Upon Arrival

Maria prays for the piles of trash. You see, the piles of trash happen to be located at regular intervals around our temporary housing, and they house many skinny cats and unseemly smells. I think Maria prays that they will be cleaned up because she wants Kuwait to be remade in her imagination, the one that has been anticipating this move all summer. Nevertheless, there is something melancholy about the idea that prayers are altered immediately upon arrival in a new place: the old concerns left behind, trivial and antique, the new concerns pressing, confusing, and probably insurmountable, like the piles of trash. Eventually, we'll learn to ignore the trash, the cats, and the stink, which is both fortunate and systematic, but it also entails a certain loss of homegrown ethics.

The negotiation of contextual ethics remains probably the biggest immediate issue upon arrival in another world. This is not to take the colonial stance of ethical hierarchies, or understanding the moral codes from my home to be superior to those here--I don't pretend in that way, and I never have. I recall that when I first arrived in Mexico for my mission at 19, I was told, unironically, that "we need to bring the American flag to their behaviors." I also remember, unironically, how put off I was at all that talk, even before I had been given a liberal education in postcolonial apologies. No apology needed from here because I didn't know better either way: I didn't believe that I needed to bring the American flag to anywhere and I didn't believe I needed to burn it either. My common sense precludes the discourse that calls us either colonialists, subalterns, or halting liberal elites. At any rate, now I am trying to unlearn that discourse as I live in the Middle East, and I will approach my writing about it in that way. Otherwise all experience will be colored by the lens of theory, which preconceives the world in a kind of original sin without the agency of experiential learning. For the postcolonialist, the lessons are already known and all experience occurs to support those lessons, or at least offer variations on a theme. This, you might guess, sucks the life out of the real; indeed, it sucks the real out of the real, and what is left is a course in nothing new.

So, before I kill this entry with the postcolonial yawn, let me begin with experience. One, anyway. The others can come later. Here is the first:

The flight from Washington DC to Kuwait was 12 hours. The observations came fast on the plane, even when I knew that many of those observations would be erroneous. But they came anyway--about average weight, about whose head was covered and whose was not, about primary language, about reading material. I thought my observations were pretty good, until we landed in Kuwait, walked into the airport to be met by a nicely-dressed man who looked already bored, and Maria promptly barfed six times in front of a fancy jewelry store. The jewelry clerk looked disgusted, rightfully so, and the already bored customs agent that met us turned his boredom into distaste, so these American Lamberts stood there trying to clean it up with leftover napkins and baby wipes until we were wisked away by someone that looked like they might clean it up, disgustedly. I am pretty sure we managed to disgust everyone within the vicinity, not least because of the smell. No wonder Maria prays for the piles of garbage--she still feels guilty for inflicting her own upon arrival. In any case, Maria's vomit represented most of our preconceived notions, and I should apologize to those in the airport for making them victims of the reeking preconceived notions we held. Hopefully someone cleaned it up after we left, but I think the smell sticks to us occasionally.

The only good that came out of the barfing incident was that it immediately taught everyone what our family felt towards the culture of bling that seems to be pervasive in these parts. I would have been more upset if Maria barfed in front of a shawerma stand.

So we arrived, trailing clouds of preconceived vomit, and then we were met by a not-as-well dressed man, much more cheerful looking, who directed us with our semi-cart of luggage to the car. The minute we got into the parking lot one car backed into another in our path, punching out a bumper, and the cheerful man kept leading us, unfazed, while Kathryn looked to be on the brink of vomiting tears. We got in the car, only after the man who took our semi-cart out convinced me, somehow not using a single word I understood, that 10 dollars tip was not enough and so I gave him a 20, and he walked away angry. Duped, I know, but I wanted to get ripped off early so I could get it out of the way. The cheerful man drove us through Kuwait to our temporary housing and Kathryn and I had deja vu, the unwanted kind that hearkens back to the beginnings of our missions: unfamiliarity, heat, confusion, wonder, and fear. If my sentences are run-ons, confused with appositives, clauses, and conjunctions, it is only because writing is a form representation, and I am trying to re-present the experience. There is very little talking--nothing to say--really the dusty mid-dusk sights were speaking too fast for us to get a word in to eachother. And we arrived in our place, and there we were, and here we are.