Love at the Speed of Email (8 page)

Accra,
Ghana

Ten days into my latest Africa trip, I found myself eating
alone at the hotel in Ghana.

It was a precious pause during what was turning out to be a
draining stint.

Overall, the workshops in Kenya had gone well. There were
the usual challenges, of course. Jet lag and nightmares prodded me awake at 3
a.m. on my second night in country and left me lying there thrumming with
fatigue and questioning my decision to embark on this line of work in the first
place, whether anything I do really makes a difference, and whether I’m
actually worth
anything
as a human being.

Those are really fun hours, those ones.
 

Then there were the late nights filled with the tedium of
organizing handouts and name tags. During the workshops, there was a plethora
of unexpected questions from the group, including, bizarrely, in the middle of
a discussion of stress and spirituality, “Can you explain the stress of
menopause?”

Every international assignment, however, teaches me again
what makes the long flights, the 3 a.m. angst, and the huge amount of energy it
takes to facilitate worth it. These are amazing people who sit in these
workshops. They are people who have chosen to work in the slums and help
children to stay in school instead of unwittingly embracing life sentences of
boredom, menial labor, or crime by dropping out. They are lawyers who prosecute
case after case of child sexual abuse or land-grabbing. They are people who
have made careers of documenting the stories of refugees in camps all over
Africa who are desperate for a chance at another life. Persecution histories,
these stories are called, and they are largely tales of horror and fear.

This was the group I was working with in Ghana, people who
spend much of their time in camps in West Africa interviewing an endless stream
of displaced people seeking refugee status and resettlement in the United
States. The first day’s workshop on understanding and coping with traumatic
stress had been lively. This group was also full of interesting questions like
“What should I do when a refugee I'm interviewing starts showing me their wounds
or demands that I touch them?”
And “When someone is obliquely
referring to having been raped, should I use the word
rape
or mirror their language?
How can I encourage them to
give more details without breaching cultural taboos around rape and causing further
shame?”

When faced with questions like these, I sometimes use a
facilitation technique I could call “tapping into the collective wisdom of the
group.”

Of course, I could also call it “In this exact moment I have
no idea how to address that well, so let’s ask everyone else present what they
think.”

There is little spare time on one of these international
work trips. From the time I hit the ground, I’m usually absorbed in meeting
with the team, liaising with management, sorting out logistics, reviewing my
notes, presenting. But there are pauses – odd moments when I’m alone in an
airport or my hotel room and not completely focused on what needs to be done
next. In these gaps there is none of the normal rhythmic “to-do list” of life
to distract me, no grocery shopping, laundry, cooking, ringing people. There is
no buffer between me and my thoughts.

Dinner in Ghana that night was one of those pauses. For one
hour I deliberately relaxed into the echo of the day, inhabited the weary
intoxication of knowing that one hurdle had been crossed, and refused to think
about the next three days.

I sat by myself at a table outside while the waiter cleared
away all the other place settings, as if to emphasize my solitude. I used to
hate this practice. Now I'm so accustomed to eating alone that I rarely notice,
but that night I thought of my California friends and smiled. I don't think
that being served fresh fish poolside is what most of them imagine I spend my
time in Africa doing. More like risking food poisoning, or worse.

Food poisoning.
Not an experience
that needed repeating. I made a mental note not to eat the salad that would
come with dinner. That was where the biggest risk would lie.

Dinner.
Malaria medication needed
to be taken with dinner. I dug through my bag for the pills, only then thinking
that maybe I should have chosen to sit inside instead of braving the
mosquitoes.

The soft darkness and winsome breeze were too beautiful. I
decided not to move.

At the next table a French couple united against the pleas
of their young son, who had returned from the buffet with three deserts.
Implacable, they sent back the crème caramel and the boy began to cry. I
learned that the romance of the language does have its limits; a child whining
in French is no more charming than one whining in English.

I opened the book I was holding and focused on a quote by
Marcel Proust.

“Come now! Were everything clear to you all would seem in
vain. Your boredom would populate a
shadowless
universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of
disquiet is a divine gift. The hope which, in your eyes, shines on a dark
threshold does not have its basis in an overly certain world.”

Would a
shadowless
universe really
not be preferable if it meant finally, permanently, illuminating the darkness?

I have often seen refugees in airports in Africa on their
way to their new lives, holding nothing but sleeping children and sealed
plastic bags full of official documents. I examine them covertly while we all
wait to board, trying to imagine what it is like to leave behind the only home
you have ever known, perhaps forever, on the strength of nothing but the
uncertain hope that there
must
be
something better across that wide, dark oceanic threshold.

Caught in the departure lounge, in that final pause
separating a grim past and the unknown, I can rarely discern either disquiet or
hope in their eyes.

