23 June 2008
Home...?
I’ve been sluggish in finishing this blog up. I was recently asked by a friend to hurry up and write one final post so he can take the darn thing off his bookmarks list. I don’t particularly want to end my short writing career, and I also don’t feel as if I’ve really settled into place in DC yet (this might be related to the fact that I’m still unemployed…). Some sort of resolution to this story is in order, but I don’t feel it, so I’m not going to attempt to provide it. Besides, there’s still more to tell. I have a feeling that there will always be more to tell.
For some of my friends, the adventure isn’t over at all. I know a few who are doing international summer programs hot on the heels of our Egyptian experience, including one who flew straight to Buenos Aires from Cairo, no down time whatsoever. The idea of beginning something new so soon, of launching into another voyage right from the first, is almost mindblowing to me. To take the plunge into another culture – one radically different from both the Middle East and the United States, with no time even to absorb and process the Egyptian experience, to let everything sink in… what a challenge that must be, and yet, what a unique perspective that must provide.
For me, it is an active struggle not to leave pieces of myself in Cairo. I don’t mean that in the usual “there’ll always be a little piece of my heart in X” way. I mean that I face the very real danger of losing, of forgetting what I learned and who I became. In my old environment, with my old friends, surrounded by the familiar, it is indescribably easy to slip gradually back into my former self. I must fight daily to make real in my life all of the personal changes I worked so hard for abroad.
So to embark on another adventure so soon, without fully internalizing the first… it’s hard to know what would happen to me. Would the second experience overwrite the first? Would each throw the other into sharper relief? Would the two mesh into some sort of inextricable web? I can’t say.
And then there are some of my peers who have been traveling for a long, long time (by my standards anyway). How they do it is far beyond me. When one journey bleeds into the next, and then the next, it is an understatement to describe the task of sorting out the layers of experience as a challenge. But then again, not everyone feels the need to do quite so much sorting as I do.
For some of my friends, the adventure isn’t over at all. I know a few who are doing international summer programs hot on the heels of our Egyptian experience, including one who flew straight to Buenos Aires from Cairo, no down time whatsoever. The idea of beginning something new so soon, of launching into another voyage right from the first, is almost mindblowing to me. To take the plunge into another culture – one radically different from both the Middle East and the United States, with no time even to absorb and process the Egyptian experience, to let everything sink in… what a challenge that must be, and yet, what a unique perspective that must provide.
For me, it is an active struggle not to leave pieces of myself in Cairo. I don’t mean that in the usual “there’ll always be a little piece of my heart in X” way. I mean that I face the very real danger of losing, of forgetting what I learned and who I became. In my old environment, with my old friends, surrounded by the familiar, it is indescribably easy to slip gradually back into my former self. I must fight daily to make real in my life all of the personal changes I worked so hard for abroad.
So to embark on another adventure so soon, without fully internalizing the first… it’s hard to know what would happen to me. Would the second experience overwrite the first? Would each throw the other into sharper relief? Would the two mesh into some sort of inextricable web? I can’t say.
And then there are some of my peers who have been traveling for a long, long time (by my standards anyway). How they do it is far beyond me. When one journey bleeds into the next, and then the next, it is an understatement to describe the task of sorting out the layers of experience as a challenge. But then again, not everyone feels the need to do quite so much sorting as I do.
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