One more week....

It's amazing the difference between going to a foreign country when you know you will be staying for a year and when you know it's just a temporary sejour. For instance, Burundi is six weeks. Five of them are behind me. On the one hand, I can marvel at the nicer sides of Burundi (friendly people, good roads, charming restaurants, the war is pretty much over, etc) while also letting small things go (intermittant hot water, the "do i have malaria or is it just a headache" game, working long hours.) On the other hand, I completely avoid anything that might invest me socially or otherwise in Burundi. After all, I've had one foot out the door since I arrived. I've been dancing once and been to one party, but I can count the times I've "gone out" on one hand. Heck, I can make a peace sign with those times. I'm ready to head back to a life that might have some social interactions beyond work.

I saw a very good friend from Kindu this weekend, and it made me both nostalgic for my Congo days and stressed at the reminder of them. Life under the microscope was not a healthy thing for me, and, at the risk of sounding like I don't like Congo, it is a country that can really suck you dry. My friend had an incident where a crowd of one hundred guys wielding machetes showed up at her house screaming that they were going to kill her (someone her organization employed killed himself, and his passenger, when he ran his motorcycle into an on-coming car). They blamed her. They were ready for any excuse to raise hell, steal some motorbikes, and loot. I make a lot of excuses for the Congo - it's complex. It's fifty years of being run into the ground. It's colonization. Etc. But I can find no reason to ever justify the fact that these guys were pretty much ready to kill her. It made me want to launch a friggin intervention and convince her to leave.

As for me, I'll be changing countries once again, this time to England. I had decided I wanted to be an American, live in America, get back to my American roots, etc, but fate had something else in the cards and I moving to London in June. Thank goodness a cool job came up because after working at a temp agency I had pretty much decided I would rather be doing emergency work in Congo, Sudan or Somalia than sending faxes and binding human resource manuals for $12/hour. You think I'm kidding, but I'm quite serious. I was in the final round of interviews to do intense emergency work in various areas of the world, and I might just have taken it. But instead I got something great in London. Fish and chips sounds loads better than beans and rice. Plus, the dating scene in London might be a tad better than rural African hotspots. Just a hypothesis.