Elaborating

November 13th, 2011. We alternate between coffee lounges and local restaurants, between placement and home base, stalls full of cloth and some full of cereal. Last night we played a game where one person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, another draws a picture depicting the sentence, and a third writes a sentence describing the picture, and so forth. A sort of pictionary telephone, we laughed at the mistakes made, signals crossed. Phrases of our time here, I love you more than banana soup, mzungus hunters and local stalkers found their ways into our childlike game. The evening was short, dark, illuminated only by floresent lights and bowls of unsalted popcorn, but more invigorating than any bar or nightspot. We waited the hour and a half for a YouTube video to load, laughed at lacking artistic ability, and listened to Jeff, a master storyteller and twenty something teacher from Colorado, talk of haunting men in white outfits terrorizing his suburban neighborhood. 
I skyped with my mom today, (hi mom!), and though I loved being able to share my experiences, and see her face, I closed the conversation with mixed feelings. Seeing a dog on a plush bed, a house heated and with electricity and wallpaper and computers is foreign to me. I live now in a third world country where fifty dollars can fund an education for a year, where a meal is less than a dollar and cigerettes are sold individually. I live in a world where one of the most respected jobs is taxi driving, where women carry shopping carts and bushels of bananas and buckets of murky water on their heads. And I know that when I return home, I will be enveloped back into the comforters and dances and cocktail Christmas parties. I'm excited to go home, part of me aches to go back to what I know and love, but I wonder if I will ever be comfortable in the ignorant extravagance with which I grew up.