In the Bag: Arrival in Bagamoyo

We have arrived. Down the hot and dusty roads. Past both laughing and stormy faces. Under a scowling hot sun. And what a landing it was!

After an overnight flight to Nairobi and a bright, hot little puddle jump, we arrived in Dar at 9am in the morning. The sun was low but already molten and we sweat through our clothes before we even reached customs. After securing our Visas in a slow-moving, craggy little customs office, we finally walked out into a blistering, swaying Tanzanian morning.

I had not been feeling well the last 12 hours of flying and turned up weak and a little worse for the wear. We had been introduced via email to a friend of a friend who we had been told would greet us at the airport. As we arrived reluctantly prepared to venture a try at Kiswahili to negotiate on an inflated mzungu price for a  cab, our new friend was waiting smiling at the doors. We were so glad to see his friendly face we almost fell all over each other. Over 30 hours of travel dissipated instantly into euphoria as he drove us through Dar, dodging skirted jaywalkers carrying bananas on their heads, bicycle carts, old buses or “dala dalas” full to the brim with glistening faces and severe eyes. Our friend Omar spoke in a slow and lovely accent, explaining every sight as we passed , and we all laughed out loud at the crazy Tanzanian drivers, listless policemen and throngs of people  casually crossing the road without hurry or apology. We arrived at his house, a beautiful, sandy-colored home with a leafy garden, a spacious white interior and…air conditioning! We sunk into comfortable chairs with glasses of clean cold water thinking we had died and gone to heaven. A fan cast its steady, beating shadow across the white walls. Omar was having breakfast prepared for us. I thought for sure I was the luckiest person alive.

Omar, a native Tanzanian, a stranger when we arrived, became an instant friend. He had an unassuming sense of humor and extensive knowledge about just about everything in Tanzania. He insisted kindly on driving us all the way to our destination, coastal Bagamoyo, along with his brother in law to be who was visiting. As we drove the paved but ribbed road up the coast, our unslept eyes could hardly absorb all the things we saw. If only every snapshot could live forever in my mind. Shanty markets with full wooden walls stacked with fruit, fabrics, and other wares. Buckets upon buckes of newly ripened mangoes for a dollar or two a bucket. Children running joyously in bare feet in citrus colored dust. Dark faces and long bodies lounging in the shade of doorways watching the traffic roll by. Tattered sheets for doors waving in the hot breeze. Men at work in the sun hammering, sawing, whittling or hauling goods in the sun. Each side of the highway was like a cut right down the middle of an isolated, bustling African village, with giant mansions belgoing to foreigners and a few very wealthy locals looming empty in the background.

When we at last arrived in Bagamoyo, we set out to find out village school, Nianjema. To do this, Omar would simply flag someone down from the car window every half mile or so and ask, after an extensive greeting in Swahili, their take on directions to the school. Many renditions, corrections, beautiful Swahili words and small detours later, the car bumped down the dirt road to the school past curious eyes.

Almost steaming in the heat of the afternoon, the school was a series of small white buildings around an open courtyard. A few school elders lounged on the stairway. They knew little of our arrival and so we were glad to find Sylvie and Ian, our starcrossed friends who had been at the school for four months, in a classroom doorway. Ian and I had gone to high school together, and by seeing a random, chance posting on facebook about the school, had discovered a few months earlier that we and our significant others were going to volunteer at the same little school in Africa. Sylvie and Ian had helped us prepare by email and their blog posts, and they would prove to be great friends and vital resourcse for introducing us to African life. Sometimes, when you decide to dive a bit to deep into a pool where you cant see the bottom, life appreciates the gesture and throws you a lifeline. They were unmistakably ours.

We got settled into the home of the school’s founder, Charlie in the spare room with Sylvie and Ian. The house is cement and white, with open screen windows, whirring fans and small lizards legging their way up the walls outside. After a good 20 minutes of starting at each other blankly and sweating in the living room, Sylvie and Ian took us down the twisting path into town for some mango juice.

