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Oregon Coast

Between South America and Africa we spent one month in the good old USA, mostly in Oregon with TK’s family.

Somehow I didn’t take a single picture in Oregon, except once at the coast. Maybe setting down the camera is a side effect of feeling at home after so much travelling. Whatever “home” means. The first time I came back after two and a half years in Paraguay, I felt like an alien observing strange human behavior, stupefied by America’s wide highways packed with huge vehicles holding one person each. I never expected to cringe at the sight of someone using paper towels to wipe a counter, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that would send me into distraught reflections on mankind. Not to say that a few years in Paraguay turned me into a native, or that one place is better than the other. A good chunk of my Peace Corps service was spent wrapping my head around the Paraguayan psyche and their customs that initially seemed absurd, i.e. the general avoidance/fear of spending any time alone, and the preference of many adults to live with their parents for their entire lives, and even the little things like their use of a tablecloth instead of a napkin to wipe their mouths with. I grew to love Paraguay, but I could never feel completely at home there, not least of all because every walk through any public space brought on long, unabashed stares from children and adults alike, usually accompanied by hisses, whistles, “que lindas son tus ojos,” and “kuna poraaa.” That gets really old after three years. But then I returned to the U.S. to realize that American customs are no less absurd. (Try explaining Halloween to a foreigner.) One thing Peace Corps does is make you feel precariously connected to two different worlds and somewhat estranged from everybody in both, except for those few crazy RPCVs who did it all with you.

Anyway, since that first bout of reverse culture shock, it has become less jolting to go back and forth between North and South America. This last visit was, more than anything, incredibly comfortable. We thoroughly enjoyed English conversations with family and friends, carpet, hot hot showers, good food and drinks, and not being stared at ever. By the end of it I felt so at home in Oregon that I was as melancholy as I was excited about moving to Swaziland.

During our U.S. trip (or was it our U.S. return from a South America trip?) we took a mini road trip down to the Redwood Forest. I LOVED it there. We camped in the car and hiked on trails that wound through the biggest, tallest trees on earth. Beautiful.

Amelia really loves her cows :)

On our way to Africa, we paid a visit to some of our dearest Peace Corps friends on the east coast. Anita, Kyle, and Dan led us through New York City debauchery, and then Amelia introduced us to rural Massachusetts, her family, her newly acquired cows, and some of her favorite watering holes and swimming holes.

Then we flew off to spend the next six months (or more?) in a continent fairly new to both of us, and more specifically, a country fairly unknown to anybody: Swaziland.