Rewind and Press Play
Life has a tendency to move way too fast, leaving reason and meaning behind in the dust and struggling to catch up. Or, at the very least, this is how I feel about the last few months in my own narrow little existence. I look at these pages and see that the last substantial entry was written in April; a typical Ape Rifle piece on Chinese urbanism, no less. Yet here we are in late August, four months later, these pages having not received more than a few minutes of attention. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it or run out of stories to tell; on the contrary, I have so much to write about I’m not exactly sure where to start. The past few months have been a whirlwind of places, faces and surreal new experiences.
This is about the time when I send this narrative back to April 2006. Having left my postgraduate life in London well behind, I was back in Montreal experiencing all the joys of transition and uncertainty. I was interested in too many potential paths and places, but getting frustrating by a lack of definite direction and opportunity. The excitement of having a Masters from a prestigious university was wearing off with the realization that making that next step was turning out to be rather difficult. Applications were written, the CV was updated and a significant amount of time was spent waiting for replies that were taking their sweet time in coming.
I was enjoying my rediscovery of Montreal and cherishing the time spent with close friends. Despite being stuck in a transitory period, on a certain level I was enjoying the familiarity of it all after several years of bouncing around the globe. My hometown is a great place, made as much by the presence of family and friends as the city itself. However, something in me still yearned for one more foreign adventure, one more bumpy ride down a dusty road in a beaten up van. The more responsible portion of my brain, however, stressed that if this were to happen, it would need to be a more serious endeavour than my random wanderings in China teaching English badly. This potential experience needed to build my career experience and employability, perhaps even in a field I was interested in. This time, I needed to emerge on the other side with something more than culture shock, good stories and a strange obsession with Chinese urban landscapes.
And the next thing I knew, I had gladly accepted a rather prestigious nine-month fellowship with a very respected international development organization. This position was based in the rural world of northern Mozambique- not exactly a hub of urbanism- but I figured it would be a welcome change in perspective and a great experience.
I said goodbye to my days of transition with a ridiculously fun road trip to New York City, where my sister’s graduation was celebrated with fashion shows, rock concert boat cruises and champagne in the pouring rain. From there it was off to Ottawa, Canada’s well-groomed capital, for a month-long preparatory seminar with the other people departing for all corners of the world as part of the programme. It was at this point that I lost track of time and fell out of touch with even my closest friends. The seminar was a heavily caffeinated experience of group work, presentations, receptions, dinners, late nights and early mornings. It assembled a great group of people who bonded as only spending a month of 24/7 contact can facilitate. We all lived in the same few hallways of a university residence, shared the same conference rooms, and together approached the limits of sanity with sleep deprivation and enough inside jokes to last a few years. It was certainly a memorable experience and further solidified my theory that, despite it all, there are a good number of great, bright, fun young people in the world.
With the seminar completed, I was given two weeks to go home to Montreal and realize just how exhausted I was. So, I did the obvious thing: instead of packing and preparing properly, I went on a road trip to Toronto and then had a great visitor to keep me company for a week in Montreal. Somewhere in there (and largely thanks to the patience and assistance of said visitor) I managed to buy things, arrange stuff and have a few suitcases sitting around my room half-packed. Given the unfortunate timing that my birthday happened to fall on my day of departure, I woke up that morning in early July regretting that one extra marguerite and realizing that I was flying off to southern Africa for 8 months that evening. Miraculously, I didn’t forget anything.
And so followed the compartmentalized world of international travel, with memories of souvenir clogs in Amsterdam’s airport and a duet of Dutch and Afrikaans on the flight to Johannesburg. I still cannot get over how strange flying can be: the flight tracker shows a little plane icon passing over the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe, and yet they are nothing but spaces on a map. Completely disconnected from a reality below than I cannot yet fathom, I sit there in the same stale space I’ve known since eastern Canada, watching movies and eating oddly flavoured Doritos. Disembarking in South Africa was strangely exciting- well, about as exciting as things can be after spending nearly twenty hours flying over a few continents. Johannesburg at night was a dead landscape of empty streets, barricaded homes and concrete. The next morning it fared little better in the sunlight, evoking a dystopian future California where nothing much had been built since the early 1980s. It is perhaps irresponsible to pass judgment on a place based on a stay of one day, and I hear that all the action is out in the suburbs. Yet, I can’t help but feel suspicious about the prospects of a city where the suburbs are the place to be.
As the flight to Maputo lifted off that next day, I left the heavily industrialized world behind, that familiar reality of consumer excess, grid infrastructure and peri-urban office parks. Mozambique was on its way.