The Traffic Light

Dear Friends,

Hope you all had a great New Years. I just arrived here in Meulaboh again yesterday afternoon. I’m staying in the same room I stayed in last summer. The office got some new furniture and the guest house lost some furniture, but I suppose gained more space.

I’m listening to that same calling for the prayer I heard last summer, sitting in my bed, wide awake at 4am. So strange being back to a place so foreign yet so familiar. I suppose I am just as foreign, just as familiar to myself as well. The way I appear in the rusted, mildly distorted mirror on the cabinet in the corner of this room…the shape of my thighs, the blemishes on my face, the waves in my hair…all strangely not quite the same as before. It’s a bit like time-lapse photography, revisiting a place after a while has passed, seeing it and myself in juxtaposition with the way we were in my memories. Even the feeling of mosquito bites that awaken me in the middle of the night reminds me of how things remained the same and have changed in an unmeasurable way.

Perhaps most of it is me that has changed: my goals, what I long for at home, my feelings about this place – from one of discovery to one of nostalgia.

It’s actually quite chilly here at night…I had to put on a sweater to go outside! What a concept. It rains several times a day here these days. It reminds me of the relief I felt over the summer whenever rain fell from the sky. And yet it’s all so plentiful now. Another thing that is the same yet different I suppose.

Time is a funny thing. It changes so much. Just time alone. The big talk of the office is that there’s now a single traffic light on our street. The first and only one in Meulaboh. It’s shocking to see the traffic actually obey something. That particular intersection was previously policed by 4-5 men and women but mostly operated under the rules of first come first serve/who can honk the loudest and most persistently.

It’s funny to imagine I was just walking around the Magic Kingdom 5 days ago. It’s amazing how we traverse time and space these days.

I think I can learn a lot this time around about how to get things done. It’s a bit overwhelming since there’s about 6-7 people in the office alone who is working on this project and several other projects at the same time. So many people to coordinate with. I’m still unsure who is ‘my boss.’ It appears that it might be this new officer, Dr. Rizal. He seems very organized and experienced. He’s also very polite, almost to a point that makes me uncomfortable. I hope I can learn a lot from him. I think I will make that one of my goals. The meetings are going to involve several more people than I expected, which will make it much harder to predict how they will go. It’s a different feeling than anything I’ve tried to accomplish before. It’s a bit like trying to stay on the back of a bucking bronco…so many times you just want to give up and fall onto the hay, but you just have to keep pulling yourself onto the saddle despite feeling like you never quite get on it before falling off again. I’m hoping things will settle a little bit after this first week once the major introductory meetings have taken place. I’m just trying to give a good first impression – be humble but not seem too disorganized so that I earn some respect.

It’s hard to predict what will happen in the next two weeks. The only thing I foresee is that it will be a lot. Nothing will be routine this time around. I’m hoping I can take a minibreak to the city for a couple of days, but it will have to depend on what God wills.

I will write again soon,

Love, Bev