In mourning...again

We just got news that another friend is being asked to leave Elsewhere. This friend has spent the last five decades teaching, working with orphans, leading girl scouts and giving of herself to a country that has given her less than a week to leave.

Put this in perspective: Imagine a parent or grandparent (she is in her seventies) being uprooted from their friends and family. Posessions accumulated since the 1960s have to be sorted through and discarded unless they are small enough to fit in one of a few suitcases. Hundreds of goodbyes will have to remain unsaid because there simply isn't enough time. Every meal will be with loved ones and there still won't be enough time. (And there hasn't been a shipment of good food imports in months anyway). Favorite places will have to remain unvisited because even if there was time, the permits to travel would never be granted. "This will be the last time I..." echoes. Absolute exhaustion hits even before getting on the plane. Tears will have to wait until Germany when the flight over the Atlantic will start. Sure, the move will be to a place where the language is understood but will never really be home.

I guess what hurts most is that there is simply nothing I can do to help solve the problems going on there.

PS - I just found out that another friend, born in Elsewhere but now an American, has been imprisoned since Oct. 4. He has two children and an American wife who are both currently in the US.

One step forward...

For the last several weeks, I have been writing. A lot. That thesis that should have been finished nearly a decade ago is progressing and regressing at remarkable speeds. Some days I will write nearly three hours worth of material, only to edit it down by a third. And while I realize I shouldn't be so self-critical, it's tough not to when I reread errors in logic or see that the rabbit chase I just went on really has nothing to do with Ngugi - the subject of my research.

At the same time, I'm really enjoying it. The ideas, too topic-specific to bore you with here, are stretching me. They are also spilling over to my own feelings of Elsewhere and Africa as a whole. I find myself moving back and forth from a "western culture is horrible" to "yeah, but not everything/one who travels to Africa is negative".

This, and hearing about some of our friends being kicked out of Elsewhere, has really crept into my dreams. I'm in one of those phases where I wake up sometimes more mentally and emotionally exhausted than when I went to bed. But it's a good kind of exhaustion. It's usually cathartic and sometimes even valuable for my paper. This can spur me on a bit to actually want to write more. What this also means is that I can't spend quite as much time with @ as I'd like to.

The boy is really becoming quite fun. He pottied using his chair for the first time the other day. He's developing a real sense of humor. He is finally using some basic sentences - even if his vocabulary is a combination of real and his own words (he doesn't use "farm," but "EIO" and "I'm sorry" is conveyed by stroking to arm of whomever he hurt and repeating "nice"). Hopefully, I'll have my work finished by Thanksgiving so I can spend some American time with him.

We're still looking at a move to Asia in late January.

A favorite place

This is one of my favorite places on Eastern's campus. It's a silly sculpture and I can only imagine how much it cost. But I like it.

Just a photo

A quick photo of Elsewhere. I'm working on a major paper about Africa and I think that the writing, along with a desire to be finished so we can move on to Asia, and news about our friends making me a bit...homesick.