Backlog, 3 pm, today

A lot of friends have written about their monumentally moving experiences this summer, these Hakuna-Matata, revelatory moments where all the synapses are in sync and the linkages that traverse humanity glow vividly under the sub-Saharan sun. I’ve just been complaining and posting photos, it would seem. Today was somehow the same as any other day here and at the same time a tad bit different.

I’ve been struggling to write a success story – max 600 words – for the past three hours. This is both a result of my incorrigible distractability – ooh new news in the google reader! A bird I don’t yet have a photograph of in the waterhole! FACEBOOK!! – and that it’s really hard to write this narrow focused piece giving a succinct example of our organization's direct impact on one individual. The writing style requested is completely not my own and the content requested isn’t something I’ve thoroughly borne witness to either.

So I moved to my room to try and write from there. All of a sudden a foreign sound filled the air: a tiny charter plane was descending! I looked at the computer calendar to make sure I hadn’t insanely confused the days. Charters come on Thursdays. No movement. Today is Wednesday. I looked up and blinked: it's really a plane and it's landing. I ran to find Joseph who was running toward me, shouting, “Pack your bags! You go! I’ll go tell them you’re coming!”

I darted for my external harddrive and scrambled to back things up from the comp I’ve been using since mine died my first week in Sudan. I started cramming lenses and ipods and prescription drugs into my neatly and anticipatorily-well-folded clothes. I ran and grabbed all my wet clothes off the line and was ready to use the latrine one last time when I heard the propellers. I climbed atop the big mound of dirt adjacent to our toilets and saw Joseph amongst the 75+ onlookers surrounding the plane. A military man yelled at the kids to scram out of the way of the excitingly foreign technological delight while I stood watching from inside the fence that separates our compound from the airstrip.

For about 60 seconds I had one of those feelings of hakuna-matata connectedness.

Though we were physically separated by a dilapidated fence and some muddy puddles, I stood with those kids, gazed silently while berated by the general, and watched the world take off in front of us, with no one to grab and nowhere to go and nothing to say but to utter a slight sigh as it left us longing for something more.

The rain started falling as soon as the plane lifted and the moment in which I felt the weight of the world outside coming and going passed just as quickly as it had come. All the onlookers began running for shelter as their likely only t-shirt became instantly saturated; Nyaraka ran to hand me an umbrella and my gumboots. She took my wet clothes and walked barefoot through the mud.

It’s still raining an hour later. If the other charter lands tomorrow I’ll get on and go, and leave this place and these people like so many before me have done. Maybe in a week’s time, or a month’s or a year’s, I’ll think about Pagak, never really missing the place, but with a slight sigh at the tragedy of waiting for something that never comes. And I’ll feel I accomplished so little for this place, seeing that I can’t even write a one page story on the lives affected, except my own.