In African villages, the paths wind right through and all around people’s homes and dust yards. Some can afford cooler cement block houses but most are outside of their mud huts with thatch roofs cooking over a small fire. After a few days, we have begun to get used to the spectacle that we cause every time we travel anywhere down these paths, past peeping eyes, children’s laughs and a wide variety of faces, greetings, and grunts. Most often, the children will up from their play and get to peeping with wide eyes, jumping up and down chanting “Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!” (meaning, white person). We respond with smiles and  “Mambo” (whats going on), and the local reply is “”Poa” (cool). “Mzungu!”’s will come flying at us, even from unseen children shouting from windows. The adults will address us politely with Swahili hellos and sometimes Karibu, welcome or you are welcome here. Some glower at us, some mutter insults in Swahili or jest at us . But every time, even badly disguised in local Konga skirts or mumus we are much like the traveling circus!

Over the last few days , Ian and Sylvie have shown us African life. Scott and I have struggled to adjust to the heat, which never leaves you with a dry brow or a cool morning in the height of the African summer. But we are beginning to manage and with Ian and Sylvie’s wonderful guidance, we have been doused in African language, culture and comings and goings. We visited the beach, ate at local huts, drank Tanzanian beer, lounged out on the porch in the evenings with the mango trees rustling to our conversation. Yesterday, they took us for lunch at the home of an African family, who graciously cooked rice, beef and beans for us, prompting and helping us through our Swahili. Ian and Sylvie’s Swahili is quite good after their months here and they have learned fast. Scott and I on the other hand just stared blankly and smiling at the mother, who spoke no English but spoke to us kindly and repeated her questions slowly for us, allowing us to repeat every syllable, while her children translated in English. We ate with our hands of course, although occasionally forgetting to only eat with our right hands as is customary. They were patient with our awkward Swahili greetings, asked us things about where we were from and poked fun of us good naturedly. We took pictures of all of us together in the living room and Scott taught one of the sons to use the camera, which he took to like a pro and wanted to carry it around proudly with it around his neck.  “This day, I like it very much.“ The father said, patting us on the backs and telling us not to bother calling before we come visit, as we are always welcome there. Their son was one of the students at the school and Sylvie and Ian finished showing him how to send an email on their laptop out in the yard under a thatch hut. A small crowd of village children gathered, most of them not knowing what they were looking at but patiently gawking at the small computer screen and squeezing in to see.
After the computer lesson, the father asked if we would like a walk to the beach. Of course we could not refuse and so in lines of two or three we wound our way through the villages and down to the beach, each member of the family paired with one of us in engaging conversation. As I chatted with the son who was a student of Nianjema in slow English, he reminded me softly when a pikipiki (a motorcycle) would approach us to get off far to the left on the small dirt roads as the pikipikis have priority and can be very dangerous to pedestrians. His younger brother who was about five walked spritely in between us as we walked away from the setting sun. He had not learned English, so he could not understand me but I occasionally addressed him anyway, just to see him smile at me happily, satisfied to walk with us attentively into this cooling African afternoon. I heard Scott talking about Africa behind me with the father. We twisted and turned on paths through the village that we might never feel comfortable enough to venture by ourselves, and from time to time I thought we were going to walk right through the cooking fire of one of the neighbors. The locals watched silently as we passed, the Maela family and their Mzungu friends. As we got closer to the sea you could feel it in the breeze, lifting the heat off of your skin just enough for you to notice, and the palm trees thickened, edged with the setting sun. The older son and I continued our conversation as we neared the beach, with the youngest in between us. Just when I had forgotten the heat and realized how special this afternoon was, the youngest reached up and took my hand - and held it, with arm stretched up above his little head as I was much taller than him, all the way to the sea.

Into the Arms of Amsterdam.

Have you ever seen the Disney cartoon Mulan? Where the heroine decides to join the Chinese army in place of her father, masquerading as a man? I feel a little like she might on her first day, waking up before boot camp begins. "Day...One."

My bags are packed, my blackberry is back in New York, and it took me way longer than it should have to figure out the captain was speaking dutch and that I wasn't simply unable to comprehend my native language.

I'm almost off the map, baby. I've turned off the spiggot of my life. And now its just about taking it as it comes - straight up, on the rocks.