Just exhaustion.

Five men strutted across the lobby of the hotel and pushed
through the glass doors toward us, commandeering the last remaining table by
the pool. They were tall and lithe, moved with authority,
even
gestured loudly. Three of them wore white tunics that dropped from neck to
ankle, magnificent against skin that was darker than the night sky.

 
They ignored the
crying child but spared me a little more attention without noticeable pause in
their animated debate about the credibility of someone I eventually surmised
was a local politician, or maybe a gangster.

I returned my eyes to the book and William
Inge
spoke.

“He who will live for others will have great troubles, but
they shall seem to him small. He who will live for himself shall have small
troubles, but they shall seem to him great.”

What does it really mean
,
to live
for others? Does motive or action take the lead in that tango?

People often ask me what I do, and if I describe it just
right I can come off sounding like a cross between Indiana Jones and Florence
Nightingale.
  

“Wow,” one woman said to me recently, “that’s not a job,
that’s a calling.”

Yes, in some ways. But I have often wondered whether it’s
not an inferior high-adrenaline substitute for the living for others that
happens day after day in marriage and parenthood. The kind of living for others
that slowly wears the sharp edges off your core
selfishness,
that
plays out in a million little installments instead of the
occasional big sacrifice.
  

I’m pretty sure it’s easier to live for others when they are
half a world away and you just visit occasionally.

Music drifted out over the pale marble tiles that circled
the pool.
Nothing's
gonna
change my love…Cherish…Wind beneath my wings… I can't live if living is without
you.
It was the same type of music, I suddenly realized, that I'd heard at
the airport, on the radio in every taxi, and in the hotel lobby competing
valiantly with the soccer commentary: ’80s love songs.

I looked at the empty chair opposite me and thought about
feeling lonely, but I was too tired. I settled for wistful.

I wondered what my family was doing right then. Where was
Mike? Was he thinking of me, or had he mostly thought the better of our sudden
e-friendship? Was he eating alone and feeling far from home?

Home.
 

All those places that I lived growing up did feel at least
somewhat like home during the time we lived there. That had something to do
with the little things we took with us, those portable threads of continuity:
books, music, and pictures. But it had more to do with people.
With family – those other four who were always there – and with
friends.
Without those people somewhere in the picture, there was no
amount of “stuff” that could make a place even come close to feeling like home.

I laid my book aside as the food arrived and let my thoughts
slide past the next three weeks and settle back in California. In three weeks I
would be the one laughing with friends over dinner. Perhaps someone else would
sit alone across the room, a silent witness to our camaraderie, savoring their
moment of anonymous solitude and thinking that for them, too, home rests far
more on the foundation of people than of place.

Perhaps they would remember that we all stand
shadowless
and disconnected from substance and meaning
unless illuminated by the care and insight of others.
And
that while we may need pauses to recharge, life is lived in communion.

Perhaps they would also think about place and people like
this and then wonder why the puzzle of home still did not feel complete and
what the missing pieces were.

London,
UK

A week later I walked into Heathrow Airport. The icicles
decorating it were a sudden and disconcerting reminder that Christmas was
coming.

When I had transited through Heathrow two weeks earlier on
my way to Nairobi, there had been no streamers of blue light cascading from the
ceiling or coned evergreens winking fiercely. Now there were. Starbucks had not
been selling coffee in red and white cardboard cups and drawing Santa hats and
candy canes on its chalkboards. Now it was.

I sat in my favorite airport café,
Pret
a Porter, and tried to take stock. The abrupt realization that Christmas season
had arrived in the West while I had been gone was jarring, and the pink pigs
hanging from the roof of the next store and whizzing in battery-powered circles
didn’t exactly prove grounding. I got up, ditched my coffee cup, and prepared
to waste the next several hours of my life wandering through airport limbo.

Twelve hours from then, I knew, I’d be landing in
Washington,
D.C. Michelle would want to know how the trip
had been. And I wouldn’t know where to start, because the previous two weeks
had been more a stream of potent, rushing moments than a story.

Saturday, the day before I leave Los
Angeles.
I am dressed in my pajamas at a costume party and sitting
outside on the cold stone bench of a barbecue eating Mexican food without the
safety net of a paper plate.

Two days later, Monday, a twenty-four-hour
layover in London.
I am sitting on a gravestone and eating meat pies,
again with no safety net in sight. A friend from high school, Angela, and I did
try to find a bench, but they were all full of uniformed British schoolchildren
who for some reason were not in school, so we figured that the occupant of this
particular grave would not mind the company. We talk of friends we knew when we
were both teenagers growing up in a peaceful, promising Zimbabwe that no longer
exists. We watch Angie’s toddler, Abby, sleep in her pram. She is a stark
reminder of the fact, bewildering to me, that we are no longer teenagers. How
did that happen?
  

