{ and the writing continues }

Here is my take to a prompt on an experience that changed my life. Enjoy!

Two years ago I discovered just how small and accessible the world actually is in this twenty first century. The night before I was to start my two day journey from Canada to Africa via England and the United Arab Emirates, I perched nervously in my favorite seat on our couch. Our tiny condominium’s living room glowed with a familiar light as my husband, Derek, and I racked our minds for any last-minute items that we would have to pack. I was a nervous and neurotic mess, although excited to go. I had very little experience with traveling, and the experience that I had already had was less than ideal; in fact, I would have to say it was quite negative, involving homesickness and physical sickness in general. Even my honeymoon had left me hospitalized with a form of dysentery that to this day I do not know how I acquired.

Nevertheless, this trip to Africa, planned ten months in advance, was now imminent, and I was working to convert all my jitters into nothing but positive stomach butterflies. As I sat in my favorite couch seat, I took in all the pleasures of home, all my things in exactly their right places, where I liked them. To leave the comforts of home seemed against my nature, and yet I had signed up to do it. I flipped vaguely through a magazine I had received in a pile of junk mail, then tossed it on my ottoman, where it landed, splayed half open. I left it there, then went to bed to catch a few hours of sleep before our early morning trip to the airport.

Once in Africa, my cautious nature ruled me for the first few days—possibly even weeks. And yet, I managed to loosen up and play in the wintery ocean on the coast of Jeffreys Bay, donning a wetsuit and doing some bodyboarding (I never could master the surfboard), while some local Africans looked at us like we were crazy hooligans as they sported their winter fur-lined. I took a six hour trek to sand dunes nine storeys tall, barefoot all the way (suffice to say, my feet were hardened and swollen the next day, but it was well worth it). I went on a safari and was less than a few arm spans from a male lion, leader of its pride. I slept in a grass hut and did everything possible to keep mosquitos—and their malaria—away from me. I continued to sleep in said hut one night even after we killed a spider double the size of my hand-span in my bedroom earlier that same afternoon. I ate grilled crocodile meat from Lake Kariba in Zambia as we dined on the lake’s edge and were carefully on the lookout for poisonous snakes in the long grass of the yard. I saw a killed black mamba snake, shot dead by a young schoolboy, its carcass stretched out long and thin in the dust. I photographed Derek as he lied beside it, dwarfed by its length. I hugged orphaned children, many with HIV themselves, I’m sure, and helped raise a roof on the orphanage that they or their cousins might one day live in. I played jump rope with village kids while the men tarred beams for the roof of the new clinic we worked on. And then, twenty seven days later, I was back in Pretoria, South Africa, in a mall more modern and flashy than many I’ve seen in Canada, surrounded by elegant restaurants, internet cafes, electronics boutiques, and designer clothing stores. The culture shock may have been greater coming back to what I felt familiar with than going away from it.

Fourteen hours past that, I was in a plane flying over the deserts outside Dubai, the world-class airplane touching down just past midnight in a temperature of more than forty degrees celcius. In the Dubai airport, I was due for a twelve hour layover in the middle of the night. I visited a McDonalds in which the menu was written in Arabic, and I ordered the same chicken nuggets that I could have had anywhere. There was a comfort in these familiar morsels. I wandered past a Starbucks kiosk and wondered to myself whether the milk they were using was cows’ or some other animal’s. I caught a cat nap lying under a bench, as I saw other weary travelers doing. I didn’t mind the floor as the world-class airport’s carpet was immaculate. Curry smells and other exotic fragrances drifted out of travelers’ lounges where, for a few dollars, you could have a cushioned sofa to nap on, and a middle eastern breakfast buffet when you awoke. The floor seemed to be enough for me as I dozed for a few solid hours amidst the hubbub, woken only as the imam gave the public call to prayer, chanting in a foreign tongue as the majority of travelers—men clad in long white robes and women in black burkas and head scarves—laid themselves low before their god.

Within thirty hours more, I was long past the coasts of Africa, past also the deserts of Dubai, and just past the islands of the U.K. I was back to Canada, to my home on the prairies. In an exhausted stupor I hugged and kissed loved ones who greeted us. We were whisked home, helped with our luggage, jetlagged to the max. I dropped off our foul-smelling luggage in the front hallway of our condo, resolving to tackle the stench of our thirty-day soiled clothes later, after a sleep in my own soft bed. As Derek used the shower, I allowed myself to rest a moment on the couch. Without thinking of it, I sat in my favorite seat as I always did, to the far left, stretching out my legs to the ottoman. I had to kick aside a splayed out magazine that was in my way. I inched it forward with my toes, remembering suddenly, in a sort of time warp, that it had been a long thirty days ago that I had tossed that same magazine there, by my own hand. In those thirty days I had been a changed person, had had countless experiences that seemed nothing more than surrealist dreams as I sat in this unchanged space of our condo, a space locked in a month’s old time frame. Without trying to, it was then that I marveled at the smallness of our world, at its accessibility, and at our newfound human ability to jump cultures and span worlds in such a small amount of time.

And where, a month before, nerves and neuroticism had dominated me, now it was nostalgia that flooded my senses. With all the comforts of home at my fingertips, I found it was the uncertainty and the novelty of my adventure that I craved, instead. Luckily, there would be plenty more world, near and far, left for me to explore.