A Year Abroad

Despite still thinking I smell Murambi every now and then, even after being back in the United States, that isn’t the smell that I associate with Rwanda. To me, Rwanda smelled like tea plants, eucalyptus trees, and rainstorms. Uganda smelled like dust and sun-burnt sweet grass. Over the last four months I took hundreds of pictures, managed to capture some of what I saw, but there is no similar mechanism to capture what I smelled. Scent is a powerful link to memory, and I wonder what memories have settled to the back of my mind without the smells of Rwanda around me anymore.

My first month in Uganda I smelled like sweat, dust, bug-spray, suntan lotion, and hand sanitizer. We all did. Eventually we gave up on the hand sanitizer, suntan lotion, and bug-spray one after the other. All that remained was the smell of sweat and dust, and then just sweat when the rainy season started. While initially happy to once again be surrounded by fruity shampoo and sweet smelling lotions when I returned home, within a few days I was absurdly sad that I no longer smelled like bug-spray. It was as if that little change back to normalcy, to who I was before I left, foretold a more dramatic and significant return.

Despite all the writing I did this semester, both for this blog and for myself, I still feel at a loss how to tell others about my experience and what I’ve learned. Since I’ve been home I’ve gotten the questions “how was Uganda/Rwanda?” and “what was your favorite part?” a lot. I normally respond “beautiful” or “phenomenal” to the first question and “the people I met” to the second. While my standard answers are true, they also fall short of expressing the magnitude of the last four months or my desire to share what I learned. But the questions are so big, the answers even bigger, and I don’t know what else to say. I mean, it’s a little harder to drop into conversation “the genocide in Rwanda lasted 103 days, I was in East Africa for just over that amount of time,” which makes no sense to mention, but somehow seems significant to me. I haven’t figured out how to talk about the memorials in a short conversation. I feel like I either end up glossing over the difficult parts in order to deliver my conclusion, that memorials are somehow beautiful, or making it sound like all we did was go to memorial after memorial and saw skulls, after bodies, after more bones. It feels wrong to have any conversation about Rwanda and not talk about the memorials, like the tourists who go to Rwanda for gorilla trekking but don’t want to bother with the “depressing stuff”.

I miss Rwanda, which isn’t exactly what people want to hear when they ask “how does it feel to be back?” I am happy to be home. I’m even happier that I now have the opportunity to share this experience with the people who matter most to me in the world.

I guess this is where this blog ends. There are still things I need to process, parts of re-entry that don’t make sense. It isn’t so much that being back is hard, but that the things that were difficult to process or took time to deal with in Rwanda now need to be re-processed again now that I’m no longer in Rwanda. But I’m home now, which means that all be having these conversations in person, rather than via blog. I started this blog as a way to keep in touch with people, to let them know what I was doing half the world away. It ended up meaning a lot more to me than that. Just knowing that I was going to be writing about experiences later made me frame things differently in the moment. I think I had a better experience abroad because I always had the thought in the back of my mind, “how am I going to share this, what story am I going to tell?” It forced me to think through each experience I had, not just the ones that eventually became full posts. For every post, for every story, there were so many more that didn’t make it into this blog. Unfortunately, more often than not, the happy stories got the short end of the stick.

This is also where I say ‘thank you’. Thank you to everyone for their support, for only thinking I was mildly insane for embarking on this year of international adventures. Thank you for taking the time to read about my year, for giving me a space to ramble, and for your feedback.

Who knows, maybe this blog will get a second life sometime in the future. There is so much of the world left to see…

One of the first things we did during orientation was write a letter to ourselves. I pretty much forgot about mine and when the envelope ended up back in my possession four months later I couldn’t remember what I’d written for the life of me. This was my letter to myself.

“OK Self-here’s the deal,

You did it. You had a lot of fears going into this, but if you’re reading this, you made it. So no matter how the program goes, feel good about that. You were worried about what you could handle, worried that you would let people down if it wasn’t the super awesome adventure you thought it would be, you were worried about what it would say about you if you couldn’t get past yourself and you made this a purely selfish experience. I hope you had a good time, learned a lot, made wonderful friends, and maybe even found a new part of yourself. If not, that’s OK. A really smart lady once told you that just because you couldn’t do something didn’t make it a failure. So be proud of what you did do, and if you’re disappointed by how anything turned out, just keep trying. As your roommate would say, ‘think positive!’”

It’s hard to remember that I had so many fears at the start of the program, fears that I didn’t voice, for the most part. I’ve been back for a week and already the lack of warm showers and the often dubious bathrooms have faded away and the good memories push to the forefront of my brain. My experience in Uganda and Rwanda was so overwhelmingly positive that all the uncertainty of the first few days seems to have melted out of existence. Even though I’m back home, I still have so many things left to say, so many stories I didn’t share. Even though this is technically the end of my year abroad, I’ll probably do a few more updates once I’ve gained a little distance from the experience. But for now, I’ll end this post with one more little story. Two weeks before I left I got back in touch with my Ugandan host family. I’d been out of touch since I left them, for various reasons, but I wanted to make sure I got a chance to talk to them before I went home. I learned that my host mother, who had been seven months pregnant at the time I was living with them, had given birth to a baby girl. They named her Liliana.