Adrift

-Last Morning in Iringa-

If there were any doubts about where I was Monday morning, the large chocolate shake at MickeyD's eliminated them.

The artificially flavored faux-dairy mix, guzzled through a red and yellow straw from an unnecessarily oversized plastic 'commemorative' cup, flooded my taste buds and sense memory with the disturbingly delightful yet oh-so-unnatural flavors of the good ol' U.S. of A.

Like a stranger in a strange land, on Monday I was shuttled from JFK to exotic Cincinnati before landing in Milwaukee and the great state of Wisconsin - an extended 13 hour coda concluding a thirty hour journey.

While wandering Waukesha and playing with the pup, the swirling mass of flotsam and jetsam from ten weeks in East Africa is being filtered and settling into recognizable and manageable forms. Anecdotes are collecting in the tidal pools of memory and pithy stories are slowly being built, layer by sedentary layer.

As that happens, I find myself culturally adrift and linguistically limited. No longer the stand-out Mzungu who knows Swahili, I'm just another dude walking through Highland Park wearing a Tusker shirt. From being the obvious one thing that isn't like the others, I'm immersed in a sea of similarity - nothing distinguishing about me. Apart from a tan and a $2.50 buzzcut, by all outward appearances I'm no different than when I left. As if the intervening 10 weeks never happened.

Having landed back in the States I'm floundering . . . waiting for questions . . . searching for words and ways to describe what has happened and where I have been.

Only then will I be able to move on. Only then can I begin to make sense of -begin to explore - this newfoundland.