Reposted from my personal blog: https://sittingundertheoaktree.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/the-art-of-coming-home/
Somehow, I arrived without realizing it right away. It started with a desire to be at site when I was not, and then a general disinclination to ever leave, and now I'm able to make fun of the "how I see PC" hashtag, without batting an eyelash, in a subdued sort of sarcasm.
Let me tell you how it goes. My cat never stops meowing. I strategically make use of the milk so that I can drink as much tea as I want before it goes bad (I don't have a fridge). One of these tricks, by the way, is to sing a little milk-song to my cat to get her in the house at night; to my infinite delight, the neighboring kids have picked up on it, and sing it to her of their own volition as they entice her to play with string, reeds, and bottle caps. Every two or three days, I buy enough food to last a few meals, and kind of make it up as I go along. Would I normally put Thai red curry and couscous together? No. Did I leave all my rice at a friend's house over a week ago, and forget about it until now? Yes.
Almost every day I wish I had a third arm, and a motorbike. The daily ritual of buying airtime is so familiar to me that I have the Africell data package codes memorized. I had to tie a towel around my cat so that she doesn't pull her stitches out, from being spayed over two weeks ago, for a third time. And I've piled layers of blankets on my bed so that I can't feel the bed frame through the mattress, until I can buy a new one when our next salary disbursement comes through. (Which is also when I will buy more rice.)
The books in the school library are almost categorized and organized; the goal is to have it ready-to-lend next week. As the baby that I've nursed for the past five months, I'm ready to pass it to someone else (preferably plural: someones). When teachers make jokes about my not having children or yet being married, I lovingly point them to the library and joke that THAT is a spouse and kids in one.
And to top it all off, today I dropped half a container of tomato paste on the floor. And by "dropped", I mean that it pinwheeled out of my hand as I tried to catch it multiple times (#tbt to those cartoons of characters trying to grasp soap), and left scattered artwork across the walls, à la Pollock. I may have sworn loud enough for anyone around to hear me - for the record, I don't recommend doing that - and then, almost as soon as I decided that instead of tomato soup with spinach and basil, we were having Thai red curry and couscous, my regular evening cup of tea became a hot toddy almost of its own accord, as if that was what I intended all along.
That's the sort of thing that makes me think "how I see PC". Make yourself the hot toddy when you need it, when you've been looking at books for far too long and can't feel your face, when you've made five trips to the vet for your cat, when you're getting creative with your menu because your shillings, nuevos soles, lilangeni or tālā are running a little bit low. When your hands are brown with dirt from picking spinach with your co-teacher, when children run to greet you on your way to school and yell goodbye from the windows, when your neighbor asks you every day how your cat woke up in the morning, that's how to see PC.
And I like it here, to be honest. I don't like the constant dust or the feel of it on my hands, especially after touching books in the library, or scrubbing my feet every night with a stone. But I do like watching and listening to the kids as they murmur and hold up pages to their friends, and their cajoling smiles from the door when they want to come in and read. I do like having a market friend in town who supplies his store with rice noodles for my sake. I do like walking through my neighborhood, greeting and being greeted by name, fielding invitations to eat or take chai, and being obliged to open my home in return. There is nothing like the Acholi offer of hospitality: Come and eat! they say. As often as I can, I make it a point to take them up on it. ✌🏻
(The featured image from this post, befittingly titled, "All I Wanted Was Some Nutmeg," is the end result of an entire shelf falling down around my mother's head on the same day as the Tomato Paste Incident. Coincidence? I think not.)