Re-entry: Surprises

For the last few months, I haven't really allowed myself to think about life in Oregon.  I never started mentally preparing myself to be home, because "just around the corner" stretched on forever.  Then suddenly we had the visa appointment and I was packing like crazy, and still not thinking and feeling about the change.

There are so many surprises.  Some of them made me feel almost angry, like "why have I had to live so many months without this, when it is right in my own home!"  Some of the things that are normal in America suddenly seem strange or silly.  Some of them make me miss Uganda.  Some of them I just don't know where I fit.  Some of it seems so familiar, and yet so distant.  This is just a long list of things that suddenly jump out at me as I float through the days.


The toilet paper is so thick and soft, and works so well.  And the toilets are different, of course; they seem to be different everywhere!  When we went to the bathroom in the Seattle airport, Hibiscus went in her stall and popped right back out, complaining "Mama, my potty is already full!" I was disappointed that she would find yuck in her very first American toilet, when in general the toilets here are so much cleaner than in Kampala.  But there was no excrement, just water.  The bowl was full of water.  Ugandan toilets only have a little water at the very bottom.  Now that she pointed it out, it looks strange to me, too.  But the Ugandan toilets seem to have a giant, powerful flush, and the American ones are much more subtle.

My mattress is so nice and soft and supportive and comfortable.  Why have I spent so long sleeping on awful mattresses?  Most of them were foam, which was too hard new, and as it got used you could feel the boards underneath.  The last apartment had a luxurious spring mattress... which was so hard and pokey that I could only stand it if I slept on TOP of the bedspread.


"Where are all the people?" Hibiscus asked.  I don't know.  It seems like there is no one here, even in the middle of our city.  All the space is taken up by huge, smooth roads, and sprawling parking lots, and vacant lots that don't have any corn growing in the middle of them.  It feels lonely.

Everything is so big.  All the buildings are so big.  On our drive from Seattle back to Oregon, we had to stop to get something, and the first place we found was a WalMart in some tiny town.  Africa to Wal-Mart: I don't recommend it.  I practically had a panic attack.  Minus the top three largest cities, probably just about any Ugandan town or city could have fit inside that store, and with every single citizen and nearby farmer milling about, they still wouldn't have figured out what to do with all the STUFF.  That is an insane, crazy amount of stuff.

Our house is big.  The school is big.  The yards are big.  Why do we need all this space?  I'm not ready to jump into being a poor Ugandan, and fit my 12 family members into a house the size of my bedroom.  But 600 square feet per person is not a "need," it just isn't.  (Unless you're a family of one, in which case 600 square feet seems fairly reasonable.)  Although I do like my big, open yard, probably mostly because it has lots of garden in it.  I freely acknowledge that it probably takes about three times as much land to grow the same amount of food, just in the same season, so the gardens and farms are reasonably allowed to be bigger.  And I support playgrounds and public space.  But grassy yards that no one plays in?  That's a little confusing right now.

And the people are so big!  I had forgotten Americans are so big.  There are plenty of tall people in Uganda, so I hadn't felt the lack of tall-ness.  But maybe the proportion of tall people is higher here.  Or maybe the "tall" genes in Uganda go along with "lithe and somewhat boney."  (That is not a joke; they are much less ethnically blended than we are, so the ethnic group that is tall is also a group that tends to be very lithe; also blacker than the Muganda.)  I am a fairly petite person, and I suddenly feel like I am looking up all the time, and that feels different somehow.



Speaking of looks, it's an amazing experience not to stand out dramatically everywhere I go.  In fact, there are so many different types of people I don't think anyone stands out as dramatically as I did in Africa.

Although I still caught people trying not to stare at us when I was out with Buttercup.  People actually make an effort to not stare, which is different, but actually, when you are used to just being stared at, it seems kind of weird to work so hard to pretend you're not looking.  Why do we Americans make such a big deal about not looking at each other?  I remember this when I came back from Italy, too.  Just calmly looking at someone when you want to see what they look like seems to make more sense.

