Back at DMO

So arrived at Dadaab at 530 -  been on the road since 6 am.  That was a very long exhausting drive. Yet I am actually very happy to be back. When I am here I feel good about my life, I feel confident and have a sense of purpose. When I am at home in Cincinnati I long to be at places like this, and while hanging about in Nairobi I felt incredibly idle...its good to be back.

The good thing about having made a brief departure is that I suddenly see this place with somewhat new eyes. Coming to Kenya and Dadaab I have had NO sense of culture shock. The poverty, the malnutrition,the episodic insecurity - none of these things have made me even blink. Yet today returning to Dadaab I suddenly felt transported into another world, into a lush Hollywood rendition of Arab Africa. 

We were driving through this desert village outpost,which was crawling with children wearing drab, dirty clothes and overflowing with rubbish when I look out the window to see a woman as dark as ebony wearing a vivid red orange tunic, marching into the hot forceful wind. Somali music was blaring on the radio, sand beating against my face the heat steadily rising - for a brief moment I felt as if I had left the world I've always known and entered into another dimension, a completely new fabrication of reality. The only other time I have ever felt this was at Amritsar India, the holiest city in the world among the Sikhs of the Punjab desert.  At both moments the world turned upside down, and I can only compare it to the C.S. Lewis story of the children stepping out of the wardrobe and into magical Narnia.

So here I am. Tomorrow I will be running about the refugee camps doing my project and will be presenting my plan to Save The Children.  Saturday I expect one of my research teams to submit all collected material. Now that I only have 3 weeks left there is a great deal to do and not much time! Nonetheless, as much as I miss my family, my home, my girl, and my vegetarian burritos, I honestly have no desire to be any other place in the world.