Coming Home - Brief Reflections From Six Months in Uganda

Six more months of living in Uganda, giving me a collective of ten months in the country over the last two years. Kampala, and to some extent the greater environs around the country, have taken on a sense of home rather than a place of temporary residence, even if that’s what they were always going to be. Looking back on my first time in the country and how slowly that time seemed to go, as well as how recent it feels getting dropped off at the airport in the brisk October weather last year, it’s hard to be believe I’ve been away from home for half a year. Trying to reconcile how short this adventure has seemed with the reality of how long six months actually is has been rather difficult to say the least.

One of the hardest – but in my mind, most important – bits of reflection is to combine the professional/career/pragmatic side of my time in Uganda with the overall experience of coming here and being here. I’ve tried to keep a mindset that travel is meant for storytelling, memories, personal growth and reflection, not for career advancement or monetary gain. If the latter happens to occur then you’re god blessed, but I hope I can always move around this globe on my own accord, with a shrug on my shoulders and an attitude of ‘because life’s short, that's why.’

My time with Refugee Law Project was more than I could have asked for or expected. The work challenged me emotionally and mentally, and provided me with more challenges than I needed, but I am grateful for the experience of navigating all of them. The job provided me a platform to travel around this beautiful country multiple times and allowed me to meet a handful of folks whom I will remember and hopefully keep in touch with for years to come.

I gave a presentation on the media and post-conflict recovery in Gulu to members of the national press; attended workshops and conferences in Soroti, Kasese and Kitgum; published public policy pieces in two leading Ugandan outlets; became friends with the former head of internal security and ventured around with him on a few occasions; I met the Honorable Norbert Mao and am in the process of becoming his editor for some of his personal memoirs.

Those experiences have been the dominant aspects of my time in Uganda, and some of the memories I will cherish the most, but they don’t make up the sum of my time here. Far from it. In Zanzibar I dove off boats into the turquoise Indian Ocean. I locked eyes with a lion fresh from a successful hunt in Kiedepo. I fed monkeys in Entebbe and stood under a waterfall in Mbale. I quit smoking (3.5 months now) and got into decent shape again. I made three great friends in my roommates and created relationships with others that started and really only ended because of the happenstance of simply being here, so far away from home.

As I’m typing this I’m looking out my bedroom door into our compound, the sound of Ibis birds and children playing mixing with tree branches lazily swaying in the wind. Earlier in the day I hand washed some dirty clothes and ripped the skin off my thumbs ringing them dry; even after 10 months, I haven’t mastered the art.
 

But in less than 48 hours, I’ll be getting on a plane back home. This Friday I’ll be in Harrisonburg with some of my best friends, and Saturday I’ll be fighting through the consequences of international travel and culture shock while aggressively taking part in the Rockingham Beer Festival. In less than two weeks I start a new job, and in 20 days I’ll go on my first family vacation in over three years.

It’s hard to imagine and impossibly exciting to prepare for.

Sipi Falls: Pictures From a Final Vacation in Africa's Pearl

My roommates and I spent the Easter holiday on Mt. Elgon, taking in the views of Sipi Falls from the Crow's Nest, a quiet but lively hostel not far from the border with Kenya. Given a day off either side of the weekend - Easter is serious business here - it seemed like every mzungu in Uganda converged on the touristy spots throughout the country. We met some great folks, including a group of Peace Corps volunteers whose Uganda experience is so diametrically opposed to mine that it's shocking we all live in the same country, as well as two brodudes from Manhattan who happened to be some of the smartest and funniest people I've met here.

I traveled to Sipi my first time in Uganda and it will always be a special place for me on the merits of its sheer beauty alone. I've decided in the unlikely chance I want to go through the motions of marriage, Sipi is where I'll propose; I'd tell you to run for the hills, ladies, but if we're on Sipi there isn't much higher you'll be able to climb. Here are some pictures from the weekend there, more than likely not taken by myself.

My roommate JC and I split a ride up the mountain with a group of South Korean expats about our age. One of them asked us, within three minutes of getting in the car, if we liked to drink. JC and I appreciated his bluntness and the beauty of cultural differences. Here I am, staring at them as they take pictures of trees down the road. 

