Notes from the Pacific

I took my last malaria pill tonight. That means it's been 81 days since that first night in Doha, dozing in a chair and conversing awkwardly with American missionaries headed, like me, for places they'd only read about. That also means it's been 30 days, give or take a few missed doxycyclines, since I returned. The danger of bloodborne parasites has passed. Africa, one might say, is out of my system.

But of course it isn't. My room, like my head, is full of mementos from my trip: Zanzibari scarves folded on the corner of my desk here in Honolulu, a hand-painted card from Dar's museum beside the computer, the skirt I had tailor-made from kitenge fabric hanging in my closet. My wandering thoughts and eyes both frequently come to rest on notions of Tanzania. But the card remains unsent; I never could figure out for whom it seemed right. The skirt I've only worn once--its bold, waxy print just feels out of place, and besides, the fit is a little off. And the unworn scarves sit in mockery of my ignorance of both the city in which I bought them and the one into which I have since moved; neither, in any season, is cool enough to facilitate their wear.

I haven't decided what to do with these things. I don't yet know all that my experience really meant, or what, besides a few scarves, I should take away. The residue of that trip has also inadvertently become a part of my foundation here in Hawaii, as I've been adjusting to my new situation even while ruminating on my recent past. The two have already blended in at least one respect; I am designing a Swahili course with one of my professors (UH offers an amazing array of languages for study, but Swahili happens to not usually be one of them.) Who knows; maybe I'll find myself back in East Africa for research someday. Perhaps my new life as a grad student is actually just an indirect and incredibly expensive continuation of this experience.

At least for right now, though, I'm just an island-bound student bobbing in the gentle wake of my first week of classes. Despite the fact that everything has been incredibly easy so far, though, I often have the creeping feeling that I'm some sort of impostor, that I'm not smart enough to be here with all these amazing students and that sooner or later someone else is going to catch on to this. Sure, it's not really true, but something about the thousands of hours of serious labor that I put into my undergrad degree, only to discover that none of it was enough to distinguish me to employers, eroded my confidence a little. I'm working on getting it back; maybe this is where I'm supposed to apply some lessons from Tanzania. In the meantime, I'll take a lesson in humility.

Well. It's late here on my watery slice of the globe. The streetlights are reflecting off the shiny wet blackness of my post-rain lanai, a reproduction in miniature of the stars on the ocean that I can see from the top of my block. It's unlikely that I'll arrive at any sort of concrete answers to my musings any time soon, but I think it's healthy to keep my memories of Tanzania out where I can actively interpret and integrate them into this latest Hawaiian episode. Now I just need to figure out what to do with these scarves.