Thursday.
Nairobi.
Work.
During workshops I am nowhere else. There are only
words and thoughts, and I am always searching for the right questions. One day
of facilitating
drains,
three days’ worth of energy. I
work again over solitary dinners by the pool, occasionally glancing up to see
bougainvillea glowing purple in the shadows. A waiter, a beautiful man – tall
and graceful and dressed in a spotless tuxedo – thoughtfully carries over a
glowing copper brazier and places it near me to ward off the dark’s chill. We
share a silent smile. I go back to work.

Wednesday.
Accra. The last workshop
is over. The bubble of total absorption breaks and Ghana elbows its way in.

It’s 6 a.m. and I’m headed north on my last day in the
country with a silent driver named George for one precious day of adventuring.

Traffic and people.
Chaos and heat.
Pollution and dust glued to me in equal
measure by the humidity.
Women balancing buckets and boxes on
their heads, selling plantains car to car.

10 a.m., Elmina castle – the Portuguese and Dutch trading
post that brokered the most valuable of commodities, slaves, until the late
1800s. I am standing on the governor’s balcony overlooking the three stone
cells that used to hold hundreds of female slaves awaiting the transport ships.
At the governor’s pleasure, the women would be driven from these holding pens
into the courtyard below to mill around until he had made his daily choice.

When I look up I can see a church in the middle of the
castle, placed directly over the dungeons that used to hold male slaves. In
that church, words from Psalms 132:14 are inscribed above the door: “This is my
resting place forever;
Here
I will dwell, for I have
desired it.”

I stare at it and want to cry with rage and shame. And fear.
What modern blind spots or willful, apathetic ignorance of ours will goad
future generations into similar paroxysms?

I don’t cry, though. I am not very good at crying.
Outwardly, anyway.

1 p.m. More than one hundred feet up, standing on planks and
holding on to
ropes
, I look down into the treetops of
Kakum
national park and watch butterflies waft through the
rain-forest canopy. There is a tiny, brilliant gecko by my sneaker – an emerald
on legs.

4 p.m.,
Tetteh
Quashi
market. I buy an oil painting on rice-sack canvas that I do not need because I
see the talent of the artist, and his pride mixed with anger, and I wonder what
I would sell if my lot were a market stall on a dusty corner.

11 p.m.,
Kotoka
Airport, in Accra.
The blank, endured space of the crowded gate lounge on a hot
African night.
On the plane I resent the roundness of the man beside me,
the touch
this compels, but refuse
to relinquish the
armrest completely.

When I was twenty-one I spent three weeks traveling around
New Zealand and there’s a moment from that trip I sometimes think of in the
midst of all the moments of these trips. I was in an inflatable raft, shivering
in a wet suit, about to plunge over the highest commercially
raftable
waterfall in the world. We got snagged for a
moment at the top of the fall and there was a deliciously terrifying,
wonderfully focusing pause before we teetered on the very edge of that 21-foot
drop. Then the raft went completely vertical and folded in on itself. Mashed
against the others, blind, I opened my mouth to scream and was invaded by the ocean
of water that had followed us over. The pressure was unbearable. Then,
suddenly, it was over. We popped out the bottom, the raft unfolded the right
way up in the calm of the eddy and most of us were even still in it – torn
between shrieks of fear, laughter, and a silent awe that we were still alive.

We navigated seventeen sets of rapids that day in New
Zealand, and that’s what these work trips sometimes feel like. To adapt a
metaphor from
Anais
Nin – like living for weeks in
the rapids where novels are born but not written.
 

Today.
Friday.
London. As I step out of the plane it’s suddenly freezing and I am adrift,
caught in this enforced eddy.

I look around in the sudden stillness and realize.

The raft is still the right way up.

There are blue icicles hanging from the ceiling in Heathrow.

And Christmas is coming.
 

Washington,
D.C., USA

I spent most of the next week in the basement of my sister’s
house, dressed in her flannel pajamas and working on a big report on staff care
for humanitarian workers in Sudan and Chad. It was a good place to be buried in
a huge project, for on those occasions when I did come up for air there was
Thanksgiving with family, my young niece to smile at, the fanciest automatic
coffee maker I’d ever seen, and Michelle to chat with.

“Wow,” Michelle said one night when I ventured up to the
kitchen in search of ice cream. “You
do
have to work hard for your job sometimes.”

“What do you mean?” I said, digging through her freezer. “Do
you have any chocolate mint?”

“There are already four different types in there,” Michelle
said. “You’ll just have to make do with one of those.”
  

