There's a whole world contained in those two words, most of which I can't really explain here. If there are any takers out there for a pint and a boozy chat, it might be possible. On paper (can you call a blog "paper"?!) I don't have the time or the energy right now. I would say that I haven't formulated most of it yet, except that - as I always knew would be the case - after only four days back in Ireland, my Ugandan experience is already slipping away from me, and I have a terrible fear that if I don't write about it very soon it'll slip away from me forever.
I flew out from Kampala on Friday night, and arrived back in my small little Irish home town on Saturday lunchtime. By Sunday afternoon I was already on my way to Dublin and on Monday morning I was back at my old desk in the office, fumbling my way uselessly through the same work I was fluent with a few months ago.
There's so much I haven't written about - so many things happening, so many places seen, new people befriended, new journeys made, new events (some magical, some tragic and horrifying). This blog was as much for myself, to remember things, as it was for anyone to read about them. The month of lost blogging thus really does seem a loss - too many things I'll have forgotten, some day. It's not that I gave up blogging the past month, its simply that circumstances conspired against it. Armenia swallowed a large chunk of my Ugandan time - I spent ten days away. I spent a week recovering (literally - a large proportion of the week after I came back was spent in bed recovering from some kind of bug I picked up along the way). I spent another week almost totally without internet in the office, frantically trying to wrap up the work I needed to finish before my successor, Daniel, would arrive for a handover. My last week in the office was only three days long, all of which was swallowed by workshops, speeches and the launch (a big deal) of the Human Right's Centre's first report. And then I spent about a week traveling with two friends through southwest Uganda and Rwanda before coming back to Kampala to fly home.
It would take me days to write about our Great East African Road Trip. Suffice to say it involved:
We were safely in Rwanda when we heard the news, and thankfully no friends or colleagues were affected. This is less surprising than you might think - one of the bombs, at the Ethiopian Village Restaurant, went off in my neighbourhood, Kabalagala (which I've written about before), about halfway between home and the office. I've driven past twice a day for the past three months; I've eaten there before. If I had been in Kampala I probably would have been in a neighbouring bar or restaurant that night - in fact a good friend of mine was in a place just up the street and heard the explosion. But noises and whooshes and bangs happen all the time in Kabalagala, especially on the night of the World Cup Final, and no one took any notice. Fifteen people died in that whoosh.
I've been trying to explain to people that while you in Ireland or Europe or North America might think that these things happen "out there" all the time, in those far flung places whose names are linked to suicide bombings every week, these things did not happen in Kampala. Security concerns in Kampala involved taking precautions against petty theft, or avoiding political rallies and protest demonstrations where rowdiness and beatings are a growing trend in the run-up to the elections. No one worried about bombs and fundamentalism and extremists. Kampala was - and is - a city of bars, and shacks selling beers, and restaurants with live music; a town obsessed with football, where even the rundown local joints screened satellite channels from South Africa; a place where a typical Friday night out involved changing your bar every hour until 5am, before sipping beers through the sunrise and dryly taking a boda boda home after grabbing the first rolex from a street vendor at 7.00.
Bombs in bars didn't happen in Kampala. I only returned on Thursday night before flying out on Friday, but you could see the place was jumpy. People are calling in suspicious packages to the police, and shopping bags are checked by security guards going into shopping centres. The embassies send regular text messages with up dates to ex-pats. Yet even still, town was buzzing. "The jam" was as bad as ever, the street food sellers were doing their usual trade, and although the Western muzungu bars were probably deserted, friends have told me wild stories about spontaneous house parties that were thrown up around town all weekend.
I hated hearing about them: I wasn't there. I was watching soft, gray Irish rain beat off the window panes in Kerry, paying €3 for a cup of the coffee I'd so craved, hearing - before I saw - the girls in fake tans and tracksuits. Well, that's a harsh invocation - Ireland's really not that bad. Today, my second day at the office, was better than yesterday, my first. True, the sun was shining today, and I'd forgotten how beautiful Dublin is when you take the train out along the bay; had forgotten the smell of the sea; was startled once again by how O'Connell Bridge at 8.30 on a fine summer morning has the strange quality of a film set - tidy, vivid, wide, calm. And yet, still, what continues to upset me is not that I'm so unhappy here but the fact that I'm already settling back in; the fact that I can get on very well outside Uganda and that I'm already forgetting it and re-adjusting, faster than I want to.
You don't realise how immersed you are in Africa until you leave it; going to Armenia and then returning was in this sense a very strange and emotive experience for me. Reverse culture shock for me isn't, after all, the unfamiliarity of what should be the home environment. It isn't no longer feeling at home in your own place, amongst your own people. It isn't seeing the same old same old with new eyes, marvelling at what you never bothered to notice before.
