The theme of my journey and first few days here has been comparing every sight, sound, and feeling to my first journey into Africa three years ago. When I was getting ready to leave I kept thinking to myself, “how can I feel just as nervous all over again? Haven’t I been through all of this before?” Like an athlete resuming a harsh training regimen after months of an off-season, however, I felt like my field-researcher-muscles were severely out of shape. Three years is a long time to allow oneself to forget all of the lessons learned after only six months of living in East Africa. It is not long enough, however, to forget many of the obstacles I faced while there. I knew a repeat of similar circumstances would be inevitable, and I stayed up many nights wondering if I would still have the disposition to handle unforeseen circumstances with decisive optimism and confidence.
I have grown up a lot in the last three years though, and a lot about my life has changed. I am no longer a college student, rather now I am a Ph.D. student, already having suffered the shock of forced maturity and increased independence. Also, I have gained an obsession with distance running since I was last here, and it has become a metaphor for most of the challenges in my life. Just a month before leaving for Africa I completed my first full marathon, and I quickly realized that all of the stages of emotional preparation that I underwent for the marathon were occurring all over again as I prepared for my journey. I used this to my advantage and thought over and over again, “You are a marathon runner. You are tough enough for anything.”
Some things about me will never change though, and will always make me a seemingly terrible candidate for world traveling (and athleticism, for that matter). I suffer from mild asthma, allergies, hypoglycemia, and anemia, have terrible reactions to most medications and immunizations, and most importantly, have been plagued with severe motion sickness for all of my life. No amount of preparation can deter these complications from interfering with a trip at some point. This time around it did not take long at all.
Ten hours into my thirteen hour flight into Ethiopia from Washington D.C. (after two domestic flights in the U.S., and before one flight across East Africa), the motion sickness mixed with a reaction to my malaria medication and low blood sugar. I became terribly ill. As the flight landed and everyone began getting off the plane, I became an unpleasant issue as I started vomiting in the walkway from the plane. What a sight I must have been.
An Ethiopian airport is not a pleasant place to be ill, either. The air was hot and sticky, and people were allowed to smoke in there. The only bathroom had no toilet paper or paper towels (though I should be thankful that the toilets flushed when you pressed a button inside of the hood). There were no garbage cans around, and the seats were less than comfortable, if you were lucky enough to snag one. After waiting in 1.5 hours of security lines, I laid down on the dirty floor of my terminal and went into a deep sleep until someone woke me up as my flight started boarding.
The flight attendants looked at my pale face and droopy eyes with pity and tried to force ice water and crackers on me. Luckily I immediately fell into another deep sleep on the plane, avoiding more episodes of motion sickness. I cannot say so much for the hour-long taxi ride from the airport to my hotel. Again, I barely managed to survive.
In between waves of nausea and severe headaches, I managed to take a few moments to appreciate a familiar site, though. The airport at Entebbe, just outside Kampala, sits right alongside Lake Victoria, the largest body of water in Africa. I spent quite a bit of my time in Kenya going back and forth to Kisumu, a city that sits right on the other side of Lake Victoria. There was something comforting about seeing that water, and knowing that I had been on the shores of it before, even if those shores were hundreds of miles away.
As I made my way from customs to the doors of the airport I was bombarded by taxi drivers offering me a ride, another familiar site. Even through my mental haze, I found myself bargaining for a better price as drivers tried to take advantage of my Caucasian skin. I found a ride for over half of the initial offer made, and was relieved to find that the bargaining skills I learned in my last stay in Africa had not left me. We got into the cab, and as we pulled away from the parking lot, a school bus full of children stuck their heads out the window yelling, “Hello, Mzungu, how are you!” “Yes,” I thought to myself, “this part of the world is still another home to me.”
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