I've been back in the US for over two months now and I'm something like 98% re-acclimated. Every now and then I have flashbacks to people or places in Tanzania and I am all but transported back to Arusha. Occasionally I'll say something in Swahili in response to someone before trailing off and realizing there is probably not a person within a ten block radius who understands the words I just said. That's probably the strangest. "What language did they speak in Tanzania? French?" "No, you can get by with English but I learned Swahili, also." "Oh... Swahili... interesting..." Sometimes there's some genuine interest in the language, but for most part I think that people don't know what to say beyond that. The strangest sensation over the last two months has been not talking about Tanzania. It's relieving to get back to school and to live in a room where everyone studied abroad this semester so that we can just preface a sentence with, "Oh yeah, in Tanzania/Egypt/India..." and no one really bats an eye.
There was quite a while when I felt like I hadn't talked about Tanzania or anything that I had done there. I think it boiled down to people not really knowing what to say or to ask. Very few people know anything about Tanzania and so beyond, "How was your trip? Good, that's good", most people don't know how to continue the conversation. I didn't want to feel like I was talking people's ears off and they didn't want to pry and so the result was me not talking as much as I wanted to about my time there. But don't worry, it's all better now :) It's nice being around people who were abroad all the time because we're all in the same boat. Now I just don't have the same issue.
I don't miss the mosquito nets or the power outages or the sub-par academics. I do miss the closeness of life in Tanzania. Literally greeting a person by asking how they are, how their day is, how their family is or how work is, is a way of life that makes you feel very close to the people around you. Not only was I always around the same 7 students on the program, but even the people that we didn't know really wanted to know how we were.
Enough about re-entry, let's talk about the ridiculous amounts of snow in DC right now. I haven't had class or my internship since last Thursday and we won't have any until at least Thursday. And classes Thursday are looking unlikely since we're supposed to get 10-20 additional inches of snow tonight and the city has far surpassed its snow removal budget already. So for all of you skeptics out there who think that DC is overreacting... I hate to break it to you but this is actually A LOT of snow.
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