“I work hard,” I said, returning to her previous comment and
resigning myself to plain old chocolate.

“It’s just that most times we chat on the phone,” Michelle
said, “it’s just after five in L.A. and you’ve already left the office.”

“That is not called ‘not working’,” I said. “That is called
good work-life balance.”

I looked down. It was after eight at night. I had not
changed out of pajamas that day, or showered. I had two more sections to write
before I could go to bed.

“That balance sometimes vanishes when I’m on the road,” I
said. “This project is a disaster and we’ll be lucky to get it finished before
I have to leave to run the Baltimore symposium.”

“Oh, so you are still working now. I thought maybe you were
down there writing emails to that guy. … What’s his name?”

“Oh, uh, Mike, you mean,” I said.

“How’s that going?” Michelle asked when I didn’t supply any
more details.

“First,” I said, pointing a recently emptied spoon at her,
“there is no ‘that.’ We are just getting to know one another as friends.
Second, I don’t know. He’s on some island somewhere and has been for more than
two weeks. I won’t hear from him until he returns to civilization.”

Michelle didn’t push me any harder that night and I was
grateful, for the truth of the matter was that I
was
interested on some level. As careful as I had been to lay down
boundaries in those first emails to Mike and to never allow myself to indulge
in that naughty art of e-flirtation in any of my letters since, I had already
caught myself wondering more than once whether maybe, just maybe, Mike and I
might have a real shot at something more than friendship. I didn’t want to try
to explain that even to Michelle, for Michelle had had a front-row seat the
last time I’d tried long-distance love and
that
show had been anything but pretty. I doubted that she would bring the past up
and lecture me, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t need to, I told
myself. I’d learned my lessons well with regard to long-distance relationships.
These lessons were, in fact, remarkably similar to the rules that lifeguards at
public pools used to drill into us over and over on steamy summer days.

Danger!

Walk,
don’t run, because the ground
here is slippery.

And no diving in headfirst, even if the water
looks
like it might be deep enough.

Baltimore,
USA

Inquiries into my love life were, it seemed, once again the
flavor of the month. The next conversation on this topic came just three days
later, in Baltimore.
  

It had finally stopped raining, although the pavement was
still wet and the streets steaming in protest against the November chill. I was
in my own little world, juggling my laptop and bag, when I stepped onto the
curb near my hotel and he spoke to me.

“Did you get your coffee?” he asked. “
Oy
vay
, you look tired.”

“I am tired,” I said, recognizing the smiling, bowler-
hatted
limousine driver who had introduced himself as
Gideon and pointed out the coffee shop to me that morning. “I've been thinking
for five hours. My brain hurts.”

“It's cold,
ey
?” he said. “Where
I'm from in Africa it isn't this cold.”

“No,” I said, remembering the heat that had chased me onto
the plane ten days earlier. “I know
,
I was in Africa
last week.”

“Where?”

“Kenya and Ghana.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Not Nigeria? You should go to
Nigeria. It is the best place. Why have you not married an African man?”

I did a double take. Nope, we were definitely standing on a
street corner in Baltimore. And, yes, I was discussing this topic with a total
stranger for the second time in three weeks.

About three weeks earlier I had been in a taxi in Nairobi.
It was a
Jatco
taxi,
Jatco
being one of the
handful
of taxi companies in Nairobi
where you can be reasonably sure you won't be robbed mid-journey – not by the
taxi driver, anyway. This safe-service guarantee apparently doesn't, however,
extend to protection from being propositioned.

I was staring out the window, exhausted after a long day of
facilitating, when the taxi driver, who was blessed with the unlikely name of
Bunny, spoke into the silence.

“Are you married?”

I sighed. I knew we still had about forty minutes of traffic
on
Muta
Gisau
Way to
contend with. It was going to be a long trip back to the hotel.

“No.”

“Ah, I think you must marry an African man,” Bunny said.

“Why?”

“
Ahhhh
.
African man is very good.
Very hard-working.
But I
think maybe you best should pick an African man with no money. That is very
good.”

At this I was curious beyond all restraint.

“Why?”

“When man have no money and woman have a little money, then
they come together,” Bunny brought both hands together to illustrate this
important point, thereby taking them off the wheel and almost running us into
the back of a minivan in the process. “Then they work together to make
lots
of money.”

“Plus,” Bunny added as the coup de grace, “
man
with no money will be more faithful than man with lots
of money.”

“Huh.”

“How old are you?” Bunny asked.

“Thirty one,” I said.

Bunny clearly knew something about Western women. Usually
when I gave this answer, I got a look that hovered between shock and concern
and sometimes an interrogation into how and why I had managed to reach this age
unwed. Was my father negligent? How high, exactly, was my bride price?