The Last Bit.

It seems ages since I first set foot in this big expanse of bush and mud we so lovingly call Africa... And yet it was a mere six months ago that I last saw your smiling faces... Less than six months by a week and a half, actually... In the span of a lifetime, that's peanuts! But to me it's been a long time, and I'm almost sort of disappointed by how excited I am to go home.

It's certainly been nothing I expected. By any account, in every aspect, it's been a basket full of surprises, with, unfortunately, more unpleasent ones than pleasent. Even about the unpleasentness I expected to find---

I just re-read the Poisonwood Bible, and boy let me tell you, does it ever make more sense now that I've been to Africa. One of my favorite lines goes something like (in explaining why she doesn't write home) she goes on and on about her day and says "before i've even gotten to breakfast I've already filled three sheets of paper and then you need words to explain the words and words to explain the explanation..."

It just is truly inexplicable. On every level. Something about this place brings you up short, smacks you hard and wakes you up, another slowly lulls you to sleep in the heat and the drowsy pace of things not happening. I have learned a thousand things I'd rather not know about the cruel reality of life here, and how impotent, hopeless and useless it is possible to feel in the face of such a life. I think I have also learned quite a bit about my own morality...And mortality.
If I take nothing else away it will be a profound, serious and deep appreciation for the things, people, and mostly, the love I have in my life. No, I'm not being silly and cheesey, it is just the most painful thing I have ever seen, in a country where no one has ANYthing, how they do not even show love to one another, and that is the one thing that doesn't cost. Or perhaps it costs more than everything else together, and it is just something else I cannot see. The longer I am here the more I realize I do not know.

I do know I will be happy to be home though.... Sort myself out, re-examine, re-plan, I still have no idea what i'll be doing in the future, I have many ideas but no idea of how to fit them together. Still. But I will be happy to return to a place where, at least, I will not have to see every day the evidence of our destructive worldly demise. Maybe that's cowardly of me, maybe if we all had to see it every day we would do something about it. But I think not. Those who live here seem to be the most uncaring about it. Maybe they just know something I don't.

ANYways, enough of the doom and gloom, I do have one (or two) dazzling adventures to look forward to. On the 19th of July I finally fly to Nampula (A city FAR to the north) to visit my friend David, a volunteer through a different organization there, and then spend a few days in and around the area. Then we'll bus all the way down, to Maragra and then to Johannesburg, three mortal days on the bus, AAARRRRGHHH!!! where we'll meet mom at the airport on the 28th. WOOT!!! We'll rent a car there and drive northeast into Swazi, where we'll spend some nights in a rock lodge (like natural stone not rock n roll :P) and also check out Bushfire, one of the coolest music fests in southern Africa, then drive north into Mozambique, check out Maputo, where I used to live and work, then Maragra where I live and work now, and then hit the beach!!! When we're done tanning we head back to s.a. for a Safari in Kruger Natl Park, then hop on a plane to Cape Town for a few days, then jet back to Joburg and HOME SWEET HOME!!!!

I miss you all like nobody's business.

love,

allie