Adrenaline and Blissful Confusion

These past few weeks, writing has been nothing more than a chore. I wrote essays because they were due, and journal entries (occasionally) because I knew I should. I started this blog as a way to share my experiences and how they made me think and feel. There has been so much worth sharing in the month since I last posted, so please don’t mistake my absence as apathy. I have seen so many incredible things—enjoyed sunshine and collected constellations and had meaningful conversations—and yet reflecting on all of these things felt like an insurmountable effort. So, I just didn’t write. I knew this would catch up to me eventually, that one day the dam would break, and the words would flow until I feared drowning. Yesterday, I got sick. Who knows where it came from, but I was running a fever and spent 24 hours in a haze. When my fever broke, so did the dam. And here we are.

The last time I wrote I was still on the island of Zanzibar. Since then, I spent three weeks in mainland Tanzania and nearly a week in Kenya. Needless to say, a lot has happened. It feels impossible to share all of these experiences in one post, and they deserve far more than just a chronological retelling of events. It only feels fair to share these past five weeks as I lived them, in a beautiful, messy rush of adrenaline and blissful confusion.

My last few days in Stone Town were spent cooking with my host family, gossiping about boys with my host sisters, and then promptly answering many questions about the dating culture in the U.S. We danced in the kitchen and sang so loud I thought we’d wake the neighbors. My little host sister, Lubna, made up a word and spent the entire night trying to convince me that it meant “surprise!” in Swahili. I sat on the living room floor with my host sister, Farhat, and we talked about our life goals while she gave me henna so I’d have something to remind me of her when I left.

So much changed after leaving Zanzibar. The first day on the mainland can accurately sum up the entirety of my time there. We flew to Tanzania, stayed the night in a hostel, and then woke up at six a.m. to get on the bus. I had no idea where I was going, but I heard it was pretty. We ended up leaving late and then hitting all of the traffic possible. It was a 12-hour travel day by the time we made it to the muddy mountain roads that would take us into Mazumbai Forest Reserve. Mountain roads always make me anxious. I hate them when I’m driving. I hate them even more when someone else is driving. I fought off a panic attack for two hours by staring at the view with my headphones in. When the bus got stuck, any composure I had stepped off the bus with me and wandered off while I was helping push it out of the mud. The final hour in the bus was spent trying not to cry and theorizing worst case scenarios. We arrived at our destination after dark, so I crawled into my tent, glad to be alive, and slept.

I woke up to beautiful misty views that would cleanse me over the next few days. I walked in the forest and caught chameleons and played in waterfalls. I felt like a child, how I had when I ran barefoot in the mud until the sun went down. We played hide-and-seek in the dark and held back laughter under the stars. I could see the milky way above my tent. It was heaven.

But eventually, I had to get back on that bus, face the mountain road again, and head to another unfamiliar destination. I spent the next week staying at a farm and eating way more cheese than I ever needed, but it was just so good. I met with farmers and learned about how they could see climate change happening around them. Crops they used to easily be able to farm now required irrigation or were too expensive or water intensive to grow at all. I met with high school students who were learning about the environment and planting trees in their schoolyard. So much of this reinforced my desire to work as an environmental educator because it made me so damn excited. These are conversations I want to be having, questions I find so incredibly important and want to be asking. This also happened to be a time when a lot was going on at home. I have a job offer with Teach for America that I have a couple weeks to accept. I miss loved ones and want to be involved in their lives. I know that even though I am across the world, graduation is fast approaching. There are so many feelings happening all at once that I find it easier just to ignore them all. This makes me sad when I look back because I know there are so many days I was only half present for. I keep reminding myself that life does not stop just because I leave the familiar parts behind. I am still a person who copes in the way I know best. And that is okay. I came to this realization as I drank a glass of wine in the first hot shower I’d had in a week and sang the soundtrack from A Star is Born as loud as humanly possible. This normally solves most problems for me.

This brings us to October. I have gotten off the bus to collect stones and pile them under the tires more than a handful of times. I beat a man in pool who claims to be the second cousin of the President of Kenya. I am sure I have been sunburnt the entirety of this month. I put on sunscreen every morning and picture my grandmother yelling at me every time I forget to reapply. My malaria medication makes me especially prone to sunburn and I somehow still haven’t let that sink in. I am not surprised when my Kenyan visa photos look like a tomato dressed up as a person. In October I see wildlife I had before only seen on Planet Earth. I dance in more waterfalls that make me feel alive and free and present. I sing Believe by Cher over and over, it has become the theme song to this trip for me. When I start to sing, everyone around me chimes in. It makes me smile. I ride a dala dala for the first time. This is a van with bench seats that serves as a public bus. The one I ride costs 25 U.S. cents and includes 21 people and a chicken at my feet. I learn to weave baskets from a woman named Rachel. I learn that I am not good at weaving baskets from a woman named Rachel. She is part of a women’s group that weaves together and microfinances each other’s goals of sending their children to school or starting a business or any other number of dreams they have. I am called a feminist when I argue that men’s groups are not a necessity because the whole world is already a system that functions properly for men. I find it ironic that feminism is mansplained to me; this becomes a running joke.

We hike Mount Kasigau the next day. It takes eight hours, but it rained and I got to move and I am happily exhausted. Then I get the fever. I sleep the day away until the 80-degree room doesn’t feel cold anymore. By lunch I am hungry again. Hungry for the first time in two days, and for someone who normally eats every two hours, this experience is borderline spiritual. But beyond that, I am hungry to create again. To write and to draw and to speak into existence how I am feeling. It has been weeks since I allowed myself to feel everything so that I could feel anything. I am so excited.