Deep South Sudan

     I’ve been back in the States since the first of the month.  I went into hibernate mode in Kansas for about two weeks (morning coffee in the afternoon, happy/sad ventures into the land of junk food, limitless, brain-liquefying access to tv and internet, penetrating questions of self-worth and existence resulting from a casual investigation into the lives of my parents’ numerous pets), then I emerged from my zombirific condition and traveled to Colorado to be a part of Seth and Sarah’s wedding and to see my sister’s new baby, Mason Patrick Black.  The Day of the Knot was extraordinary for at least five reasons: 1) Seth and Sarah’s handwritten vows brought me – and many others in attendance – to tears; 2) The weather could legitimately be described as heaven sent; 3) At the reception I got the chance to catch up with a handful of our most esteemed visitors to Sudan while enjoying a plate of outrageously tasty Indian food; 4) Near dusk two of the guests stood up in the pavilion and executed an electrifying rendition of “Business Time” by Flight of the Conchords; and 5) I succeeded in not getting drunk.  However, the real revelation in Colorado wasn’t the wedding, the mountain vistas that still captivate prairie folk like me, or the medical marijuana (not that I tried it or anything).  The real eye-opener is Mason Patrick Black.  He’s my new BFF and I told him so and he replied, “Gwaagoo!” after which I’m almost certain he farted. 

      I haven’t experienced a full-on American Autumn since I lived in the Delta.   I saw pieces of it in and around Portland, Maine back in ‘07 before hastening my return to Africa, but nothing quite as uncut and cinematic as this.  Showers for days then sudden and glorious sunshine, the trees all dolled up in their changing fashions and the perfume of wet and burning leaves.  The boastful and gaudy approach of Halloween, the quickening night, the panoply of heartfelt sentiments and images that aren’t any more mature than the ones I might have composed for a high school writing assignment.  A return to innocence perhaps?  No, innocence will have to wait till death.  Coming home tends to necessitate a kind of capitulation to the mercurial nature of reality, which (surprise, surprise) doesn’t remain static while I’m off in another reality.  We’re all part of the same fabric, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way in Sudan.  It feels like the 18^th century with a few anachronisms peppering the scene – radios, cell phones, motorbikes, and toothpaste.  Or it feels like a ruined future.  Interstates and Wal-Marts got vaporized long ago and replaced by goat paths and mud huts.  Luckily, you can still get your hands on some tech-relics from that mythical age of monstrous consumerism.  Not everything was destroyed.  You can SMS your friends, so what else do you really need, right?     

     Arrival in the land of the free – the Best of the Best in Authentic Reality since 1776 – usually demands I empty my pockets of any presuppositions, then submit to the process of accepting the strangely everyday things along with the transformed and broken ones.  And this time I’ve found there’s more damage at home than ever before.  Collapsing marriages within my family, an early and bittersweet Halloween party for my youngest cousins, and no idea when I’ll see them again.  No ideas at all from the guy who doesn’t live here anymore.

      I’ll be around until the end of November.  There’s extensive and exciting paperwork before me (summaries and reports that I couldn’t pull together in the midst of my sixty children) and there’s a grad school application waiting to be written. 

     Contact me if you get the chance.  I’d loved to hear from you (and I might even send you an immediate, unsudanerated reply)!