Reverse culture shock for me, upsetting and disorientating, is in fact the inevitable, crushing sameness of everything when you come back. Nothing has changed. This is obvious, as much to me as it is to you, reading this, and its the almost-sense of shame and stupidity that comes from knowing this and recognising this, the whole, well, what else did you expect?
I've tried to reason it all out the past four days. The obvious answers are: you have changed, and home has not. You have changed, but the people at home have not, and most of them cannot relate, and most of them really aren't all that interested anyway. Other friends who have traveled to the developing world have talked to me about how friends, family and acquaintances project a defensiveness when you return - even if you were never to talk about your experiences, they expect you to, and expect you to express dissatisfaction - which they take to be a criticism of themselves - and expect you, somehow, to project a sense of superiority because of what you've done and where you've been. And even if this couldn't be further from the truth, it won't make any difference to those who'll keep you at arm's length because they expect to find you changed. And you don't want that to be the case; you just want your friends, who you very likely missed while you were away.
Reverse culture shock is all of these things, and yet for me that's not exactly it either. In addition to all of that, there is the sameness of things flattening everything else out. The sameness took the good out of all the modern conveniences that I looked forward to my last week in Africa, trying to console myself at the thought of going home: the long hot showers, the drinking water direct from the tap, the bewildering choice of food, the fast internet, the being able to go out alone after dark. Home is so utterly and crushingly the same, from the instant that you get back here, that all these things are just the same too, unnoticed and unappreciated. I thought I would have forgotten how to drive, or would marvel at the hundreds of choices in Tesco, but I did not. I thought I'd never been able to choose what to eat for lunch, but I just got on with it, and that was what was most upsetting.
No matter how long I'd been in Uganda, no matter how comfortable I felt there, every so often there would come a moment - of beauty, of kindness, of friendship or simply of something random that could only happen in Africa - and you'd jump in your own skin, look around and think - This is amazing. How did this happen? How did I get here? I can't believe this is my life now!
Yesterday, running late for work, lacking change for the bus, getting wet in the rain - that crap Irish half-rain, muggy and humid with mildness - it was my very first day and yet simultaneously so eternally as if I'd never been away. And I looked around and though.... how did this happen? how did I get here? is this really my life?
Because when I thought about where I had been only five days ago - bumping on buses over the Rwandan hills and the Ugandan plains, laughing about nicknames with Jenny and John, being welcomed by the Rwandan border guards who remembered us from passing through on our way the week before, flying on a boda boda through the balmy Ugandan evening, being called Auntie by Mama Sharon and Paul the boda driver, looking at Kampala's twinkling nighttime hills with Paulo, having pizza while surrounded by friends on my sofa, getting ridiculous text messages from Hubert, seeing the tears in Sharon's eyes, guiltily thinking of the people I didn't even get to see before I left, eating chapatti, gossiping over lunch with everyone from the office, listening to the birdsong and the rooster crowing and the call to prayer in the morning, counting banana trees on my way to the airport - I had no idea how I had come from there to here in what seemed like the passing of a few moments. The idea that all of that was over was so deeply upsetting. I wasn't ready for it to end. I still amn't.
I don't know if I'll keep blogging. If I have the time there are stories and thoughts about my last weeks there which I'd like to write about. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of thing which simply loses momentum in the atmosphere of home, although I try to tell myself I'll be different this time. Perhaps this is my last entry, until my next travels; the thought makes me think of the very last anecdote I have from Uganda, and of how perfect - in summing up, and in all the hopes I have for the future - it was.
On my last morning I went to a supermarket to buy an extra bag for my luggage. I took a cheap holdall to the till, where the man whose job is to pack your shopping bags picked it up and turned it over, folded and unfolded it, opened and closed it, and handed it to me as if he'd made it ready for me.
"Thank you please. This is a very good bag," he said, and it wasn't small talk. He really meant it. "You must be planning a journey if you are buying a bag. Eghh. I wish you safe travels ,and good health wherever you will go with it."
I flew out from Kampala on Friday night, and arrived back in my small little Irish home town on Saturday lunchtime. By Sunday afternoon I was already on my way to Dublin and on Monday morning I was back at my old desk in the office, fumbling my way uselessly through the same work I was fluent with a few months ago.
