Home, Jetlag, and Reverse Culture Shock

Mozambique is basically the farthest place from California on the planet. Actually we’ve consulted our world map several times on this issue and there are two countries further from our home in Pasadena, Mauritius Islands and Madagascar, but still Mozambique is really far! If our rocky, unpaved airstrip in Zóbuè could accommodate passenger jets, and there was a direct flight to LAX (Los Angeles International) it would take at least 24 hours of flying and require a mid-air refueling session.  If we somehow booked that hypothetical flight, we would earn over 12,000 frequent flier miles. Needless to say, that flight does not exist, and our sojourn back involved several different planes, layovers, and in flight movies.  After two years of travel in Africa, we had no major complaints, other than Luc’s irrational air-travel anxiety, possibly exaggerated by his malaria prophylaxis’ psycho-side-effects.  Our moms were waiting to greet us at the LAX International Terminal and we went immediately to El Arco, our favorite Mexican food restaurant where the rest of our welcoming committee greeted us as we chowed down on corn chips, enchiladas, burritos with tomatillo sauce, mole, and all those comfort foods we just couldn’t quite replicate in Africa. Our journey took us through progressively more developed cities: Maputo (a huge step over our rural village), Cape Town (way more advanced than Maputo), and Istanbul (a full blown European metropolis), so we had a gradual readjustment to the speed of modern life which helped mitigate our reverse culture shock. Jet lag was another story. Mozambique, Capetown, and Istanbul are all in the same time zone, so we left all of the time shifting for the last 14 hour leg of our journey on the non-stop from Turkey to Los Angeles. 11 time zones left us with an extra ten hours of being awake; we originally planned on sleeping in-flight, but were just way too excited. The trade off was several days of serious jet lag, crashing out at dinner time and waking up at 2am, possibly exacerbated by our non-stop trying to see everyone and do everything schedule. 

Lucas at 8pm on Christmas Day

So now that we’re back in the land of plenty, we’ll see if we can stay at our recommended BMI (Body Mass Index). With a virtually infinite array of tempting foods at our fingertips staying thin will be much more of a challenge than it was in perma-skinny Mozambique, but Janet rejoined her favorite gym and Luc has plenty of hiking and jogging trails nearby. We’ve traveled back and forth between the modern fancy rich part of the world and the poor less-developed traditional part of the world several times, so reverse culture shock wasn’t too bad, but we’ve still had a few moments of culture related anxiety attacks: trying to get the remote control to work, realizing we had nothing fashionable to wear to Janet’s ten year HS reunion, walking into the AT&T store and looking at all the different models of iPhone, opening up piles and piles of X-mas presents, all the while thinking of how simple our lives were back in Zóbuè. 

Janet's Dad's house post gift opening

We’ve tried not to convert prices from dollars back into meticais, or think about how many months we could live in Africa on the amount of money spent on an evening out here in Los Angeles. But we are glad to be home, especially with so many people around for Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. Even though we don’t have jobs, or cars, or phones, or a place of our own to live, or any of those items we once considered luxuries but people here seem to think are necessities, we are confident things will work out for us.  We’ve heard the question “So, what are you going to do now?” at least 200 times, basically everyone has asked us. Luc is going back to UCLA to finish his dissertation on Education for Sustainable Development based on the research he did while living in India just before Peace Corps. The project has basically been on hold for two years, so hopefully it reignites without too many hitches. Janet’s future is less constrained, and involves finding some sort of meaningful employment, hopefully in the International Health Education field. We don’t know where that job will be geographically, but we would like to stay near our families, which live mainly in California. In the meantime we have lots of friends and family to catch up with and are expecting a new niece this month. We have thousands of pictures to sort through; we have some wardrobe shopping to do and various of our favorite museums to visit, so many new books to peruse at the library, endless food sensations waiting for us at Los Angeles’ endless assortment of eateries, and recipes to try out with the grocery store’s limitless array of exciting ingredients. We would like to take a couple of road trips and reacquaint ourselves with USA and maybe visit some of our new Peace Corps friends now scattered across the country.  Africa feels distant now. We try to keep up, reading the news on the internet and following the blogs of the current volunteers living in Zobue (Lisa and Dan), but it’s all quickly fading into the past.