Changing Places

My bag is packed. I am so ready to go to Amsterdam. And just to make sure I don’t forget that Dakar is my second home, Ieta and Suzette are sending me off with a jar of the hottest pepper sauce on earth! [See the blog for 5/31.] I am hoping to breathe a little fire into my Dutch friends, who all love Indonesian food and think it’s spicy. Ha!...think again!

Frankly Indonesian, Thai, Korean…none of them can hold a candle or a blowtorch to this sauce. I’ve grown to really enjoy it with traditional Senegalese cooking. Today, perhaps because I’m leaving (and they are so excited to have one less bed/bathrooms to clean), Ieta and Suzette prepared yassa, a Woloff dish…chicken with a wonderful onion, olive sauce that’s flavored with Maggi, which is the brand name of an herb combo like boullion. The pepper sauce does something to the yassa…I can’t explain it…it just does. Yummy!

Odd, as excited as I am to be going, I am also a little hesitant about leaving here to re-enter my own familiar Western culture. I don’t think it’s the culture but the past that has me a little edgy. For two months, I’ve been very free of my past. I’ve been relatively unknown, somewhat mysterious because of the distance created by language…not that there have been all that many direct questions. Twice I’ve been asked if I have children, once if I am married and twice about my work. It’s odd to be so free of questioning, given that “What do you do?” is the driver for most American conversations. Here, nobody asks much of anything. They have allowed me to simply be present…so much so that Paul’s family has decided I am really Senegalese and have said that I never get to leave.

In Amsterdam, I will be attending and speaking at an LGBT diversity conference. I will be leading and participating in discussion about issues that were the focus of my professional and personal life for 20 years, issues that I helped frame. I have been relatively unengaged with these ideas for the past 2 months. The few times I have uttered the words gay or lesbian have been in conversation with Nathalie or on a Skype call with a friend from the US or Europe. As I left LGBT behind to come to Senegal, now I am leaving the Hospital of Hope behind in Senegal.

My once integrated life is feeling just a bit scattered. I am wondering if I really have figured out what I want to do with my life. Glad to have an opportunity to think about it.