Leaving on a jet plane...

When leaving Kenya, I first took a bus all the way back to Nairobi. It was only seven hours and the road was mostly paved, so it was pretty much a cake walk.

I stayed overnight in Nairobi with the family of a good friend at school (my brother from another mother as he likes to say) that somehow managed to spoil me rotten in the less than 24 hours I was there. His brother took me to dinner with a bunch of his friends who were all grad students at Columbia doing their summer internships in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia.

Nothing like an evening around some of the brightest people from your country to make you feel like an idiot and an underachiever. No, I didn’t ride around with AK47s to spread the message of reproductive health to the contested region of Somalia or infiltrate Uganda’s most infamous refugee camp. I hung out at a hospital and sold paperbacks on a street corner.

The bus back across the border into Tanzania was once again less than a good time. At least I'd become savy enough to actually acknowledge the guy hitting on me at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning just enough for him to happily volunteer to figure out which of the nine million buses I was supposed to be boarding (in the dark, among a couple hundred people crowded onto one sidewalk with all their luggage) and get my now impossibly heavy bag laden with gifts for home loaded into the undercarriage.

I was better armed with an attitude not to mess with when arriving at the border crossing the second time around. There was a tiny little Japanese girl on my bus who was completely discombobulated and still sleeping off her jet lag. I saw a staff member from our bus leading her OFF OF THE MAIN STREET and followed many paces behind to save her if necessary. He led her to a cell phone shop and told her that the bus company needed her passport number recorded there.

At a cell phone shop? I don’t think so! As soon as she handed over her pass port (they actually had a ledger to enter in people’s passport numbers to make it look professional) they told her she needed to pay them 500 shillings. Um, and what would that be for? Minutes on her phone?

I stepped in, started yelling like I knew what I was talking about, and ripped the passport out of the guy’s hand. The four men started yelling at me about the bus company needing the info and how we weren’t going to be allowed across the border now (yeah, because that’s why the 50 other people on our bus kept on walking straight down the main road to the visa office where they paused for 30 seconds before being sent across the border).

I grabbed my tiny friend by the arm and dragged her and her passport away before they really got angry. After three months, I felt like I’d gotten pretty smart at these games! Everybody is running a racket on the side. I’m sure these guys gave the man from our bus a nice cut for every mzungu he lured to his shop and tricked into giving them a pile of money.

After sprinting off of my last African bus with glee, I took a 40 minute taxi ride to the Arusha airport and enjoyed a gorgeous view of the base of Mt Kilimanjaro the whole way. It was overcast. Again. Well, at least I’ve seen the base twice and can tell that the sucker is huge judging by the width!

After an excruciating eight hours at the Arusha airport waiting for my flight (looking at the clock at least twice a minute for several hours), I was finally able to board my plane for Amsterdam.

And then we sat at the gate. And then we sat some more. Finally an announcement from the cabin: there was not enough jet fuel in the entire country of Tanzania to get us all the way to Amsterdam, so we’d be spending an hour and a half on the tarmac in Cairo to get the necessary fuel.

Now we still had to stop in Dar es Salaam before we left Tanzania, so there literally was not enough fuel in the entire country to get us all the way to Amsterdam. I thought it a fitting end to my trip. No electricity, no food, no medication, and nothing on time. Why on earth would I assume that the country would be able to make planes work?

After sweltering in Cairo at three in the morning (the lights looked really pretty from the sky - I actually want to go there now) and a sprint (literally) through the Amsterdam airport (I had been told back in Arusha that I would miss my connection to MSP by minutes and decided to test that theory), I was on my way home. I was soooo antsy on the flight, and I am never like that. I have never been so ready to be home.

After an uneventful trip through customs, my dad was standing there waiting for me right where he promised he’d be.

I was a little sad that it was an icky, rainy day because I thought that they sky should burst into sunlight with the Hallelujah Chorus being sung in the background. I insisted that I be taken straight to El Loro for a cheese quesadilla on the way home. If other people had a problem with the fact that I had been wearing the same underwear for three days, that was their problem. My food dreams were coming to and end right then and there.

And honestly, I slipped right back into regular life like I’d never left. I had no return adjustment issues whatsoever. Many people when returning from developing countries have trouble with American excess. Well I’ve always had trouble with American excess. I think now I actually feel better about what little role I play in it. When I got home, all I wanted was some eyeliner and a cheese quesadilla and had both without any guilt. I work hard for what I have and I don’t live extravagantly or spend wastefully.

And things there aren’t all bad. Even though people live with less, many of them are happy and successful in their own right. The culture is rich, their faith is strong, and darnit, they know how to throw one good party.

Kenyans don’t need a different shirt for every day of the week or indoor plumbing to feel that they have made it. If they can educate themselves and their children and afford a reasonable amount of medical care when necessary, they are satisfied. They have something intangible that Americans have trouble capturing and encorporating into their own lives.

Though there are many (too many) I came across who come nowhere near that level of self-sufficiency, my image of Africa has been changed from one of abject poverty to one of life. There is plenty of death and struggle to go along with it, but people there live at a level that we Americans, with all of our stuff, will never be able to achieve.