Time Warp

Whenever I talk to people at home one of the most common questions I am asked is if it feels like I've been gone forever. I am never quite sure how to answer this question because quite honestly I am not sure. I feel like I am an in strange time vortex where up is down and down is up. There are days where I feel like I have been here about 5 minutes past eternity and there are other days when I realize I've been here almost 2 months and I think GET OUT, no way! I feel like I've been here about 2 weeks. I think it depends on how my day is going, how much work I've felt I've accomplished at any given point in time, and other random factors like how many days in a row it's rained.

I think part of it has to do with the strange pace of life here as well. One thing I've always said about Nigeria is that it is a society based on "hurry up & wait." By this I mean that we spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for something to happen. In general there is not a sense of urgency for things, but often you'll get swept up by some frantic thing happening where everyone runs around screaming and everyone knows we're late and we all run crashing into each other to get to where we were supposed to be 15 minutes ago, and by the time we get there we settle down and sit for about an hour before anything happens again. It's a very strange way of living that I think affects your perception of time passing. You spend most of your time feeling like you are watching paint dry because everything is so not rushed and then these spurts of mania make it feel like you are always running late and running to do any anything. I can't really explain it better, but that's what it feels like to me.

Anyway, I've almost reached the half-way point (half-way based on my initial projection of how long it would take me to do my research with a leave date of December 18th) and I feel like I am in good shape research and mental health wise. I have good days and bad days (mostly good) and overall I feel like progress is being made and that I will have an outstanding experience overall. Now I just need to hurry up and wait until my work is done.