Well,
it’s been a while. I’m now back in the
States, back in Wooster attending classes and trying to figure out how all the
new fits into all that I left. As of June
2013, I hadn’t lived outside of Ohio. I
was born and raised here, and while I moved three and a half hours away to go
to college, I’m still in the same state.
Which I love, don’t get me wrong, but 20 years living in the same place,
and the world felt like it was calling me.
I’ve been on occasional trips to other places in the states, and even
overseas, but what I felt last winter when I began thinking about all of this,
this felt different. I wanted to be out
of Ohio. And not just for a few weeks,
but really live somewhere else, spend time walking around and staying around
even when the novelty was gone. And
while part of me was terrified of this, another part of me knew I had to do it,
because I was more afraid of doing nothing, of staying here, than I was of
going away.
I
spent last summer in Oregon, working at Camp Namanu. Even though I missed Camp Joy, where I had
spent the past ten summers, I was excited to be able to experience something I
love (camp) in a totally different and new environment (Oregon). The change of scenery alone was enough to
remind me I wasn’t in Ohio anymore, but I also found myself missing (and
craving) the family I had at Joy, the community that knew me and loved me and
supported me through everything. As much
as I love traveling, I forget how long it takes to create community, and I
found myself in an interesting place at Namanu, full of passion and love for
camp and for the work that we were doing, but surrounded by faces and hearts
unknown to me, and mine unknown to them.
Before long however, these unfamiliar faces became friends, family;
these hearts full of hopes and dreams not too different than my own, and pieces
of which remain with me today, even miles and months away. But even as much as I’d like it to last
forever, camp came to an end, and I soon found myself packing up my suitcase
and preparing to fly back, if only briefly, to the state I had finally been
able to get away from.
I
was home not even 5 days when I left again, this time, on my way to something
even more unknown. Four airplanes,
multiple cars, and one suitcase less than when I started, I finally arrived in
Kankan, Guinea. I wish I could say I
fell in love with the city right away, that it was everything I imagined it to
be, that I knew right away it was going to be such an amazing study abroad
experience that I could go home and tell all my friends and family about and
everyone would be jealous of all that amazing-ness that I got to do. In fact, what I knew right away was that it
was going to be a struggle, what I didn’t know was just how much of a struggle
it was going to be. Kankan was nothing I
expected it to be, full of things I saw as contradictions and frustrations
(least of which being that few people spoke English). When people ask what I did when I was abroad,
I say simply, “I lived” because that’s what took the most energy, what I spent
most of my time thinking about. It’s not
something that is easily articulated because it’s just life, it’s what my host
family and my friends did every day without thinking about, but for me, I found
myself in a place I had never been before.
I knew nothing. Absolutely
nothing. What to wear, how to eat, how
to get from point A to point B, how to go to the bathroom, how to shower, what
to wear, what to do upon entering a room, how to wash my clothes, how to talk,
how to think. Not everything I did was
wrong, but it was weird, different, and I had to think about things in a way I
never had to before. To say it was hard
would be the understatement of a lifetime.
But I did it. I learned how to do
my laundry and how to eat; learned to communicate and how to advocate for what
I needed, as weird as it seemed to others.
I lived. And it’s the proudest
I’ve ever been of myself.
The
flight back was a whirlwind; more cars and airports and pat-downs and finally
home sweet home. But home was different,
too. I had adapted so much to living in
Kankan, and now I needed to adapt back. Which
one would think would be simple, getting back to this life that I had looked
forward to for so long, but it wasn’t that easy. I found it really hard to talk about my time
abroad, and especially difficult to try to articulate how I had changed, and
how I now saw the world. I was the same
old me, back to another Christmas with family, but I felt different, and I
couldn’t explain why. Conversations were
now strained, and I spent a lot of time by myself, just trying to figure out
how to live life here all over again.
I
didn’t have much time though, because not even three weeks after I landed in
the States I was off again. The timing
of this last trip wasn’t ideal, but I had the opportunity to travel to Thailand
and Myanmar (Burma) for two weeks before the start of spring semester with a
group of students from Wooster, and I couldn’t say no. So I spent the day after Christmas packing my
suitcase once again, and off I was to Thailand.
In less than thirty days I had been on three different continents. I say none of this as a way to brag, but as
conviction that I’m crazy. And I mean
that. I spent the first few days of our
time in Thailand in a state of shock, not really culture-shock and jet lag like
my classmates were experiencing, but shock at this crazy pace of life and that
I was (again) living out of a suitcase, living in limbo, traveling around. My time in Thailand was nothing like my time
in Guinea, and I feel so thankful for that.
While my study abroad program prided itself on not being tourist-y, our
group in Thailand was a part of a large tourist culture, especially in Bangkok
where we first stayed. There are so many
different ways to experience a new culture, to see and live in a different part
of the world, and I learned to appreciate these ways. Tourist isn’t always synonymous with ignorant
and disrespectful, and even long term time spent in a country doesn’t make you
all-knowing (or your motives better than others). Tourism and Global Travel are complicated issues. They deserve thought, especially if you
yourself are planning to travel across borders, but the answers aren’t as clear
as I once thought.
And
now I’m back. To Ohio, to Wooster, to
one of my, now many, “home away from home”s.
This is week 4 of classes, and I finally am feeling back to “normal,” whatever
that means. And sunrise after sunrise, life
keeps surprising me, as I wake up to pure Joy shining through my windows. Day after day, ink smudges across blank paper
still trying to process it all. I don’t
know where I’m going from here, don’t know how I’m going to make sense of
everything that has happened in the past six months, but still I try. To articulate for myself and to share with
others, but mostly as a way for me to continuing taking one more step in this journey
that is life. I try to find the words,
to write, to speak, because it’s how I make sense of the world, and I thank you
for listening and caring as my heart tries to make sense of the ebbs and flows
of the journey.
