Inbetween

Somehow Britain seems an appropriate place to get stuck. The entire place smacks of people on their way to someplace else. It’s foreign, but not foreign enough to be ‘abroad’. Everyone speaks English but not necessarily in such a way as to be understandable. It’s not home but not abroad either. It’s grey and cold and the sky is close and it is stuck off the continent like Ellis Island in New York. London feels to me like a train station or a layover airport. Not a bad place to be but not a final destination either.

And so here I am – for the time being – until I get a visa. I’m running out of things to do, of people to see, places to go. And I can’t get off the island, my passport is at the embassy, remember? My training and briefings are finished, I have all my shots, have finished two books, have read as much about Darfur as humanely possible. The only thing I have left is the organization’s logistic manual. A hundred-odd page document written in font Arial 4. It’s shaping up to be a fun weekend.