Anyway, they are looking at us.  I haven't figured out yet if it's because I am carrying a baby whose skin doesn't match mine, or because I have her tied to me with a giant piece of cloth.  I suppose I could do an experiment, and carry her some other way and see if we got fewer stares, but that doesn't seem worth the trouble.  In Africa, I knew exactly why people were staring at us.  It was because I was carrying a baby whose skin didn't match mine, and I had her tied to me with a giant piece of cloth in THE WRONG WAY.

It seems so odd to pay for everything with a credit card, and not be carrying around a wallet full of cash.  The first couple times, I forgot that I had the capability of buying something, since I didn't have cash in the appropriate currency yet.  And spending half my going-out energy thinking about how and when to procure that cash.  But if I do pay with cash, that seems pretty confusing as well, because it's all the same size and color.  America has a lot of green bills.

That, and the cash is so valuable.  Mark gave me a $50 bill to take into Wal-Mart, and part of my impending panic attack was thinking about how many shillings I had in that one little piece of paper.  I didn't dare take my hand off the bill in my pocket the entire time!  The largest value bill in Uganda is about $20, but those are kind of hard to use because most people don't have change, so most transactions are done with the $8-ish bills or smaller.

The computer that I used to use all the time seemed so overwhelming and I couldn't figure out how to do things.  And the screen is gigantic!  You make whatever you're doing so big, and you can still see a bunch of other things at the same time.  That screen just by itself seems to be lead directly to ADD.  Mark says they don't make computer screens that are any smaller any more.  Luckily, I can avoid getting ADD myself by going right back to doing everything on my iPad Mini, like I have for the last many months, but I think it's bad news for everyone else who is normalizing looking at that many pixels at once!


I hope I remember how to drive, because I'm driving.  I think I usually manage to turn into the correct lane, because I think about the driver being towards the middle of the road and try to ignore the left-right-ness, which gets confusing fast.  I think I might have forgotten a few of the policies about ceding the right of way.  In Uganda, whoever is moving has the right of way, and they "hoot" to remind people that they are coming through and to get out of the way, but they are often cede the right of way to turning cars.  I am quite sure that I have managed to not hoot at any bicyclists or pedestrians as I drive by!  But it's possible that I have not ceded at the right moment.  I do remember that I am actually supposed to pay attention to the red and green lights.

And I have forgotten how to drive around my city.  I just kind of head out on auto-pilot, and have a vague muscle-type memory of making certain turns or going in certain directions, but I can't think of the streets ahead of me and how they lead to where I'm going.


I don't remember where things are in my own kitchen.  How strange is that?  It's a very strange feeling.  I found a mini-dustpan in the garage (which I remembered is supposed to live in the bathroom) and used it for two days because I didn't remember that I keep the dustpan and whisk broom under the sink.  How convenient!  And I keep finding myself opening two or three cupboards to figure out where some ingredient lives.


I had forgotten about all the different American accents.  I'm used to hearing so many sounds of English around me, and being able to pick the American one out of a crowd.  If it's another ex-pat, we just kind of smile at each other and don't have to ask where we've come from, unless it's by state; if it's a traveler, they probably think American English is normal.  But now I suddenly remember that there are all sorts of different ways of speaking American.  And it is so mumbly.  Overhearing the general rumble of child-speech at my children's school sounds like what morse code or heart monitors look like.

I had not thought about American music.  Some of it I recognize and some of it I don't.  Just all the different kinds of sounds you hear in stores and on phones and out in the world.  Not to mention, hearing music in all the stores. I had forgotten that was part of the shopping experience.


I have not re-mastered the greeting ritual.  Some people cut right to the chase and say something like "this register's open," and I can handle that.  But some people say "how are you?" and my heart feels all friendly, and I reply "I am fine, thank you, and how are you today?" and they say "fine" and then there is an awkward pause.  I am not sure why the pause is awkward.  I think they are confused why saying "how ya doin'" is taking so long.  I was still feeling friendly.


And that's my random thought train list of things I'm still trying to figure out about America.