Boredom

Yes this may be the blog you have been waiting for. I'm sure most of you will be reading this blog for no reason other than the fact that you love us and you want to breathe our highs and lows along with us. There may be however a handful of others out there (you know who you are) who are reading just hoping for that little inkling of suggestion that our year out is not an endless white knuckle ride of interesting and enlightening experiences. Perhaps secretly hoping that some mishap (not too serious of course) will occur and the daily monotony of your personal rat race is temporarily interrupted by the thought that having an African adventure, or similar (that everyone periodically flirts with the fantasy of having) isn't really what its cracked up to be after all. Then you can sit back in your office chair feeling satisfied and safe with the security that your lot provides.

So this one’s for you and hopefully it will make you smile.................

So when embarking on the planning of 1 year away from the UK; working and living in AFREEEEKA - I never anticipated the magnitude of eternal boredom which we would have to endure. I think it must be the 'travellers' unspoken truth. When Edd and I got engaged in 2005, our lives went in to complete overdrive. Edd had the MBA to do, we got married, I started a new job and we refurbished and extended our new home together. In those 2 stress overload years we yearned and prayed for a day to ourselves, to think, potter or just to do nothing. It is such a shame that for that period we couldn’t have slowly charged our overload capacitors up with all the stress to be slowly discharged later over our relaxing year away. I wish now that I could still appreciate doing far less, but it probably only lasted for 1 month. Being born of Giles/Randall stock I am completely incapable of relaxing and feel totally unfulfilled if I have no purpose or job. This break really has made me realise that one of my purposes in life is to have purpose. Shock horror, I like to work! Without it, my mojo is just nonexistent. 

The worst time for us is the evenings. In Biombo I suppose it was worse because there was only one hour of electricity. But here in Kenya, with electricity, its actually not too much different. The choices for evening entertainment are really only to a) sit drinking your savings away in bars, continually being hawked by trinket sellers and prostitutes or b) sit at home watching about the wildlife in Kenya on a Kenyan TV. Ironic really! Its just not safe to go for a stroll along muggers beach. We do have quite a good portfolio of random encounters and experiences, but of course you can't experience true life as 1/3 of the world’s population live unless you are a born again Christian do gooder who doesn't mind regularly getting boils the size of planets on your body or worms in your feet by living in a mud hut and putting yourself through utter misery (relatively speaking) for the good of true empathy. Given that this is not how we are accustomed to living, the pain of adjusting to this would be far greater than the pain experienced by those living like this every day. The same goes for the boredom factor. Given that the benchmark has always been like this, then relatively speaking it is not boring is it?

Being an ex-pat in Africa is lonely. We had dreams of coming here and building powerful and or spontaneous friendships with all types of people in this land which sometimes seems like another planet. But we now realise, in most cases, to be as honest as I can be, this is just not possible. There is a huge social barrier between us, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. No matter how long you have lived here you will be seen as a white man and the majority of potential friendships have no real hope of a natural formation. With very few exceptions - everyone has a hidden agenda.

'I'm going slightly mad' by Freddie Mercury regularly goes round and around in my head. Everything in my world then moves in time to the song. I go madder and madder. There is nowhere to go, no one to really talk to no radio, no Internet, no TV, no looking forward to meal times with a nice glass of wine, no nice hot shower or bath, no Lindt chocolate (thank you Bridget for sending us some - you might have just saved my life). When I discovered my little MP3 player in my luggage in Biombo and I hadn't listened to music for 3 months, I was in heaven. I lay down on our hut step with the sun and the breeze on my face and listened to my music. It was such a stimulation of my hibernating senses that I could physically feel the endorphins flowing in waves through my body as the music changed. It was so powerful. I realised that never again would I take for granted the little things in my little Leamington life, like: walking in to the supermarket and being able to pick whatever I want. Never again will I moan because I couldn't park right outside the house and I had to carry my shopping bags (with everything I wanted in them) 50m down the road.

I always imagined that given all the time in the world, natural beauty, natural resources and sunshine, my artistic flair would blossom and I’d be creating art from little pieces of the surrounding environment. Yeah right, think again Picasso. When you are not stimulated and you only have your own naval to contemplate, then it is really hard to create from nothing (except a head full of manic Freddie).

You can tell the monotony and coping with it is an intrinsic part of the African culture. In Biombo we would hear drums which went on forever in the same rhythm. Amazingly never missing the beat because your body parts have fallen asleep with utter boredom. Here somewhere not too far from the hotel there is an incessant whistler. He has a 5 second tune which he whistles over and over again. Never tiring. Never stopping. Never losing enthusiasm. I have heard this same whistler on 5 different days now - with the same tune. I look up from my laptop every now and again with a searching frown. I wonder 'WTF' he is playing at. Its almost as if the whistling and drumming echo the endless drone of life as it continues, unchanged from day to day........that’s the empathetic reality I convince myself of and it just about prevents me from leaping the fence to find the whistler and strangle him!

So yes, in between our 'once in lifetime' experiences, there is a LOT of staring in to space, wondering what more we could do for adventure and self actualisation. But how would it be possible to define ‘once in a lifetime experiences’ without a realistically calibrated personal benchmark?

Disclaimer - Anyone who has the propensity to be culturally sensitive, please don’t assume I am intent on casting thoughtless judgments about people. All I am doing is making observations and comparing them to my expectations. I could not presume to know enough information about a person to make judgment on their resultant behaviour as a product of their environment and life to date. But if anyone has comments on my observations - I would be so very interested to hear them.

SJCK-L