Finding rain

I had a completely rained-under week. Completely insane with a deadline on a grant that we should have been writing over a month, not two days, and snurfed under with a headcold. Channeled my inner poltergeist and somehow contrived to destroy the trackball on my NEW MACBOOK (a single drop of soup, maybe), and in fetching an external mouse to make it work, somehow lost my main visa card. Which made it hard to book my flights to africa, which I hopped forward and booked and then realized I should have booked through our charity in order to get a tax receipt. Oy.

I’m feeling a different kind of anxiety this time than last year. Part of it is feeling like I’m cramming too much into my life. We’re going back to Uganda for a whirlwind week with the kids and planning for next year, and then I’m heading off on my own. Through a complicated little set up, I ended up buying a trip to kilimanjaro off a guy who won it in a fundraiser (and he’s going to donate the money). So we’ll land back in Kampala as a group, and then my compatriots will go home, and I’ll go visit a couple of other projects, then go off to TZ on my own. That’s the trepidation part.

I’m going to resurrect my Kasese blog, I think, but different people read that than this one, and right now, my stressy feeling is more to do with money and time than with Africa. I keep asking myself why I’m cramming so damn much into this year…and when I’m going to give myself a chance to step back, try to make some meaning of it, and stop spending money I don’t have.

I was reflecting on last year’s experience with Uganda, and started with my initial fear and the intense sense of rightness I felt. Something about accepting that culture and place that is so different is essentially unknowable from my perspective. There are points of connection, and these points are humanity, and the fact that they mean something so different to me in my personal narrative than they do to the kids, the people employed on the project, the community guys — this is somehow reassuring to me. I connect with Lillian the matron, Abdu, with Angella, with Bryan, with Alex because it enacts the story of me as outside myself, able to connect, loving and capable. Someone making a difference by enacting my most profound humanity.

I can’t know what they get from me — Abdu may call me Dear Auntie and be grateful, and his gratitude is so infused with the intense loss and chaos of his early years in Rwanda, the lack of certainty about tomorrow, his intense belief in a kind of Christ that I can’t know. A quintessential paradox.

So the Uganda part of the trip is about find that part of me, trying to live into the story of me as competent and difference-making… as well as facing my limits, the nearness of a meltdown at feeling the shape of my solitude, voicelessness when I’m facing systems I can’t penetrate with the bureaucracy, the way things are done.

What was most unnerving for me last year was my own response to being thrown out of my own sphere, facing my own limits, especially with the fury-making that is the founder of our project who continues to throw a wrench into it. I found myself near-angry in moments at not knowing how to make things happen, in pure torsion with my primitive desire to connect and love. I think that’s the african experience many people have, in a single seed.

The trip after the Kasese portion of this one will be have a lot more of that second realm — anxiety at traveling on my own, visiting projects for no particular reason, putting myself in the hands of a tour group for the climb up kilimanjaro, which I so clearly am not trained to do right now. So many unknowns. And then a long flight back here to BC to quietly recover, make meaning and make plans for 2010 over the holidays, trying to figure out how to be less jumping-bean, more grounded.