Our first overnight flight is behind us and we will soon wait for the second in the Amsterdam airport for about 9 hours. I fared pretty well, thanks to my right hand man, Tylenol PM. Scott, who is wearing that sleep-deprived, wide-eye swim goggles look, not so much. Getting ready for landing, we are heading into one of those pocky, perturbing patches of turbulence that, when strong enough to send a massive jetliner skating erratically on atmospheric ice, often leaves you gripped and negotiating with God for more than a few seconds.  And after you hit clear, open air once again on the other side, you feel like the idiot who hit the deck in a nice restaurant at the sound of a champagne bottle popping close by. Especially judging from the undisturbed eyemasks of the frequent international passengers around you. Hehe - why no, I was certainly not terrified for my life just then (teeth could cut a dinner plate). Sinking lower in my chair...


But the sun is up (although wearing very gray, wet clothes) and the day is in full swing in Amsterdam. Never have I had such an appreciation for having a partner along on a well-planned wandering off like this trip (and we are about to wander quite far)--especially a partner of such patience and brevity in times of squalor. Without him, I might have talked myself convincingly out of this at the gate, or worse yet, slept through all of my free meals on the plane. This morning, I have decided that there is truly no one better to have along in a prickly patch than Scott. And I get the feeling things are about to get prickly. That is of course if I live through this next microcell on our way in for a landing.

The Get Out of Town Countdown....

No wonder how long you wait for something, it still comes right up on you like a bedecked Christmas party guest you thought for sure wouldn’t show. But you knew it was coming. You planned it with mind-numbing care, you nursed it from a seedling over coffee, you budgeted for all its possible pitfalls, and you gave it all kinds of impertinent names with arm-candy adjectives like “grand”, “eye-opening” and “life-defining”. But even so, even slowly, it has prowled up on your plans as if uninvited, ready to spread its feathers, one at a time, and give you the adventure you asked for.

The day is fast approaching, with a signature New York City snowstorm precariously greasing its tracks. When my flight arrived at a frost-flecked La Guardia, flanked in dirty but determined snow drifts, I surprised myself by feeling nothing but displacement. Otherwise known as anxiety masked in pure confusion and denial. Six months worth of clothing, emergency medication, good luck charms, my own weight in feminine products and quick-dry-just-about-everything made the final cut and were rolled into a big red backpack. In true mammalian self-preservationist fashion, I spent the final days in Colorado obsessively labeling already labeled over-the-counter medication and counting the number of poisonous snake species in each country rather than telling my supportive friends and family how much I honored their presence in my life and how every word they said would hang in my head once I had crossed the border. My parents pasted over any fear or doubt they knew my hawk heart would be looking for and waved me goodbye, casually and quickly, with a “you’ll be fine” hug. My siblings saluted from their parting posts and in their own ways gave me the greatest gift of their unfaltering confidence. My friends turned up at every turn to tip their hat to a trip they knew would bring me back transformed, wholeheartedly willing to accept whatever version of me came back in my place. Meanwhile, I nobly focused most of my last week’s energy mentally bemoaning the small child howling behind me, squawking about hidden foreign conversion fees and fussing over the percentage of germs that competing hand sanitizers claim to eliminate. And all this, I have concluded, is what takes me successfully to the brink. Without it, I might flounder in those last days of comfort and familiarity, until I am flayed out over the things I might (and I will) miss - a rat asleep in a puddle of sweet wine.

Soon, its to the trenches… to the truth or to the trails that will lead us head-on toward the unexpected.

Dear Universe,

Up here on the roof I can't see a damn thing

I'm shivering in the dark and want to go inside

I'm a thin reed in the early winter mountain wind

I am as we all are, so unknowingly

within inches of my life

blind to the mere footfalls from the edge

but taking in a phantom powder moon

over a sweet potato sky,

on its knees singing arias over every second of our lives.

Please Prepare for Take Off

To prepare: One who, or that which, prepares, fits, or makes ready. To make things or oneself ready.

A month and a half on the clock before our plane departs for Africa. Winter has moved in downstairs. Our jobs are drawing up the resignation paperwork. Our things have been bagged, escorted across the country and stuffed away at our parent's houses. Our hearts are heavy as we cut small everyday losses to make room for such an adventure - little goodbyes and big ones, the last rites of our routines, closing the shop doors on years of New York minutes. But we know that the adventure is waiting at the door.

