Flying into the Future with No Vegetarian Option December 16, 2006

Greetings of the strictly formal American variety,

I’m finally back home and settling in, and slightly sad at really, how easy it’s been to adjust. But before I lose that sense of absurd at all things usually familiar in western world, I thought I’d send them out and share them. It’s very long, not too polished or articulate or well-thought-out. Maybe just skim until you see something worth reading. At least scan down to the very end.

• The colors and the ads are so bright and proud of themselves for being so very clever.
• I hear children’s voices and turn around and it startles me that they’re white.
• Heathrow staff really felt the need to post signs everywhere that said “We are please to announce a new fire alarm system for Heathrow…” all over the gangway. I’d gotten so used to absolutely no institution to person communication of any kind.
• I can still feel the wind from the uncovered window at night talking to the family about anything I can think of just to fill the air, we all have our hands clutched between our legs to keep warm and everyone’s wondering why Simon hasn’t come home yet but I can’t really blame him for not wanting to be here. Africa was so real up until the very end.
• There are three separate people selling exclusively UK liqueurs that can be bought for exorbitant amounts in the duty free shops and (“breaking news!”) can probably even be brought on your plane after you buy it. These people seem happy to be pouring the endless little shots, happy to shoo people over, happy enough to stand there for hours. Like the people at the security x-ray machines. How can they be so content to do something so tedious and meaningless?
– X-ray man: “I had to unpack this whole bag for this [empty fanta bottle you stole from the bus to use at home as a vase and a relic.]“
– Me: “Pole sana.”
• I don’t have to clutch onto my purse when I walk around the airport. People have their own purses, their own endless items and have no need or interest in mine.
• People look so different from one another! There are so many beautiful people.
• No one makes eye contact when they walk by. Even if I try to say hello they pretend to or actually don’t hear me…
• I don’t have anything in common with white people anymore–no african traveller solidarity. Now we’re all just passing through London to and from different directions.
• People watch the news for hours like it matters, like it has something important to say, not to be missed. Stories: “Keeping Your Pet Stress-free Through the Holidays” and “Tupperware Parties Have Come a Long Way.”
• I move to sit by Africans hoping they’ll see the Swahili on my shirt and talk to me and ask me where I’ve been and test my Swahili. I miss it already the Shikamoos and mambos. But these aren’t like the Africans I knew for 6 months, they’re in Heathrow in their suits talking about their property in Nova Scotia and $50,000 bribes to Zambian officials just so they can run their businesses. I move.
• How can the city, small gray bug with orange glitter sprinkled all over stretch all the way to the horizon, view from just under the clouds?
• The things people wear: red crocodile boots, sandals with socks, cowboy hats, pink bunny backpacks, such different quirky boring things. So many accessories.
• Urgent, lengthy, incessant, leisurely phone calls.
• Vending machines.
• Everything is built with straight lines and calculated curves, painted to match, spare no expense, all space utilized for signs or windows or ads. Everything polished.
• At the airport I spend 2,000 on tea, 2,000 on a doughnut to take my pill, 1,500 on .5 ltr. of water to take it with. Every single last shilling. Nothing for a keepsake. It’s dark as we take off, even though it’s 9. The man sitting next to me on the plane to London. We don’t speak the whole way until he asks me how my nap was. Says he’s coming from the Sudan where he worked for the UN, heading home to Oslo. “I’ve been there a year, but, I don’t know if I’ll be going back.” I don’t press him for his ideas, his perspective. He says something more under his breath. Before we land, he pays for something electronic with a $100 bill.
• The only way to keep your self busy in London is to buy things. Stores successfully branded like CHANEL with rows of the same pink button up shirt for a price that makes you shudder just imagining. Worse that they know they can get away with it, make a profit at it, that people will get sucked in.
• I don’t want to be in Heathrow, delayed of course. I miss Elieka and her shy presentation of the thermos, loose tea, sugar, 2 eggs, 2 spoons on a plate. Every morning. Kili out the window. And why isn’t she at school?
• Things are warmer there, not just the air but the light isn’t so wet and gray, and the people are warmer too, because they seem to know that their lives are not so isolated but connected to everyone’s they meet. Who’s wrong?
