Last Night

Yesterday I went for a run in the afternoon. I usually go down a trail that runs along the edge of the small mountain. It is a rocky and quiet path, with very few signs of life beyond some goats and the occasional little boy tending them, yet close enough to the main road that I feel safe when I run alone. It was a good run. I left a little later than usual so the late afternoon light was cool and I had enough energy to run past my usual turn-around tree, a withered looking acacia, to a huge baobab further down the trail that looks like a fat old lady at the beach, happily sunning her grey rolls of fleshiness. In view of what I hope will be a tropical vacation sometime in the next few months, she is a far more inspiring tree to run to. Another treat was that Asad, our puppy, got tired of sprinting next to Bryan’s mountain bike and decided to keep me company on the run home. This was his first long run and he was pretty winded by the time we got back but you could tell that being included in the “family recreation” absolutely made his day.

Within minutes of getting home from our bike/run we got a phone call from a friend in town saying that the results of the election for the governor of our state had just been announced. In many ways this race was far more precarious than other races in this country as leadership over this “contested territory” is being sought by people on either side of an intense political conflict. We were told that the incumbent candidate had just been declared the winner (which was what we had been hoping for, if you can call it that) and that many people in town were celebrating. In a move clearly against several UN advisory e-mails we have received in the past few weeks, we jumped into the ATV just as night was falling and drove into town to witness history with our own eyes. At the first dirt junction we had to yield to a pickup overflowing with young men shouting out political slogans and cheering loudly. They hung fearlessly off the sides of the truck in their Barak Obama or David Beckham tee-shirts, proud and happy for a reason to act brashly. When they had passed we eased into the road behind them choking back the dust they left in their wake. In the shadows beyond the brown haze of our headlights we could make out the silhouettes of many more people running down the sides of the road, their pink soles flapping and white teeth flashing in the dirty darkness. As we passed we could hear children singing and women ululating loudly. We made our way into town and joined a river of people pouring towards the market square. The crowd was so thick that we eventually just pulled over, parked in a dark corner and slipped into the swirling current of people. The shouts and chants were deafening. Flags and tree branches waved above the throng like flotsam caught up in a flash-flood. I was grateful for the dark and my headscarf which made us a little less conspicuous, though it was not enough to keep many wild-eyed boys from actively trying to pull us into their rebel chants. We just smiled and stuck with a more neutral, though apparently less satisfactory, “Mabruk” (congratulations).

In the midst of all the singing and dancing, yelling and ululating, I found myself crying. I wasn’t crying because I was especially happy or sad, scared or relieved, though facets of all these emotions were present inside me. Sometimes I cry not because of one particular feeling but because my physical body doesn’t know how else to respond to the emotional place that has been touched. It feels something deeply, and not knowing what else to give it offers tears. That’s how I felt last night. In fact, that’s how I have often felt here. Tearful because this place makes me feel something deep and strong and sad and happy inside that I am not sure quite what to do with. So I cry.

The crowd eventually stampeded on to another part of town and we went to our favorite juice shop for a cold drink. There were plenty of people not joining in the revelries of the night and it was interesting to sit back and watch faces and hear snippets of conversations. As we were leaving to go home last night a man drunk on adrenaline and maybe something a little stronger yelled after us, “So you are loving this country, eh?” And as we walked away I thought to myself, “God help us all, I am.”