Here's the thing...

"Careening," I thought putting the New Yorker down on my lap. That is the word for what we are doing right now - in this taxi - through the hills above Nairobi. Careening. Under the heavy grey sky, over these pot-holed roads, between the jungle threatening to come over the garden walls. It struck me as funny - or funny enough to stop reading a magazine - that the word just came to me like that. After so many months of having no words pop into my head to describe anything. After years of not having really anything to write. Having no words compose themselves in my head. One just pops up. Just like that. Careening. I guess we are all careening in life - which is a great metaphor for life if, in the words of someone famous, you're stupid enough to want more metaphors for life - careening along roads on high mountain cliffs, over hills, being shifted in our seats from side to side by bumps and turbulence. We rarely, if ever, just stay perfectly still. Not even wh...

I like to think that there is a special state of mind into which frequent travelers often descend. You will know these people by their irksome calm when they, in the same awful travel predicament as you, watch calmly as you lose your temper. Their bags might be missing, their flight delayed, or cancelled, the airline clerk being a heinous twat and yet they stand next to you with that placid look of acceptance and love for the airline clerk, and the airline industry - and universe at large. Sometimes, I enter this state of travel zen. No, I don’t enter it…it usually descends upon me for no apparent reason and in those moments I feel calm – and somewhat superior. I’d like to think that most of my travels over the holidays I was in that state. Flight from Amsterdam cancelled…no problem. Flight to Boston cancelled…no problem. Flight to DC cancelled…no problem. I was the poster child for travel zen. But now the universe is tempting my resolve. I am set to fly DC, to Amsterdam, to Nairo...

As was tactfully pointed out by a dear friend from Chicago I haven’t posted for a month. This is not, you’ll be glad (?) to know, because I have nothing to say but rather because I have too much to say and not enough time to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – to say it. As I write this I am sitting in Loki – one of our support sites in Kenya – where I have just been in a technical workshop with a lot of our field staff as well as some lower level govt. of Southern Sudan officials with whom we work and I have spent several of those days depressed. Not for any very valid reason except that, at every turn, everything seemed to not be working out. Have you had those days? Where it seems that the obstacles and challenges and problems seem to far outweigh the solutions? Sometimes those days like to chain themselves together in to weeks out of sheer vindictiveness. This has been my week. Last night, one of the government officials seemed to be lingering around where I was having...

Today I was at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi for the 10 year anniversary of the bombing in which 46 staff were killed. The event started with the marines playing Taps which got me thinking about how music so easily strikes an emotion. I mean, is Taps an inherently sad song or have I just seen and heard it at enough sad events that it's inextricably linked to sadness. Same with Amazing Grace played on bagpipes. Does certain music actually evoke a similar emotion in everyone or could some hear Taps and think it's a pretty good party tune?