Come Back Africa

I wrote this a week ago:

Tonight I will load all of my belongings into a blue and white Lada taxi that was built in Russia and imported to Ethiopia during the cold war. The Lada will drive down Bole Road and fight through a sea of old Toyotas, large trucks, and chauffer-driven Mercedes carrying businessmen and diplomats weary from a day of battles. And so, my bags and I will be ferried to the airport and after going through all of the required formalities I will board KLM flight 604 to Amsterdam stopping in Khartoum, but, I am not going to Khartoum. Then, the other passengers and I will take our seats, we will fasten our seat belts and the plane will push back from the gate, even though I was just on one two weeks ago and should be used to such things as I encountered them fairly frequently in my previous life and will encounter them frequently again, the aircraft will appear to me as though it were an aberration; for it will seem so clean and everything will seem so well ordered and put in it’s place and I will get to read a newspaper- they’ll probably hand out copies of The International Herald Tribune and maybe if I’m lucky, Le Monde. While I read some article about how the E.C.B. should provide more liquidity in sovereign bond markets and pretend to be lost in a world in which I have not lived for more than a year, the plane will line up on the runway and with a mighty roar its twin Prat & Whitney turbofans will be powered up. They will suck in the high-mountain air of Addis Ababa, wind will rush over the wings and the plane will climb up and up and take me away from Ethiopia and the Peace Corps. Tonight, I am leaving Ethiopia to never come back again, at least never as P.C.V. But, if I am honest with myself and with you I should say that my heart left Ethiopia a long time ago and I don’t think it’s ever going to come back. I realize now that I could spend the next 8 months or so in a state of melancholy or I could go home. I’ve never really been happy here and I’m sure that I never will be, I feel like I gave life in my village a shot but it just hasn’t worked out and it’s time for me to move on.

I’m excited to go home and begin a new chapter in my life, for if I’m honest, this one has brought more disappointment and hardship than I had anticipated. But I’ve grown a lot and made a bit of a difference and I have memories that I’ll cherish for a lifetime. I could fill pages and pages with graphic accounts of the reasons for why I am quitting but it’s kind of private. Although, I will say that the worst part about my time at site was that even though I was constantly surrounded by people I almost always felt alone.

Beryl Markham wrote in her memoir West With the Night that when you leave Africa and come back it is never the same, four weeks ago I left to go home for vacation and two weeks after that I returned, but it was only me who had changed as I realized how much I had missed living in San Francisco during the last 16 months. When I left for vacation I was almost sure that I would have been able to grit and bear my Peace Corps service to its fruition but now I realize that grit and bear is no way to live; for me Peace Corps was not supposed to be like some world’s strongest man contest in which I would pull an airplane with my teeth and bench press compact cars. No, I thought that I would really enjoy being a P.C.V.

In the African Studies literature scholars always write that Africa is perhaps the most misunderstood continent in the minds of most Americans and in closing I would like to say that Ethiopia is going through a period of tremendous transformation and economic growth, new cranes dot the skyline in Addis Ababa like a giant Erector Set, and in countryside new tarmac roads are being built as quickly as streams spring up during the rainy season. There are many serious development and security issues in Ethiopia but it’s not the starving backwater as it is so often portrayed as on the news, and when I go home I will try to communicate this. I will come back to visit Ethiopia one day and I wonder what it will be like, ni illaltan (we’ll see).