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Coming Home

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Salut, I have called many places home in my life. I wrote these words on our cohort Face Book, cute page-long intros we each made about ourselves before we set foot in Vietnam. I was the last person to make mine; sorry, Andy, I am bad at using Canva, and I kind of messed up the spacing. Anyway, how do I summarize myself into words? Most succinctly, I say that, that home is a traveling place and rarely ever a fixed point. It moves with me, and though I have learned that home can be a person, if you find the right one, for much of my life it comes and goes. I called Nam Dinh home for a short while, and then I called Midland home, then the Woodlands, then Lekki for 4 years, then the Woodlands again, then Austin for 3 years, Rome for a short while, Bishkek and my village there, Jalal-Abad for 2 years, Washington DC for the last year, Hanoi for a few weeks, and now Lang Son until the next summer. My life has existed in suitcases and a passport, a wallet and phone, and not much else. When li...
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Your Anchor

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Salut,  Orientation is over. As I predicted, it went fast and got away from me. Skylar said and repeated to us, over and over again, “This is all we have.” We are anchored to each other and bound to each other by that single promise. All our time is here and now, and we will never have it again. I think in the monotony of work, we can often forget that; all we have is this. Perhaps I feel it more pronounced as I see a widespread amount of famous and non-famous deaths in quick succession. Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, a war criminal, and the king of Norway, and those in Nepal and China. All we have is what is right in front of us. I often find us needing to remind Skylar who first told us that. Some girls and I knocked on her door at 10 PM while she was water coloring, and we urged her to come with us to go out into the city. We are leaving; September 3rd is the last day we’ll all be together for many months. Put down your paintbrush, we told her. This is all we have. It is peer pressure...
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