Searching for Home

(As a prelude, I seem to have included the wrong link in the last blog. Please check out Rubanga? at http://jamestravels.com/rubanga/issue_1.pdf.)



Driving away from Gulu the other day, I kept rotating my thoughts. Sometimes I would stare at a tree, a camp, a hut, a group of children playing, the Nile, all of these things that I see, and try to fix it permanently as some image I would see at every moment when I close my eyes. Sometimes I would try to joke around and talk with Peter Abiyo trying to confirm and explore the already considerable impression that he has made on me. Other moments were spent scanning back over the past year--images, ideas and actions all sprawling out and coming at me at random times. And of course, sometimes I just stared. Like when I looked at the clouds and marveled at the incomparable majesty that is an African sky at its highest. Echoes of people danced about in my ears and I attempted to understand how I would not see them and how they meant to me as I sorted through the words they gave me when I left about how I had affected them.

I've been preparing to leave almost ever since I got to Uganda. That's what you're supposed to do. If your work is temporary, you know that you must leave and in your space, ideally, you must leave a world better for your having been there and not suffering for your having left. This doesn't mean that you don't let the place affect you in real lasting ways , and it still fills my heart and it still makes me long, already, to return. Even as I sit in Kampala, not even on the plane, not even at the airport yet. My work here has been such that I have made it the focus of my time. I have built relationships and experiences alongside it, and considered both of those integral parts of my work, but I have been running since the word "go." As such, I kept the pace until "stop" could be also be heard.

I don't know that I've been able to prepare myself adequately for leaving Uganda. I even have some work to do today (I fly out at three) And it's hard to break the habit of that and let my mind attempt to digest everything. There are uncountable things I'd love to say to everyone I meet, but my head has not yet fully formed the words. I hope that everything comes out in the sentiments of what I do manage to say, and in my actions louder than anything. When I look at my friends and prepare to say goodbye, there eyes seem to shine that it does.

I'm going to try to still spill out a few stories here, things that I have neglected to tell. And I can't guess at what will happen on the way home. I can hardly even think of home adequately. I'll be there soon, or wherever it is that I call home when people ask where it is. It's a difficult location to imagine--one place holding the anchor to my life. I can't really say where home is, if I'm going there, or how I might be ready to see it again. I've left it and I'm going there. Even San Diego is in many ways simply a place where home used to be. I'll see, and try to tell, what it looks like when I find it.