Back at It

I always say that I love to travel. This is a total lie. I hate to travel. I like to be in many different places, which requires quite a lot of travel, but the actual process of checking in with airlines, elbowing your way through airport crowds, confining yourself to tiny places for many hours, watching year-old movies until you go full circle from laughing to crying to remembering how miserable you are in your tiny seat-cell, and then being dropped off in a climate entirely unlike the one you dressed for thirty hours before, sucks.

But as is always the case with these big international voyages, the being part was delightful! Once we got to the US, it was wonderful and restorative, and now that we’re back, it feels just like home too. About an hour after landing in Juba, we were sitting in an incense-filled Ethiopian restaurant, eating injera, listening to the radio’s ADD mix of Ghetto Child and A Whole New World, and thinking, “Did that really just happen?” and “Why am I still wearing socks?”

 With little to no transition time, we are back at it. We’re working all the time, I’m sick again, it’s hot as heck, and already planning for Boston feels… hypothetical in some way. Like we’re crazy people planning our future lives in Neverland or something. 

 We’re in a weird place right now is what I’m trying to say. We’re totally comfortable in South Sudan and we feel right at home in the US. I think one reason we’re able to be at home in new places so easily is that we are doing it together. The differences between Juba and Colorado Springs or Austin or DC can be pretty startling, but if I can look over at John and say “This is weird, huh?” and know he knows exactly what I mean, whether I’m talking about the search for sun-dried tomatoes in a Texas-sized grocery store or the Russian UN pilot strike, then it’s like touching home base. Then it feels okay to feel okay, if that makes any sense. It’s nice to have a fellow dimension jumper. Or enabler. Whatever. 

That’s all I can say about that now, because I have to get back to work. Seriously, we’ve been here a week and there have been multiple days I have not left the compound (I’m not telling you how many, so you can just stop asking right now. Geez…).

 -Stephanie