Transitions

On our last day in Nairobi, we took a taxi ride across town.  All along the way, I felt twinges of sadness as we passed places for the last time.  The metal worker artisans who make beautiful wood and iron beds, and not so beautiful Kermit the Frog (rocking out on a guitar) lawn ornaments, the Junction Mall where we spent hours on end at Java House, Art Caffe or the newest hit in town, Planet Yogurt, and even the spot on the road where traffic always backs up due to a set of speed bumps and heavy traffic coming in and out of a strip mall/gas station.

This was interesting to me.  I fully expected to feel sadness at leaving behind so many wonderful relationships with people.  What I hadn’t thought about so much was the sadness that would come from leaving behind relationships with the environment that we lived in.  And this sadness wasn’t rooted in leaving behind specific places that were especially unique.  I can find the work of artisans here in Canada to appreciate, I can find bigger and brighter malls with bigger and brighter chain restaurants (apparently there is a Yogurt Planet type place at King and University in Waterloo), and I’ve already found Highway 401 traffic and seen Shell gas stations that look pretty much identical all over the world.

So then I guess the sadness comes simply from losing my sense of familiarity.

While in university I learned about something called “Tolerance for Ambiguity”.   As I recall, it had to do with the ability to operate effectively in an environment where information was imperfect, where there was an element of chaos and unpredictability.  In university we were talking about the work environment and the suggestion was that you needed to work at increasing your comfort with these sort of ambiguous situations in order to be more effective.  Implicit in that line of reasoning was the idea that the natural desire of a human being is for less ambiguity, more certainty, less chaos, more order.  Yes, some people may have found ways to tolerate greater ambiguity, but we all need something to keep us anchored.  And while we were learning about the work environment, I can see that this applies to our more general living environment as well.  This sense of familiarity and comfort then may be what we mean when we describe a place as “home.”  And for me it is the overarching sense of home that enables me to tolerate some ambiguity underneath the arch.

In addition to the loss of relationships with many people that we met across East Africa (yes there is still Facebook, but the pragmatic piece of me acknowledges that we will probably only maintain a handful of the relationships we’ve built over the last 2.5 years), we’ve lost this sense of “home.”  We are now in a strange land, one where wait staff talk a mile a minute in an attempt to provide top notch service (maximum tips) while getting you in and out as quickly as possible, one where land line telephones still exist, and one where a tragic crash that killed 11 is actually acknowledged as a tragedy rather than brushed off as a minor blip in a place where tragedy is an everyday occurrence.

I know that Kitchener-Waterloo has been my “home” for most of my life. With the help of friends and family it will soon become my home again.  But as we make this transition, it is good for me to acknowledge, appreciate, and commit to memory the sense of “home” that I’m leaving behind in Rumbek, South Sudan and surrounding areas.  It was not an easy place to call home, yet it was our “home,” and I will miss it.

Editors Note: This will most likely be my last entry (Kaitlyn has one more brewing).  Thanks to all of you readers out there who have been following diligently or not so diligently.  I’ve received many words of affirmation and am thankful that this has been a good way to share our experience with others and also to process the experience for myself.  Some have even asked that we continue to write.  In the words of my father “I only really go on the internet to check email and your blog.”  While I could probably continue to come up with somewhat interesting thoughts here and there, I must also acknowledge that the Jantzis are no longer in Rumbek, and with the closing of this chapter in our life also should come the closure of this blog.  I am also aware of the wisdom of heading off into the sunset while still on top.  We don’t want to hang on too long and have readers slowly lose interest and drop off (Little Mosque on the Prairie???)  So with that I will bid you all adieu even as I note another twinge of sadness at the loss of something familiar.  Thanks again to you all for sharing in this. 

PS: We’ll hopefully be making this blog into a book as another way to remember our time in South Sudan.  Public reading tour dates and locations TBD.  Private readings can be arranged through Kaitlyn for the low, low price of a lunch at Ye’s Sushi.