Being in America feel surreal

I'm glad to be back home for this break. But being in America feels strange. In one sense, I feel like I just left it and everything is still the same. But on the other hand, just like two years have gone by on the island, two years have gone by here, and I don't think I fit back here properly. It'd be different if I was here for good, here to stay, but since I'm leaving again in less than a month, it all feels a little off. 

My friend Ken posted an update on Facebook about how weird it is to leave Vanuatu, where we are all the most interesting people of all time, to go to another country where we are just a face in the crowd.

Combine that, with the fact that, from here where I'm sitting in Virginia, Vanuatu seems so distant, so foreign. Yesterday I was going through a stack of pictures that my mom printed out from my parents' trip to Tongariki last year. I thought our refrigerator needed four--Miriam, Morris, and Asina; my mom and I in island dresses; my dad with Bubu David, a view of the other Shepherds islands--but as I was looking through the photos, it struck me just how weird it all is. I've had that feeling a few times so far, and it's strange to realize that what has seemed so familiar for so long now seems so distant, just because I have changed where I am. Everything is the same, but I've moved.

A good example of how my perspective on Tongariki has been rattled around a bit has to do with poverty. Tongariki is a poor island, but while I was living there, I got used to it. A few days ago, though, I was thinking about signs of serious poverty, and I realized I had so many things to think about, even if I was just to think about the kids. Many of the children have these huge open sores that they don't cover up, because their parents don't have plasters and don't want to send them to the dispensary to buy a few that'll just fall off anyway. So these little kids have flies on their sores. Or how some of the little babies will wear basically rags, or how there are moms there who can't afford enough diapers. Or even how this one girl in class 4, who I liked very, very much, had one shirt that she wore to school for the whole first year, and then a few months before I left, started wearing another girl's hand-me-down. Or little babies with swollen bellies, thanks to worms. When you live there, you just start to not notice it anymore ... But it's so, so, so poor. And while I think that Vanuatu has a very specific kind of poverty--poorly accessible in the South Pacific is is a special kind of poorly accessible--it makes you think about how many other people in the world face the same challenges. They have trade-offs that we don't even think about, like choosing which child seems most intelligent and only paying for their secondary school fees. 

And America is so, so, so rich. We don't have these problems. I was telling my mom about a situation on the island that I think in America would be classified as neglect, but that on the island, I really just think is something very understandable, and not neglect, but parents needing to provide for their family. I'm very glad to be back home and I feel like it's all easier here. But I think my head is still in the game back where I live. America is home but it's not where I'm from anymore, and that is a weird realization.