There's so much I haven't written about - so many things happening, so many places seen, new people befriended, new journeys made, new events (some magical, some tragic and horrifying). This blog was as much for myself, to remember things, as it was for anyone to read about them. The month of lost blogging thus really does seem a loss - too many things I'll have forgotten, some day. It's not that I gave up blogging the past month, its simply that circumstances conspired against it. Armenia swallowed a large chunk of my Ugandan time - I spent ten days away. I spent a week recovering (literally - a large proportion of the week after I came back was spent in bed recovering from some kind of bug I picked up along the way). I spent another week almost totally without internet in the office, frantically trying to wrap up the work I needed to finish before my successor, Daniel, would arrive for a handover. My last week in the office was only three days long, all of which was swallowed by workshops, speeches and the launch (a big deal) of the Human Right's Centre's first report. And then I spent about a week traveling with two friends through southwest Uganda and Rwanda before coming back to Kampala to fly home.
It would take me days to write about our Great East African Road Trip. Suffice to say it involved:
- Crossing the Equator for the first time. Disappointingly the world is not as upside and back to front down there as one would hope.
- A series of long-winded bus journeys, the last of which was ten hours long, which all seemed to involve broken bags, babies on laps, questionable roadside food, near-death experiences on Rwandan mountaintops, Nigerian soap operas, Christian music, the total absence of personal space, amorous Ugandan and Rwandan men, out of date newspapers, postal deliveries and sore bladders.
- An inexhaustible succession of Scandinavians of various shapes and sizes.
- Africa's deepest lake, and wooden dugout canoes upon it, and fish inside it, diving into it, and lying in hammocks beside it.
- Day-long card games, which no one ever won.
- An earthquake. Yes, really, an earthquake. It was a good 5-10 seconds long and as thrilling as it was bloody frightening.
- Crayfish. Oh god, so much crayfish. So delectably good. Sigh.
- Omelets. Some good, some bad, always reliable.
- Unfathomable and indecipherable exchange rates. I currently have six different currencies in my purse.
- Walking to the Congo, standing and looking at the Congo, and ultimately failing to get into the Congo. Must go back to climb the volcano another time.
- Incorruptible Rwandan border guards. We would know - we tried our very best to corrupt one, and emerged morally bankrupt. Absolute shame on us.
- Children - hugging us, squealing at us, being dumped on our laps. Life affirming.
- Genocide memorials. Really nothing witty I can say about this.
- Terrorism.
We were safely in Rwanda when we heard the news, and thankfully no friends or colleagues were affected. This is less surprising than you might think - one of the bombs, at the Ethiopian Village Restaurant, went off in my neighbourhood, Kabalagala (which I've written about before), about halfway between home and the office. I've driven past twice a day for the past three months; I've eaten there before. If I had been in Kampala I probably would have been in a neighbouring bar or restaurant that night - in fact a good friend of mine was in a place just up the street and heard the explosion. But noises and whooshes and bangs happen all the time in Kabalagala, especially on the night of the World Cup Final, and no one took any notice. Fifteen people died in that whoosh.
I've been trying to explain to people that while you in Ireland or Europe or North America might think that these things happen "out there" all the time, in those far flung places whose names are linked to suicide bombings every week, these things did not happen in Kampala. Security concerns in Kampala involved taking precautions against petty theft, or avoiding political rallies and protest demonstrations where rowdiness and beatings are a growing trend in the run-up to the elections. No one worried about bombs and fundamentalism and extremists. Kampala was - and is - a city of bars, and shacks selling beers, and restaurants with live music; a town obsessed with football, where even the rundown local joints screened satellite channels from South Africa; a place where a typical Friday night out involved changing your bar every hour until 5am, before sipping beers through the sunrise and dryly taking a boda boda home after grabbing the first rolex from a street vendor at 7.00.
Bombs in bars didn't happen in Kampala. I only returned on Thursday night before flying out on Friday, but you could see the place was jumpy. People are calling in suspicious packages to the police, and shopping bags are checked by security guards going into shopping centres. The embassies send regular text messages with up dates to ex-pats. Yet even still, town was buzzing. "The jam" was as bad as ever, the street food sellers were doing their usual trade, and although the Western muzungu bars were probably deserted, friends have told me wild stories about spontaneous house parties that were thrown up around town all weekend.
I hated hearing about them: I wasn't there. I was watching soft, gray Irish rain beat off the window panes in Kerry, paying €3 for a cup of the coffee I'd so craved, hearing - before I saw - the girls in fake tans and tracksuits. Well, that's a harsh invocation - Ireland's really not that bad. Today, my second day at the office, was better than yesterday, my first. True, the sun was shining today, and I'd forgotten how beautiful Dublin is when you take the train out along the bay; had forgotten the smell of the sea; was startled once again by how O'Connell Bridge at 8.30 on a fine summer morning has the strange quality of a film set - tidy, vivid, wide, calm. And yet, still, what continues to upset me is not that I'm so unhappy here but the fact that I'm already settling back in; the fact that I can get on very well outside Uganda and that I'm already forgetting it and re-adjusting, faster than I want to.