On our first night on Mt. Elgon we went to a restaurant on the side of the mountain with a ridiculous view of the Rift Valley stretching through eastern Uganda. Not a bad place to have a few beers and watch the sun set:

On the walk down the quiet, dark, and rather remote road back to the hostel, JC decided to surprise Sara and I by running past us in the dark like a god damn madman. He is a lovable maniac. 

The next day we hiked Sipi:

There's a 100 percent chance people do their laundry upstream from these waterfalls, not to mention every water-based parasite that could find its way into your body. But you're not going to pass up the chance to get in the water, right?

An Atlantic User Comment Shatters My Conception of Love and What It Means to Love

Erik Vanderhoff has completely reversed the paradigm that is internet user comments in one fell swoop, having written what I consider with no exaggeration or melodrama to be one of the most beautiful bits of prose I've read in a long while. Responding to an article about marriage, he overshadows the genius that is Ta-Nehisi Coates with the following words:

I met my wife when I was 23 (she was 26), and somehow managed to convince her to accompany me on a date three months before my 24th birthday. We were engaged by the time I was 26, married when I was 27. Every important step, save perhaps one, of my journey in to manhood has been at her side.

I had not dated a lot by age 23, but I had had some formative experiences: The one you pursued and who pursued you, but then you realized you were wrong for each other. The one you desperately wanted to adore you back and did not. The one you made your first bumbling steps into lust and passion with. The one you were with because you were lonely. The one you were with because you were horny and selfish and, twelve years later, regret deceiving. And, most importantly, the one you thought you were going to marry because you could not imagine loving anyone more than her.

First loving my wife was all of those emotions and lusts and passions made physical and manifested with an intensity that burned my sanity to the ground. Every single youthful conception of love was rendered into ash by her reality. I knew it with amazing clarity at my young age, one of the few moments of cosmic lucidity I have ever experienced, mirrored only by the utter poleaxe to my soul that came with first sight of my children.

To a reasonable extent, I have no issues publicly sharing my limited and sometimes painful experiences in love. We all have them, there's no reason my story can't be your's, as well. That's what we as people universally do: Share our experiences in the hopes that some are mirrored in others, because at times nothing is more comforting than a commonality that lets you know how normal you are in simply being human.

I thought I knew what love is; I still do, just through the lens that is my personal experience and my perceptions of friends and family who realize love through one another. My idea of love, however, and my badge of that love leaving me, were mocked mercifully by Mr. Vanderhoff and his ability to write about a feeling I can't imagine elucidating, even if I had felt it.

I know those stages of experience - to date out of boredom, loneliness, convenience, or simply as something to do because it's different from what you've been doing. I've had my knees buckle at the realization of  love for another, and I've felt the crush of the weight of the world on my shoulders when that love up and left.

But to have my "every single youthful conception of love rendered into ash by her reality"? It's hard to reflect on your past emotions to find something that compares to those words. Have I felt that? Perhaps the answer lies in simply asking the question. Or maybe it's just the first time I've seen the concept of love manifest so simply and wonderfully into words.

What is love for me now? Love is seeing my family and friends in 13 days. Love is soaking in the rest of these experiences in a foreign country that has become home. Love is this song. These things I can understand, fumble into coherent thoughts, analyze into some form of context or greater meaning. Mr. Vanderhoff's reality of love? I'm looking forward to feeling an emotion so dense in its own greatness that you can't fathom it without experiencing it firsthand.

That feeling that can't be reckoned with until you've lived it is one that I think is summed well in the notion that you shouldn't waste your time, or the time of another, if you answer 'yes' to the following question: Could you live without them? I'm not sure what I would have answered if given that question a few years ago. It  wouldn't have been something I would have wanted to consider.

When I wasn't given the choice anymore, when it was made for me without my consent, I spent a lot of time wondering 'what next'? I spent a lot of time on the bottle, feeling sorry for myself. But I lived; I've lived more in the time since that love left than I ever did when I had it. There was no other choice, and there won't be a different one until my conceptions are turned into ash by the presence of another.