getting an apartment. Sometimes in opening up to someone I discover all these emotions beneath the surface, patiently waiting for me to give them the time of day, rather like one patiently waits for the rains to start planting millet.
But if having patience is so necessary that it is a catch phrase in West Africa, it seems virtually unknown here. People in checkout lines get mad at me for bagging items instead of swiping my card. Ten seconds of their lives lost. Cars race to be somewhere and honk if I don’t cross the street quickly enough. Two seconds gone. Compare this to Niger, where a merchant will ask you to sit in his store and chat with you about whatever randomness (probably whether or not you are married) and cars are used to waiting behind a donkey cart, though they will still try to run you down if you cross the street at the wrong time.
For me, this idea of having patience, of taking life a little more slowly, really resonates. Fulfillment, the very essence of living, comes from those moments where one can just sit and be alive, and not have to be doing or saying anything. That wordless contemplation is very dear.
In America we race around, and if we want to sit we do it in a structured meditative way. There is no time for a a few minutes gazing out of the window or sitting on your porch. It is so rare that if someone catches you doing it they think you are sad or upset. For me it crystallizes in feeling, really sensing the texture of something under my fingers. When I was lost, sometimes that was sheets as I lay in bed sweating until the early morning. Sometimes it was the hot sand in the afternoon sun, or the rock that I sat on. That tactile sensation epitomizes that sense of taking a moment, and the fear that I will lose that appreciation is never far from my mind.
But as always, there are so many ways to view life. Part of my wistfulness comes from the intensity of the experience itself and the human tendency to miss and romanticize those kinds of experiences even if they were not always full of joy in the moment.
Part of it is the shock of settling into life here and knowing how it will be different. I can’t explain exactly what this is, but the difference is palpable and it’s not just because the pace of life is faster or it’s easier to communicate or it’s less hot. We care about things here that I haven’t thought of in two years: inane things like how other people dress and the way they talk, but also bigger issues like race and class and environment and gun issues and abortion rights and etc… etc… etc… The divisiveness of all this stands in stark contrast to the coherent communities of West Africa (or at least what I perceived as that).
I have made a slideshow. It’s nothing special, but the ending is pretty funny (for the record, I didn’t teach them that).
Goodbye, friends and family and other readers. Good luck in your own adventures.
-Nichola, Mamadi, Amir, Abdoul Karim, Karimu
(Names in chronological order of date recieved.)
