Shedding Skin

An alternate perspective on the last couple of weeks:

I left for my leave just as dry season came to an end. The first rain in 5 months came as a surprise one afternoon and quickly reminded me why those first few months were so challenging. Even after a brief shower the dust turns back to mud almost instantly -  like it’s only been pretending to be anything other than mud for the last 5 months.

It’s quite an assault on the skin. My palms seem to be peeling, but that might be a result of some skin infection. There’s also a slight rash on my arms that I hope, along with the sloughing skin on my hands, will come off with a good scrubbing and regular showering in clean water over the break. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt here it’s that these things, like the grime on my computer or my persistent, low-level diarrhoea, are only temporary.

The exit from Sudan was welcome. It’d been 13 weeks since my last trip out. I found the huge indecision about the project and potential for a future lack of money actually quite stressful, despite my thinking that everything was ok. On reflection I probably wasn't sleeping very well and the diarrhea had actually been a little worse than low-level. Each time my funder changed their minds about something (which was very frequent) we’d have to re-submit our proposal.  I practically wrote 4 in the last 3 months. It was like working for Bridget Jones. A 2-month gap in funding was becoming imminent.

I managed to work out and sign an agreement with another organization to take on some work in the gap. PSI has given us half a million to distribute mosquito nets (making the title of this blog invalid). But we know the area and how to do distribution, so I was hoping it will be kinda easy... but the mud seems to be reproducing, we’re supposed to hit every household in the state and it’s a shocking number of nets: 560,000. As I was lounging on my break one day, after being force-fed by my grandmother I got a call: “we’re delivering the 12 40-ft containers to you tomorrow. Where do you want them?” 

Oh crap, this is going to be hard.

On the flight back to London and again on the flight to Amman I found a new American comedy series: a little cheesy, but very funny. In Samantha Who, an amnesiac explores her old life, finding a lot of resentment and discovers to her shock how much of a bitch she used to be. Her mission becomes tying to convince everyone that she’s now a different person.

I’m finding a few parallels. I’d not seen and barely spoken to a Michael in Birmingham since my visit last July following a fall out. Rob seemed generally unwilling to lift a finger for me when I asked him to bring something back with him from the US. Dapo inferred that he’d only have 30 minutes free in two weeks to meet. Tola was happy to meet, but only at certain day, time and a place and told me honestly that she didn’t expect the meeting to happen.

Maybe it’s just city life, time is short and I’m filled will a little too much self importance, but while I don’t expect everyone to free their whole weeks for me, I’d like to think these friends would want to meet me in this limited opportunity. I genuinely sensed that I was being treated with caution, though. I asked Rob to suggest why this was the case.

“You’re a bit needy.”

?!

Tola: “Insensitive.”
Olu: “You can be a dickhead.”
Dapo: wouldn’t return my calls.

So this is a negative highlight of some much larger and actually positive interactions, but I have to heed the criticism. I’m not taking any as gospel (especially given that the last three come from Nigerians, one of whom is a woman), but taking some time away and returning to still find the people I used to see regularly has been very revealing.

In thinking about my past interactions with these different friends in different places I’m reminded of a lot of things. I don’t think was consistently the only wrongdoer, but I wholeheartedly participated in the interaction. My time away has given me both the objectivity and the confidence to be honest about what I did. I subscribed to the games of city life and considered most interaction a competition. I was very competitive. I sought reason to disdain others. I lived a very narrow life of work, gym, cycling and a few not so healthy social interactions. I gave very few people the time or the attention they deserved. I took advantage of their generosity, and was distracted by shallower but prettier individuals. I would routinely put my own needs above others or only gave on my own terms.

Again, a worst-case appraisal, but as the evidence mounted I felt much like the amnesiac in discovering how much of a bitch I, too, used to be.

But I’m not the only one. Everyone in London seems to be doing it to each other. You can see it in the interactions on the street and the phone conversations you overhear. This is how we treat each other there. Had my friends not subscribed and regularly done the same, even to me, they probably would have told me to piss off at the first and friendship wouldn’t have developed.

Far from a mea culpa, hanging out and seeing these friends again was a lot of fun. It was good to catch up on their job changes, new houses, responses to the economic crises and their weight loss/gain. I’ve said this before, but my fears about being away and missing life are unwarranted. Contact is diminished whilst I’m away, partly because communications channels are unreliable, but mostly because everyone now seems to have an iphone and corresponds with at most 2 lines of text. But life is still there: the shops and restaurants and streets remain. So do friends, I guess – at least the ones good enough to forgive my faults, hear an apology and recognize the changes for the better my time away is yielding in me. I feel like I’ve shed some skin…and my palms still are.