In school when I didn’t know where to start or how to move forward with a paper, a story or a thesis, I was told to take out the dictionary. Start with a word that will define your paper and then define it. Seek and absorb its full definition, that which aims at its essence over the course of its life in the English language or the languages before that. Break up the fibers of a word into its syllables, class, conjugations and historical contexts and soon you will see the nuances of its nervous system – a network of meanings, multiples and interpretations. Once you have understood its energy – one that can never be fully captured due to the elusive and coy, shifting nature of language –you can use it to propel you forward into the pages that follow. Start with the definition of one word and the rest will fall into place. Like footfalls on a long journey after the first… purposeful… step.

Life is very much like language. Seeking to capture, understand and describe that which ultimately cannot be. But how very close we come. And before we can grasp the whole of it by the tail it slips from our fingers… but not before we’ve reveled in the richness of what we’ve learned so far.

And so I’ll start with the word I am seeking that defines this less-than-sacred space I have crossed into: prepare. This is a room of mirrors reflecting illusions that appear to be real and familiar but are already fading into fallen footsteps on a road already travelled. The carpeted rooms of my childhood home, my old bronze maxima in the driveway, the trappings of this comfortable Colorado life bumped up against the steel spires of downtown New York, the rumble of subway cars, the delirious delight of evening cocktails around a crowded bar.

To prepare: To make things or oneself ready. To make ready beforehand for a specific purpose. To put together or make by combining various elements or ingredients. To fit out; equip. To lead up to and soften.

To make things ready. Shots, clothes, passports, VISAs, medications, notifications, communications.

To make oneself ready. Expectations, goodbyes, hellos, compromises, doubts, hopes, I wonder ifs. Agreements with yourself you know you might not be able to keep. Balking at your own courage.

For a specific purpose. To find, understand and share meaning. Teach, learn. Learn, teach. ARRIVE. Arrive into my own life and into that of others. Start something. Anything. Become.

To equip. For a game I don’t yet know how to play. With things that will mean very little next to the new tools that the world is about to demand that I discover.

To soften. The threads of the heart on the alter of the unknown. To allow. To hunt for knowledge and then relinquish it. To negotiate for terms, guarantees and assurances only to end up signing it all away in exchange for adventure. To embrace the pieces of the journey that belong to you…and befriend the pieces that don’t.

Its not much. But it’s a start.

Its my party, and I'll cry if I want to

In New York, every life transition, birthday, good day, bad day or anything else worth mentioning, is marked with a party. A glass of wine over dinner, an outdoor café with friends, a little bubbly with coworkers, or whatever’s in a can at the nearest dive bar with the people that make a New York afternoon so much better. In just a few days, there will be a party for me – one that says, this party’s over.

If I look hard, I can still find the girl that came here three years ago, the one that looked like me and used my name. She’s still there and sometimes late at night I can hear her breathe. I can still feel her heart flutter at the lights of midtown rising at the feet of the Queensborough bridge one late, cold March night. I can still taste the sweet sweat and the iron blood of a city that births dreams and suffocates them all in the same breath. I can still hear the non-sound that Wall Street made as it fell in the bleary winter days of 2009 just a few streets down from our vanquished yet shiny new glass office building – just a silent settling of dust on the shoulders of the nicest suits in town. I can still remember the bright, grainy days of pitted concrete and perfect blue glass when I wondered if this was real – all of this, was this actually real. And I can still see my barely-made New York friends through an empty, foggy bottle of vodka from the floor of my newly rented apartment the day they told us my brother had cancer. It is those friends, and those lights, and that same non-sound that I must prepare to say goodbye to now.

If there were words that existed that could capture all the people I have met here –those I have loved, those who I have missed, those who I have learned from, adored, admired, frowned at and observed from close range – then I would use those words now. But they escape me. Evade me in disguise when called upon but fill me with the magnetic presence of their many subjects just the same. Because I – I am not the same.

People come to New York to own it – and they lease it instead. They come to meet new people – and meet themselves instead. They come to live their dream – and reinvent their dream to live… or live even beyond their dream instead. They (like me) come here shirking sadness like drugstore robbers on the interstate…and leave with that same uniformed sadness turned outlaw. Sadness dressed up nice and living out loud. Garnished generously with some of the best friends and best moments you’ve ever had in your life.