• The Greek woman, wearing black fur and leather, older with droopy lipstick lips, busty and lumpy at once. She adopts me the minute I sit down in the row, encouraging me to demand another set of headphones, explaining to me about the red wine, how it relaxes her and helps her sleep and after finishing the second little bottle, sheepishly removing the extra blanket she’d gotten, looking flushed. Having me to read to her and transcribe her responses on her custom’s form because “I don’t read so good” but she has a watch with diamonds on it and her passport says “US Embassy” and she doesn’t know things like whether her residence is America or Greece and what the flight man means when he tells her to put the purse under the seat in front of her. I don’t understand her or who she is. I let her baby me and wink her wine-filled wink and I try to escape when she’s behind me in line at customs because I don’t want to be responsible for her, for anything that could go wrong.
• In New York and people who look all different ways speak English just like me.
• I can barely figure out where to go and I’m supposed to know without asking but even me, I can get lost and I wonder about people who are foreign who don’t know these rules and this language and how they ever get anywhere.
• I wait outside for an hour for the hotel shuttles as other shuttles come and go two, three times, with the hotel visible from where I’m standing in my chacos and a bandana. I talk to the middle aged, chubby African American couple, the man’s big black coat held over his wife’s shoulders. They’re nice and we comiserate over the wait and the cold and they tell me they’re going to Ghana tomorrow. There’s one man in plaid, no uniform, he seems to be there in the wind all night to help people find their shuttles. The couple is impressed by East Africa and 6 months.
• There’s one man on the shuttle, who can’t stop talking loudly to anyone around him about his 8 hour delay and India and Brazil and his son living in Japan with his half-Japanese daughter. The Japanese man he’s talking to congratulates him awkwardly. I want to kill him. I practice my impenetrable mask, full of self-assurance and clam.
• $160, an over-heated room with a huge, spring-filled mattress all for me, five hours before a wake-up call with no one on the other end of the line. A mirror on the door so you can stare at yourself pee. Mirrors everywhere. The first time I’ve really looked at myself, alone with my reflection, in such a long time.
• The talker is on my shuttle again in the morning. I still want to kill him. Has recruited a Hungarian man and a shaggy-haired singer songwriter to talk to him, apparently willingly. All he manages to get from me when the others make their way to the counters is “Cleveland.”
• Figure out check in, throw the old tag in the waste basket, congratulated by the beautiful Delta lady and I accidentally tell her to have a good flight too, I mean good day, and she laughs.
• Putting on shoes after pointless ages through security again, business man sits across from me to do the same. “Real cracker jack crew they have there,” he says. “I just hope they never get busy.”and I laugh and respond we both get being quiet and resigned but keeping your wits and sense of humor.
• Ladies fighting behind the register at Starbucks, and I spend $8 on coffee and a water.
• Food is so packaged here, filled with so many ingredients and preservatives, rich, high fructose corn syrup. Engineered to taste delicious and fill you up. I can’t finish any of it.
• People have a few people they talk to, most people they don’t talk to, I fit into the latter category for almost everyone, there are so many people who I’ll never exchange words with.
• Tree lawns? Monopoly rows of identical houses? Driveways? How are these the foci of peoples’ lives? How do people live like this?
• I just want to bring everyone back with me to Tanzania so they can se it and rejoice at baby wipes and chapatti for the first time in weeks. Most black people here do not speak even a word of swahili.
• The mzee who stopped me on my way to my plane, finally, to home, stopped me to say “I like that you read books. I’m 70 years old and I know that books are…life.” He’s struggling to express this to me, English is not his first language. I smile and I’m really happy, and we shake hands and wish each other good days and we are both glad that we spoke.

I’m glad that people talk to me sometimes, that people have things to say to me.

I haven’t been home in so long. I can’t believe how easy it is to be here and how quickly the reality of East Africa is fading, replaced by laptops and bathtubs.

This will be the last of my entries for a while now. Hope you’ll all continue to contact me with greetings and updates even as these emails and the material for them cease. Thanks again for all of your responses and support throughout the last 6 months.

Peace and love and all of those good things,
Selena