On the whole I had a wonderful time in Birmingham, London and with family in Amman. As friend Olu said – “it only took about a year and a half to clear the air”.

So I’m better off from being out here. This is the point at which I want to pause things, though. I’m at a turning point, I think, in which I could return to life in London quite easily.  A year away wouldn’t look so anomalous on CV if I were applying for work.  More importantly, though I’d like to be able to put into effect what I’ve learned about myself and be a new and better (though much less fit) person with the people who care about and matter to me.

Reading past entries, though, I can see I’ve said this before.

But jobs seem to be drying up, even in the public sector. Some of these friends will be out of work in 2 months. I’m not sure hoe long I could remain invested in a desk-job in London again, especially in a Local Authority. That would be the easiest route of return. I still don’t know what I want to do in life. My indecision is illustrated by the jobs I’ve applied to recently in: Makasar, Indonesia; Hilla, Iraq, Niarobi, Kenya & Barnet Council, London. There’s a lot I dislike about the aid industry and it’s very easy to spot those who have been in it for too long. I don’t want to be part of the crowd.

Like anything, if I want it to happen I can make it so. Nairobi seems like an exciting and realistic opportunity that would bring me back a little bit towards civilization. I need to start looking at London jobs too. I’m sure there’s something out there that would entertain me.

Again, I’m caught between the personal reasons to come back and the professional reasons to stay. Coming back here form some satisfyingly personal interactions with family and friends makes the prospect of staying very hard. Despite the fact that I stocked up with over 50kgs of tea, honey, dried fruit, toothpaste, facewash, books, music and porn, the next few moths of distribution are not going to be easy. I hope that my mesoderm toughens up fast.

Complacency

I had 2 phones stolen the other week and with them all of my work contacts. I was in Juba at the mosque at the time. I’m surprisingly unfazed by this. I’ve been here almost a year…in fact I’ve never had a phone stolen, so I reckon I’m due. I left them in the glove compartment of a locked car as I went into Jumah prayers. When I came back the car was still locked but the phones were gone. I guess if I’m stupid enough to be separated form my phones and the thieves are industrious/socially responsible enough to get into a locked car and lock it again on the way out, it’s fair.

I left my sunglasses on the counter of Nairobi duty free.

I have worms again – second time in 3 months.

I’m getting complacent. After almost a year I’ve grown comfortable and accustomed to a lot of things. I no longer crave fruits and vegetables like I used to and barley notice that a week or two will pass without my having seen either. I never use sunscreen and I stopped taking malaria prophylaxis. I carry my passport, wallet, cash, laptop and identity documents all in the same backpack.

Getting comfortable definitely has its advantages. I’m no longer panicked by the day’s events and I’m having trouble remembering a day that involved even a moderate level of stress. Getting to this point hasn’t been easy and has involved a lot of work. I’ve trained my staff as best I could to carry out the program so it’s no longer a one-man show. We now function very effectively as a team and the objective feedback of some visitors in the past weeks has confirmed this.

But comfortable and complacent are not far apart, and as the intestinal parasites and lost goods show, there is a cost. I’m thankful that it’s a manageable condition and a replaceable item. If it were my computer or passport lost I’d probably have cried.

Am I getting so careless that it’s just a matter of time before I allow something much worse to happen? I keep coming back to this – try to think of it as a recurrent theme rather than an incessant whinge - but is it time to come home?

If on the whole I’m about as happy as I am in London, it’s better to come back, no? At least there I can eat normally, exercise enough and not worry about intestinal parasites.

I resolved to take a cerebral sabbatical and just go on leave. I booked an ambitious trip: Nairobi for 2 days of meetings, London for a day, Birmingham for 2, in London for 4 days, Amman for a week via Dubai, back to London for the weekend, then to Nairobi for 2 more days and then back to Sudan.

The trip started well. Productive meetings with my boss’, boss’ boss and on the night I left a playful and very smiley little man at the airport suggested that I could get something for a small fee. I bribed him $200 and got a first class upgrade. He even followed me on board to ensure I got the seat I wanted. Does that mean I overpaid him? I tend to question self-indulgence (save for in my writing), but had no qualms reclining and drifting off in my rearward-facing sleeper seat as Africa and its parasites fell away into a beautifully moonlit night.

Hounslow 6am. Cold, drizzle, gray: THAT’S why I left.

Within a few hours I met my mother and brother from FL who booked a trip to coincide with mine. Sweet, huh? Well, not really: my brother broke his cheek bone in a Muai Thai fight and decided to indulge in a little medical tourism: whilst the UK is not renowned for facial corrective surgery, it is for free healthcare to its residents (taken liberally in my brother’s instance). I’m sure I factored into their decision to come and in the end it was my fault for not spending enough time together.

