17 Mar: Update from Kleinmond

How do you get from Baghdad to Cape Town via Amman, Petra, Paris, New York, New Haven, Boston, Los Angeles, Park City, Visalia, Yosemite, Dubai and Pretoria, and do all of it in 4 weeks? Very, very carefully, with a lot of patience and a huge bottle of vitamin B complex, a lot of coffee and a strong stomach for airport security.

Today is St. Patty’s day, Kevin’s birthday and my two-week anniversary in Kleinmond. I still get nightmares from time to time. And emails, all the emails from friends in Baghdad. “We miss you”, “we are doing okay”, “love, your Iraqi sister”. My life over the past year plays off in my mind like an HBO series without an intermission. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and wonder where I am. When I look at my photos I see the attractive couple, and I think, wow, how lucky. Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, Dubai, France, South Africa, United States…and soon, I must examine my vaccination record for Afghanistan.

But today I write from a small town on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa: Kleinmond on a dial-up connection. I will be here for the next month where I am well under way to finish my thesis for my MA in African Studies on a fellowship from UCLA.

So many of you have written to inquire about my whereabouts and more importantly, on why I have not been writing more. The lame excuse is that I don't have Internet in the house, but that, indeed is a lame one since I access it daily at the tourist center in town, and that is not the main reason for the silence.

I guess it is understandable to want to “hide” for a few weeks after leaving a place as intense and draining as Baghdad, not to mention submitting ourselves to the travel schedule we did. So forgive me for my brief absence, rest assured it has not been maliciously intended, nor devoid of thoughts off all of you.

To make good on my promise to give a thorough update of the past whirlwind five weeks, please click on January in the archives on the right of the page and scroll all the way down to the post on January 21st, "Leaving Baghdad", and work your way back up to today. I have divided the posts up by location - alas I could not justify squeezing 7 countries, 16 cities and 4 weeks into one post, and trust me, you would not have wanted to read for that long. So instead, they are broken up into bite sizes, including photographs.

I already have a few current anecdotes I want to share, but will wait a few days before I post those.

[please see blog description on the right for some recent changes, I encourage you to leave a brief comment/remark if you are so inclined]