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.)

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.