If I could, I’d be moving at the speed of my almost-homonym….
Almost three weeks in, and I’m learning to temper my urge to flee the cement barriers buffering the downtown streets with an understanding that I am only marginally in control of my future here.
….but alas, I’ve been beached on the side of the road for weeks, like this Ndiaga Ndiaye bus on the road to N’Gor…
Don’t get me wrong, like a deluded rat in a cage I still hop on my wheel and spin. Each Wednesday I get to “work” early, running gear in hand and joylessly wonder whether this will be the last run to originate from the embassy. The jovial Senegalese guards compound roundly appreciate my ritualistic feats of futility. They all know my name (I wish I could say I knew all of theirs) and they also know how far I expect to go each time I head out. Consequently, these outings have morphed into a kind of duty on my part to provide sixty seconds of entertainment for these hard-working first line defenders.
Doesn’t everyone need a white girl in purple running tights to color an otherwise dusty mid-week morning?
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking that this is not the way I intended to dive into my Olmsted experience. Alas, it is Murphy who says that if I ship my household goods extra-early, they will arrive in country before me but will not be delivered because the housing situation has not yet been resolved. Then it will snow in Biblical proportions for days that will buffer a three-day weekend in the very place that is required to provide its stamp of housing approval. Finally, in-country language training will not begin until the language center gives my handy new cell phone a call and tells me that a class is convening. This is why I’m buzzing about post starting to Never Again Volunteer Yourself in the overextended military office.
I am on hot standby until the wheels of progress catch up with my cultural and social ambitions, and there is nothing more I can do to remedy this stagnation.
I know, things could be worse. I’m not stuck in windowless building situated at the epicenter of tropical paradise and being forced to read the propaganda of a horribly-written state newspaper that documents ridiculous falsehoods of a stranger-than-fiction dictator (done that). Nor am I deployed to a warzone of questionable beginnings where my decision to join the Navy still couldn’t prevent me from gaining “boots on the ground” experience in sandy places (didn’t have to do that, Alamdoulilahi). No, I’m in Senegal, and instead get to sit around a cafeteria table and explain to a group of visiting U.S. Marines how I managed to score such a ridiculously good scam….I mean, scholarship.
I hate being idle, but I don’t believe that this minor speed bump is robbing me of learning opportunities. Every day is a new adventure, and inch’allah next week, I’ll be on my way to opening my household goods and rediscovering my many pairs of high-heeled shoes.