After three months away and hours of travel, re-entry is always a little ackward. I arrived in London at 6 AM and found my way to a bathroom. A look in the mirror I could tell the flight had had its effects. This combined with the past three months of chasing vultures, playing with dead wildebeest, and putting out goat heads, plus I ran out of conditioner about a week ago since my fiancée used it all during his two week visit for his long, lavish hair, and I figured I was not looking good.
Traveling alone is always marked by long silences and an independent re-entry. Each new experience is absorbed by me alone and I generally have no one to share it with. But the silence is occasionally punctuated by a random stranger, who offers some comment or smile as I journey back. In the London airport, this stranger came in the form of a young Middle-eastern looking man, who stared calmly at me on the escalator. As we descended, he asked, “Are you a model?” Seemed like an obvious pick-up line and given my state a rather unbelievable one, but he said it genuinely as if he had seen me in a magazine before or something. “What?” I replied in disbelief – I look like crap. He repeated the question. When I was unable to muster a sensible response, he continued, “You look like a model. Your face. . . Your body.” In my super-glue stained khaki pants and field-worn T-shirt, I imagined I looked more like a bum than a model. He peristed and asked me where I was from and where I was headed. The whole thing seemed so strange and by the time the long escalator came to an end, I moved off without looking back. It has actually been a fairly harrasment-free summer, but this seemed like a nice enough first comment upon my arrival back into civilization.
On the trip back from my summers in Africa, I am always struck by two things. First, all the white people. I caught myself staring at everyone in the Nairobi airport and being amazed by the diversity of hairstyles, clothing styles, make-up experimentation, and accents. I had seen lots of different people over the last three months, what made this group stand out. I finally realized I had started to make the transition from a world of 5% white and 95% black back to the Western world where the mix is much greater and the Wazungus much more common. The second thing I am struck by is Western consumerism. I think airports are especially harsh form of re-entry alog these lines. Off the plane and you enter a world with shops filled with over-priced and completely useless goods. These vary from lavish food items like Starbucks and Godiva chocalates to immense book and DVD stores to the completely ridiculous isles of perfumes, Prada purses, alcohols, and jewelry. For some reason, Tiffany’s always stands as the most horrible of all of these, perhaps because I imagine the gems being ripped from the soils which I have just left with only a petence paid only to be sold at outrageous prices. Couldn’t the money be better spent? What are you really buying when you go to a store like that? Certainly not the most beautiful jewelry I have ever seen.
In a duty-free shop, I watch as 30 TV screens fill with images of African children running to water and women carrying water on their heads, some clean-faced and presumably famous in the UK Wazungus drink from bottles of water and praport that if only you buy this bottled water, some water will be given to these poor African children. The irony is too striking and I turn away in disgust. Doesn’t anyone else see it? Here you are sitting in a country with perfectly good drinking water coming direct to your home (hell even to the airport water fountain) and you are going to buy a bottle of water. Where this magical bottled water comes from should be the first question, but then there is the issue of the plastic that it comes in. Now that you have added to global pollution with yet one more plastic bottle and paid for something that you are so blessed to already have had, you can feel good about yourself knowing that somehow this is going to end up giving water to a thirsty child in Africa. It seems like the most indirect and over-consumptive route in which one could do such a thing. It just feels glutonous as I watch the British actors pour water above their heads as an African child is shown washing his face.
Overconsumption. It stands out as such a huge problem – the problem that generates all the inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation that we see around us and yet you are being encouraged to take part in it to help solve these issues. I hate re-entering the Western world for this very reason and yet soon I will be part of the problem again (hell, I was even part of it in the Mara, staying at the lodge). I look at the chocolates and teas and consider buying some Starbucks – all the time feeling the shame and guilt of the gluttony in which I am so blessed as to be able to partake.