You don't realise how immersed you are in Africa until you leave it; going to Armenia and then returning was in this sense a very strange and emotive experience for me. Reverse culture shock for me isn't, after all, the unfamiliarity of what should be the home environment. It isn't no longer feeling at home in your own place, amongst your own people. It isn't seeing the same old same old with new eyes, marvelling at what you never bothered to notice before.
Reverse culture shock for me, upsetting and disorientating, is in fact the inevitable, crushing sameness of everything when you come back. Nothing has changed. This is obvious, as much to me as it is to you, reading this, and its the almost-sense of shame and stupidity that comes from knowing this and recognising this, the whole, well, what else did you expect?
I've tried to reason it all out the past four days. The obvious answers are: you have changed, and home has not. You have changed, but the people at home have not, and most of them cannot relate, and most of them really aren't all that interested anyway. Other friends who have traveled to the developing world have talked to me about how friends, family and acquaintances project a defensiveness when you return - even if you were never to talk about your experiences, they expect you to, and expect you to express dissatisfaction - which they take to be a criticism of themselves - and expect you, somehow, to project a sense of superiority because of what you've done and where you've been. And even if this couldn't be further from the truth, it won't make any difference to those who'll keep you at arm's length because they expect to find you changed. And you don't want that to be the case; you just want your friends, who you very likely missed while you were away.
Reverse culture shock is all of these things, and yet for me that's not exactly it either. In addition to all of that, there is the sameness of things flattening everything else out. The sameness took the good out of all the modern conveniences that I looked forward to my last week in Africa, trying to console myself at the thought of going home: the long hot showers, the drinking water direct from the tap, the bewildering choice of food, the fast internet, the being able to go out alone after dark. Home is so utterly and crushingly the same, from the instant that you get back here, that all these things are just the same too, unnoticed and unappreciated. I thought I would have forgotten how to drive, or would marvel at the hundreds of choices in Tesco, but I did not. I thought I'd never been able to choose what to eat for lunch, but I just got on with it, and that was what was most upsetting.
No matter how long I'd been in Uganda, no matter how comfortable I felt there, every so often there would come a moment - of beauty, of kindness, of friendship or simply of something random that could only happen in Africa - and you'd jump in your own skin, look around and think - This is amazing. How did this happen? How did I get here? I can't believe this is my life now!
Yesterday, running late for work, lacking change for the bus, getting wet in the rain - that crap Irish half-rain, muggy and humid with mildness - it was my very first day and yet simultaneously so eternally as if I'd never been away. And I looked around and though.... how did this happen? how did I get here? is this really my life?
Because when I thought about where I had been only five days ago - bumping on buses over the Rwandan hills and the Ugandan plains, laughing about nicknames with Jenny and John, being welcomed by the Rwandan border guards who remembered us from passing through on our way the week before, flying on a boda boda through the balmy Ugandan evening, being called Auntie by Mama Sharon and Paul the boda driver, looking at Kampala's twinkling nighttime hills with Paulo, having pizza while surrounded by friends on my sofa, getting ridiculous text messages from Hubert, seeing the tears in Sharon's eyes, guiltily thinking of the people I didn't even get to see before I left, eating chapatti, gossiping over lunch with everyone from the office, listening to the birdsong and the rooster crowing and the call to prayer in the morning, counting banana trees on my way to the airport - I had no idea how I had come from there to here in what seemed like the passing of a few moments. The idea that all of that was over was so deeply upsetting. I wasn't ready for it to end. I still amn't.
I don't know if I'll keep blogging. If I have the time there are stories and thoughts about my last weeks there which I'd like to write about. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of thing which simply loses momentum in the atmosphere of home, although I try to tell myself I'll be different this time. Perhaps this is my last entry, until my next travels; the thought makes me think of the very last anecdote I have from Uganda, and of how perfect - in summing up, and in all the hopes I have for the future - it was.
On my last morning I went to a supermarket to buy an extra bag for my luggage. I took a cheap holdall to the till, where the man whose job is to pack your shopping bags picked it up and turned it over, folded and unfolded it, opened and closed it, and handed it to me as if he'd made it ready for me.
"Thank you please. This is a very good bag," he said, and it wasn't small talk. He really meant it. "You must be planning a journey if you are buying a bag. Eghh. I wish you safe travels ,and good health wherever you will go with it."
