A Visit Home

Whenever I start to feel too big for my boots, I visit the ocean. It never fails to bring me both humility and peace. And so I just had lunch with the sea. I am on campus doing work today, so couldn’t actually go to the beach, but sat on a bench on campus that overlooks the harbor and ate my sandwich, letting myself feel belittled again. With that big, beautiful ocean out there, that has been there long before I entered the world and will remain long after I depart, how can any problem I have ever seem unmanageable? Not that I really have any pressing problems, just millions of questions swimming around in my head (I’m a worrier by nature).

Lately what has been pestering me is the idea of having two vastly different realities in my life, and somehow figuring out how they fit together. How can someone feel so at home both in Rochester, NY, and in Durban, South Africa? How can I feel just as comfortable being an American in my own country and being a foreigner in another? How can I feel just as comfortable being squeezed in a mini bus taxi with a bunch of South Africans, listening to house music, riding through Durban’s bustling and beautifully vibrant center city, as I do driving my own car through the streets of my quiet suburb in upstate New York? And how on earth will I ever find the compromise that will allow both of these realities to exist in my life simultaneously, feeding both my need for adventure and newness, and my love for home and familiarity? And so here I sit, too big for my boots, thinking that these questions a) are really important in the grand scheme of things, and b) that I can answer them today, right now, definitively. Silly me.

As many of you know, I just spent two weeks back at home for Thanksgiving. Having been away from home for ten months, it was wonderful to see my family and friends again. I have completed the coursework portion of my masters, and now just need to do the dissertation part (I like how I said “just,” as though it’s an easy task… ha!). So it looks like I will be sticking around South Africa for another few months. Thus, a visit home was in order. I spent the first week visiting my sister in Delaware and visiting my relatives in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. I then spent the second week at home in Rochester, splitting my time between sleeping in late, eating all of the food that I’ve missed, visiting friends, and spending time with my family.

Although I have taken several vacations while I’ve been in South Africa and haven’t been necessarily studying hard the entire time, I have been constantly challenged and constantly learning. So being home was not only an opportunity to reconnect with people, but also an opportunity to turn my brain off and stop thinking about poverty and AIDS and the state of the world for a couple of weeks. It’s as though every day and every interaction I have in South Africa is a cultural and learning experience, constantly challenging me and pushing me to the limits of my comfort zone. Being at home was a much needed break, to say the least.

Because I was home for such a short time, I really didn’t have to deal with culture shock or evaluating my time here or where I stand in my life now. As I said, I just turned my brain off for a little bit (is that even possible?). I did make a couple of interesting observations, though. I was very overwhelmed by two things: 1) the speed of life in the US and 2) the variety and huge quantity of choices in the US. As for the speed of life, my sister Abby often reminded me, “your not on African time anymore, Jaime!” because apparently I had trouble hurrying and being on time. As they say here, “there’s no hurry in Africa.” If I did in fact adopt this slower pace as part of my own routine, than I am quite pleased with myself. Having experienced life both here and there, I can say with some certainty that perhaps the saying should go, “there’s no hurry in life.” Let’s be honest, where does hurrying get us besides ulcers and high blood pressure? We all get to the same destination in the end.

And as for variety, eish, walking down an aisle in a grocery store was incredibly overwhelming. Are there really that many varieties of cereal, that many colors of Gatorade, that many flavors of dog food?! I went clothes shopping one day and ended up not buying anything because I just couldn’t make any decisions, it was all too much. I ended up deciding that if I could live off of the same ten shirts for the past ten months, I certainly can make it for the next few months without adding anything to my wardrobe. Not to say that there isn’t variety in South Africa or that there isn’t any consumerism here, but America puts the rest to shame.

And so, after a fulfilling but all too brief visit home, I hopped back on the plane and after a 30+ hour journey and a fiasco involving a lost ATM card and no place to stay overnight in Johannesburg, I ended up back in my beloved Durban. And the strange thing is, I felt like I was in a sense coming home. It felt nice to be back in my apartment, back in my routine here. But it also felt equally nice being in my house back home, in my routine there. And the strangest part is how surreal it feels. It’s as though I cannot picture the other life existing when I’m not in it, and yet when I return to one or the other, it’s as though I never left. Perhaps I need to stop thinking about this and go sit by the sea again.

A little update on life in Durban… Summer is getting back into full swing. The only way I can describe the heat here is to compare it to sitting too close to a campfire, only you can’t step away. There’s no escaping the Durban sun, and there is certainly no escaping the Durban humidity. I’m already dreading the unbearable heat of January-March. At least I’ll get some good beach days out of it. No new progress with the dissertation, but I have full confidence (most of the time) that it will all work out just fine. I’m going to be spending next week in Mozambique, lying on the beach and exploring new places and a new culture. And then my first Zulu Christmas! It should be an adventure, which I will certainly fill you all in on. If I don’t speak with you before the holiday season, have a lovely time and play in the snow for me, because it certainly will not be a white Christmas here!