I’ve been looking at my travel pictures a lot recently. We
all have them, the tangible memories on film serving as a record of our time in
a foreign land. My first trip out of the United States was to Uganda in the
summer of 2011, where I volunteered for four months with an NGO operating
outside of Kampala. As I’m preparing to go back for another six months, my
flight leaving in a few weeks, I’ve been looking at those pictures and thinking
about the role our memories play in the decisions we make.
During my time in Uganda the decreasing amount of malaria
pills I had to take marked how close I was to going back home. I longed so much
for the comforts of something familiar that I barely allowed myself to enjoy the
environment where I worked. Perhaps part of the reason I’m going back is to
allow that immersion to happen, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened on my last day in Uganda.
It was the middle of the October rainy season, 2011. The local staff and I held
English lessons inside the cramped classroom where we worked, and after a
soccer game finished I took them out for a Congolese lunch. Later in the day I walked
uphill on the rocky and uneven path from my house, passed a shirtless and
sweaty man using a pickaxe on a particularly beaten intersection of the road,
and headed to the nearest shop selling cell phone minutes. As I paid for the
minutes with red and purple Ugandan shillings, the village drunk sitting at a
nearby outdoor bar began stammering to me. It was late afternoon, although
there was never a time too early for him to take swigs from his Waragi. It wasn’t our first encounter,
and I wanted to get back to the house.
As I tried to take my minutes and leave, he asked me if I
would take a sick child to the US Embassy. I could see the desperation in his
eyes and could tell how hard he was trying to fight the consequences of heavy
drinking in the afternoon sun. On another day I would sit and joke with him
over his requests for me to tour his house or stroke his ego as he talked about
his military service, but this time I wasn’t in the mood for him or the child
he purported needed help. I brushed him off and started walking back home,
watching my sandals kick up tiny bursts of dust at every step. The man with the
pickaxe asked for money as I walked by him on the road he was working on. I
ignored him and kept my eyes on the dust plumes, and he snickered at me as I walked
by.
Inside the house, I
called my ex-girlfriend, who I had traveled with at the beginning of my trip,
and who I was still very much in love with,
despite how painfully obvious it was that she no longer felt the same
way. I relayed my encounters to and from the shop to her and smiled when she wished
me safe travels back home. A few hours later I got on a plane and left, unaware
I would return less than a year later.
At the age of 22, that trip held a lot of firsts for me. It
was my first time in a foreign country; my first time bribing a government
official; my first real understanding of what the words “refugee” and
“privilege” mean; and my first realization that love is not always
reciprocated. There were a lot of reasons I decided to take that first plunge
into travel, no small part owed to needing to escape the confines of a desk job
and hopelessly chasing after a girl.
It has taken me a while to figure out why I’m going back
again. The program I worked for is
adequately prepared with interns and local staff and has made great strides in
the months since I departed. Due to the work of M23 in Eastern DR Congo our
program numbers have swelled, but my reemergence, while welcomed by the staff,
is not necessary to the survival of the program. There is no girl to chase
after, and a brief visit could help reconnect friendships I miss.
If we are to accept Cesare Pavese’s assertion that
“Traveling is a brutality” - and I am in no position to argue - then why go
back? Why do any of us return to a life of uncertainty, financial strife and lack
of permanence? For what reason do we return to the scene of the drunk and his
unrealistic demands or the spot where our hearts showed their fragility? Satisfaction
with daily life has to be better than chasing your past or searching for the
foundation of your future. If traveling is a brutality, partaking in it must be
a form of masochism.
My first night abroad, before heading to Kampala, was in a
small hostel in Nairobi with the girl I was chasing after in a bed next to
mine. Foolishly I had thought our week of travel would bring us back together. Struggling
with my mosquito net, I was jet lagged, confused and overwhelmed. I could smell
my sweat and Nairobi’s burning trash mixing and clinging to me. I tried to bring
up the past with the girl next to me, but she quickly changed the subject. I felt trapped and needed to leave the room
that was feeling increasingly smaller.
After untangling the mosquito net that was suffocating me in
bed I stumbled through the dark to a garden and smoked a cigarette on a bench
in the comforting heat that is Kenya in late June, panicking over how the next
week would play out between us. When I returned inside she unexpectedly crawled
into my bed, and we held each other for a minute that feels like it only just
let up.
The reason we go back, the answer to the question of “why”
is simple: Our memories and experiences dictate the decisions we make. We go
back because of what Milan Kundera calls a “poetic memory”, a memory that
illuminates the beauty of what we have lived though and makes moments worth chasing.
The acknowledgement of rejected love still lingers, but so
does the memory of infinite bliss felt in a moment inside a Nairobi hostel. The
annoyance with the local drunk hasn’t dissipated, but neither has the raw,
vulnerable humanity heard in his pleading voice. That solicitation for money from
the shirtless man with the pickaxe is stale, but you recognize the hard work
that demands respect and appreciation.
We place priority on what matters the most and choose the context
in which we remember what we want to re-live. I’m going back because I choose
to remember the infinite bliss, the humanity, and the admiration of another’s
hard work.
We hang on to what we want to hold and chase what we want to
keep.
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