I’ve had the last of my shots now, the last of my chances to turn back and the last of those once coveted doors close softly. I wanted Africa, now I’ve got it. A one way ticket and one hell of an excel spreadsheet. Like tinfoil onto a fire – throw me in. Send me there by his side and see if I believe myself long enough to remember why I went in the first place. When will I return and as whom? It’s anyone’s guess and my best kept secret from myself.

But one thing is for certain. Like a long-time lover, I could not have lived without you New York. I could not have faced the world without your bawdy, exhilarating touch. Could not have arm-wrestled with my sorry, broken sense of self without your thick-lipped, relentless demands and your late night flirtations with my sanity. Could not have died a slow, senseless death before opening my eyes to some unrecognizable, surprisingly capable human being, bearing my very own name and my old college T-shirts. Could not have known life, jeered at life, done time with life, fell at life’s knees and even saved a life without you…my New York.

So lets you and I drink up the last drop, bring down the house and hold each other close before slinking away into the dark. One more round and one more toast to those who have saved me, most of all from myself. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Water Watchers

There are benches on the east river where you can watch the sun come up. Or, if you’re like me, you can witness the sun going down without watching. Like a canary in a covered cage knows its morning, you’ll suddenly find yourself in the near dark and the East River has lost its sheen without warning. You’re most definitely being eaten by mosquitos. And there’s nothing funny about these moments. You’re crying and you know why, somewhere deep down, but you don’t know what to say about it – if it needs fixing or rethinking or just plain sleeping it off. Everyone notices you crying, even in the half dark, the runners behind you, the sleepy homeless beside you, the cell phone girls wafting around you, they all know you’re crying and they look at you like construction workers do at an unusually short and uncalled-for sparkly skirt on a Tuesday morning. It’s not the choices you had planned on but they are the ones you knew you had to make all along. Because you’re you. And you’d rather be dipped in disillusionment then constantly disappointed by boredom. There are no brakelights when you’re breaking the speed limit, every screeching corner bringing your wheels closer to what you think you’re afraid of.

New York city. No where to run. No where to hide. No where to cry in peace. No space of your own to feel your earlobes fill with blood and your body ask you softly where you’ve come and how you got here. Its just you and…new York city. Here together. And you haven’t forgiven each other. And you haven’t told each other how you feel. Even though you know goodbye is hanging in the wings. Once the curtain falls. Once the light disappears on the west side while you drop your gaze into the lightless East River. Once your eyes grow tired of your own reflection. Once the lights of downtown grow lightless in your heart and render you sightless in their glare. Tonight you’ll lay down next to the lover who’s soon to be long lost – a city that will never speak your name again as if you never haunted its walls. And you will come to realize that it wasn’t your name it called out on those un-lonely nights. It was its own.

The boardwalk grows dark but never cool on a sweltering July night. The hot garbage splayed out under the FDR grows sour fingers on the warm wind. Was it solitude you escaped here for? Was it meditation, contemplation or were you simply visiting fantasy’s gravesite in the dark, moving like an urban ghost along with the sub-80-degrees mid-summer runners. Whatever you came for, you find nothing but the uncanny feeling of being watched constantly by the living. Not even the darkness on the east river can excuse you from an unraveled, uncontemplated appearance – for a moment in your life that you visibly didn’t prepare for. Long Island City lends no skyline and no soundtrack as you hang your elbows over the railing, in hopes that the angle and the darkness will shield you from the prying eyes that pass behind. Shield you from the non-view of your life that you cherish, snub and ignore. And then it comes.

The skirt around your legs opens to let in a hot wind and the curious bugs on its breeze. The moment you came for. All the boats already swallowed by the dusk. The runners steeped in sightless sweat. The water-watchers sweatered in expected silence on the stoop of shore-less swells – under the eyes of an expressionless evening. Nothing escapes us and our unseeing eyes. Like falcons riding the hot summer air, we bear the blood we seek. It is we who haunt the sidewalks that we fear the most. We are the watched, the watchers and the watchless. We are New York City.