2010 in First Lines

A handy blogging tradition which I got from Dorothy is to cut and paste the first line of the first post of each month of the year. It’s a good way to reflect briefly on 2010. So here goes:

Dec: It’s great to be back in internet contact again.

Nov: I was hoping to post a few pictures of life in the military base but the internet here is particularly slow so that will have to wait.

Oct: Day 22 here and while I’ve been thinking a lot about possible posts, the reality of camp life here is such that it’s actually very difficult to blog.

Sept: In true military fashion, let me give you a list of what’s happening:

Aug: L and I spent a few hours at the Cape Town book fair yesterday and managed to hear author Jodi Picoult howling like a wolf with her son Jake (in addition to talking about her novels).

July: I’m waiting for the signal for my deployment to Darfur for three months.

June: I first heard this song, by the ‘famously uncommunicative’ singer-songwriter Sam Beam, also known as Iron and Wine, in a mix sent by my friend C.

May: Time is even more precious than usual these days as my ‘practice’ at the military hots up.

April: Things have been a little hectic here at the Couch Trip over the past week so apologies for my absence from the blogosphere.

March: Picking a good read for a roadtrip is harder than it looks.

Feb: It all started on Saturday as I was driving to my long-anticipated week-long seaside retreat.

Jan: Our maternal or primary relationship provides the base, secure or insecure, for development but it is not the only story of childhood.

A few things strike me from these lines:

1) I spent an awful lot of time this year either on deployment in Sudan or worrying about going on deployment. I’m not sure how long it will take to get back to feeling ‘normal’ again and I suspect that I won’t get to a state of calm anytime soon with a wedding in under a month and a baby due fairly shortly thereafter.

2) I’m grateful (and a little surprised) that anyone still reads this blog with the amount of apologising and complaining I do. New Year’s resolution: apologise and complain less!

3) I didn’t do enough reading, reviewing and writing as I would have liked this year. I managed 40 books in 2010 (probably up from last year) but haven’t yet managed to review my reading for the year.

4) I still enjoy blogging and really appreciate my blogging friends not only for your reviews and interesting experiences but for the ongoing friendship. It sounds corny to put it down in words like this but I do appreciate it. That said, my love of blogging itself took a knock this year. An opportunity for revision and reinvention I guess.

5) Above all, and it’s not really reflected in the first lines above, what an exciting year I’ve had personally. Meeting L has been the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time. And even though I’m quite anxious about the wedding and all the many things that go along with that, I don’t regret our decision to speed things along one little bit.

6) This also ties up with one of my best reads of the year which was Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps I could sum up that book in a line: When you know, you know. Or: trust your gut instinct. But it’s a lot more complicated than that. Because first impressions can be misleading and sometimes it takes a while to untangle just exactly what our gut is telling us. And, on a related note, perhaps if I were to take a guiding principle from this year, it might be: Learn to live better with Anxiety. Not to be overwhelmed by it, and not trying to fight it all the time, but just to let it hum along quietly as a guiding force in the background.

Hope you have a safe and happy New Year’s celebration and see you soon for more reading, reviewing and unexpected life events.

Oh, and before I forget, I’d love to hear some recommendations for wedding readings. L and I have basically chosen ours but I’d love to hear what was meaningful and memorable from my blogging friends.

One more thing: The best present by far that I got for Christmas was a fancy digital camera (courtesy of the wonderful L). The difference in picture quality compared to the old point-and-shoot is astounding. When I’ve learned how to use it, I’ll post some pics.

Goodbye Sudan

What a relief to be back home! I arrived back in Cape Town on Tuesday night after a six-and-a-half hour cargo flight from Al Fashir to Pretoria and then a domestic flight from Joburg to Cape Town. I was greeted by a very happy (and pregnant) L and for the last two days we’ve been getting to know each other again.

I’ll be back with some pictures of my 58-day stay there but for now I’ll just post this. A closed blue gate. I love the fact that you can find variations of these doors all over the Arabic world. My mom bought me a picture of a similar door (more ornate with wooden carving) in Morocco.

It’s such a relief to be closing this door on Sudan. (Although it’s not quite closed – I’m still thinking about the guys that are there for Christmas and will be sending them a small parcel if I can get round to it today.) And now I get to sift through my images and memories and also hit the shops for the Christmas rush.

Here’s a picture of what the plane-ride back to SA was like. We got to share our space with a few returning vehicles.

Thanks for all the messages of support while I’ve been away. I really appreciate them.

Floored in Zam Zam

It’s great to be back in internet contact again. I was out in the wilderness there for a while and couldn’t even text L.

No major news from this side other than that I’m really hoping that I make it back to South Africa by the middle of December. I suppose I can’t really discuss flight-dates here (although, really, as if anyone would actually read this and act on it) so let me just say that it’s an anxious, uncertain wait. The dates change quite frequently and when I finally do get a date, then I find that I’m going to miss it for x and y reasons.

For the last week I’ve been stuck in El Fasher while I wait to go back to Kutum. Before that I visited Malha, which is easily the best-looking of the SA bases that I’ve seen. The food was good, the showers were reasonably clean and we even got to do a bit of sight-seeing. WordPress won’t let me post pics at the moment otherwise I would show you a picture of the crater at Malha, complete with a herd of camels drinking water.

No-one knows for sure whether the crater is the top of an extinct volcano or the crash-site of a meteor. Judging by all the volcanic rocks in the vicinity I’d go with the volcano explanation. But it was pretty cool in contrast to the surrounding desert.

And then, rather embarrassingly, I managed to injure myself running out of one of the tents here in El Fasher. I had just been summoned by a rather stern-looking major and perhaps I thought that I was in trouble or that he had news of my long-awaited return to South Africa. What happened was that my cap obscured the low doorframe and I hit it at pace and went straight down as if I’d be punched on the nose by Mike Tyson. I’m not sure if my head hit the floor when I went down but I did see a few comic-book-like stars. And then my teeth hurt and I realised I’d scraped some skin off my nose and my scalp. It’s a good thing the wedding isn’t next week because I would have a devil of a time getting there in time, and scarface isn’t quite the look I was aiming for.

I did feel a little better knowing that I wasn’t alone in my head-banging stupidity, however, At least two other guys showed me their door-inflicted injuries as well. And while I am grateful that that I didn’t lose any teeth or get a concussion, my head is letting me know that it doesn’t appreciate this.

The camp where I’m staying this week is called Zam Zam and it’s run by the Rwandans, who are generally a polite lot. “Good evening sir” is quite a common greeting, sometimes followed by “I’m fine” regardless of whether I’ve actually asked them how they are. But then South Africans are known for their “Howzit” so perhaps that explains it.

Some Rwandans stare at me as if a) they think that I might perhaps be French (they blame the French for the 1994 genocide); or b) they don’t like Mzungus (whities) very much. Having said that, thought, I was greeted the other day by “I love you” followed by a hug. Perhaps I looked like I needed cheering up.

I hope to be back in blog-reading mode very soon. In the meantime, I’m still grinning at the news that Di and Llew are the parents of a brand-new baby boy. Whoohoo.