I don’t think I watched any news of read a newspaper whilst away. I think I was anxious about being back and rushed around in a slight panic trying to buy everything I could think of and ensuring that I spent as little time alone as possible. I got a new phone within hours of arriving.

Seeing family in Amman was good. I think it is a blessing, but absolutely no one has changed. My cousins are a bit taller and aunts a little fatter. My grandmother is still going strong. My aunts, uncles and cousins were all interested in my life in Southern Sudan, but on the whole seemed more concerned with my brother’s boxing injury than with the fact that I live in a war zone. No, I’m not jealous.

My cousin, Kholoud, won the Dead Sea marathon. I didn’t even know she ran. Apparently, she doesn’t. She planned on running the 10k, but her sister entered her online in the full marathon. She showed up and was given a blue marathon number but was told that it was too late the change. She just went to the 10k start and thought nothing of it.

She took her time to finish – a comic 2h 46m. After finishing she strolled back to the organizers tents to see what the commotion was about. She was quickly swept up in a small crowd of photographers and officials screaming, “you’ve won!”

The winner of the marathon distance had overcome the oppressive heat and pressure of the Dead Sea basin to compete the 26 miles in 2h 51m. Kholoud soon realized what had happened, and tried to correct it. Her sister could hear her shouting over the noise from the winner’s tent, “but I’m not blue!”

It really wasn’t long at all before her father had started calling his friends to express his pride in his daughter. By then there was no going back. When she told me the story she was trying to contact the actual winner to apologize and was considering whether to not accept the winning $1500 or donate it to a charity.

I remembered that I don’t like Arabs. My family is lovely but not immune form the very unpleasant characteristics of Arab culture hat seem to prevail more and more as Jordan’s wealth grows. Arrogant, condescending, snobbish, judgemental, living in perpetual fear of being judged. I see every quality I don’t like about myself magnified 10 fold in a nation. I also see the qualities of my father. There is one particular characteristic that I don’t share though, neither did he, and that is the almost unfailing ability of most Arab men (normally the slightly wealthy) to identify the underdog in a situation and make him/her feel even worse. As long as I stayed inside I was fine – and this was much to my grandmother’s approval. She fed me at least 5,000 calories a day.

I was a little anxious about the trip as I really wasn’t supposed to be taking the additional time off work. On the way there in Dubai at around 6:00am I was spotted in the departure lounge by the Country Director of the organization that’s giving my team a good chunk of cash to distribute mosquito nets for the next couple of months. Marcie, who manages a good few dozens of millions of dollars of funding in Sudan, spotted me whilst I was picking my nose I think: It was 6am and I live in Africa so have no qualms doing such things in public.

“Aren’t you supposed to be distributing my mosquito nets?”

I said I’d get right on it after a little break with the family. She was going to a 4-day long conference that was going to trap her in a very plush hotel, but all week. I insisted that she join me the following Thursday to get out and see a bit more of the town. My family arranged a big dinner for that, my last night, so I just invited her – aware that the results could either be very positive or absolutely disastrous. The personal/professional barrier had already been crossed at the nose-pick, I think.

Aunts’ verdict at the end of the night was: well dressed, very professional, but too old for me. My uncle and cousin suggested that she should  make a plan for her life to progress from her administrative role. She took that mis-assumption well, but I fear the wedding’s a non-starter. I think she had fun.

After dinner we went to a bar/café downtown that has a reputation for a very liberal crowd. Amman has become absolutely beautiful, and the social scene is thriving. I was so happy to bump into a friend who I’d met in Amman a few years ago and not seen since – but disappointed when the rules of Amman social interaction seemed to come back into force. He spent more time looking over my shoulder to see who was noticing us talking together. This is a common element of public social interaction – the thoughts go “who’ s looking, is it ok for me to be seen talking to this person, what will people say..?” One of the last times we met was at this café some years ago. We left and 5 minutes later he got a text message form an unknown number saying “what, you’re too good to hang out with Arabs now?” and I got one from an unknown number saying “who was that with you, is he single?”

I’ll go back many times to see my family, I think, but my desire to try to live there is gone. I’ve now seen much nicer places.

I think I’m getting old: the overnight airport stops take time to recover from. Arrived in Dubai at 9pm (via business class, but without having to bribe anyone), left for London at 3am steerage, arrived Gatwick 6:30am, cold, grey, drizzle…ok, I get the hint. The weekend was fun, but too short. I picked up a cold. I left on Monday at 10:20am…you got it: cold, grey, drizzle. It was a helpful shove to get on my way.