Home for the Holidays!

I’m racing a jet lag / caffeine coma this early afternoon at home in Woodbridge, VA, and thought I’d do some blog updating before I crash. In the two days I’ve been home, I’ve been stocking up on plenty of American-style (filtered) coffee, playing with Mom and Dad’s new puppies, gaping out the window at the cold wind through the trees, playing piano like the good ole times…random little pleasures like that. May sound trivial but when you’ve been homesick, it’s the best-tasting water after a long haul through the desert. It’s weird the things I missed this year being away from America, random things that would pop into my head and gradually become a vicious craving, like soy milk, or Panera, or Grandma’s Thanksgiving stuffing. We skipped Thanksgiving this year; I saw it coming but work was a bit too crazy to do anything about it, and as Noelle flew in from France that night, everything else took a back seat to welcoming my sorely missed friend home.

As for work, it charged on in its craziness for another week after she arrived, but then cooled down as my Christmas break in the States neared. After only a few weeks at the new job in environmental consulting, I had a couple proposals to submit for a solid waste management project in Jordan, a new healthcare waste treatment facility in Oman, and persistent organic pollutants sustainable management project in Egypt … Some people who just read that sentence might be asleep by now, but to me it’s fascinating stuff. What can I say, I’m an environmental geek of the Captain Planet generation.

Our firm has been around for 12 years, and as I’ve only been around for half a dozen weeks, that leaves me a lot to catch up on and projects to learn about - initiatives we’ve taken in environmental conservation and management in Egypt and the Middle East. I’m enjoying the office atmosphere in contrast to a year and a half of teaching English (mostly private lessons in students’ homes). I like the team atmosphere, the regular schedule, even the formalities – things that most people complain about the office life, but things that appeal to me after the somewhat lonesome last gig. And I enjoy the feeling of producing something, even if it’s just filling in the proposals around the parts where an engineer or someone with actual technical skills would provide their expertise. Most of all I simply like learning about the environmental field in Egypt; it feels good being in that awareness network like back in Virginia and Alaska.

I’m sad to report that I stopped teaching at the orphanage, mostly because the constant stomach/abdominal nausea and pains I’ve been battling for a few months were heavily exacerbated by the stress and energy I put into planning and teaching my lessons there. I’d put a lot of love into the students and the work, and gained a lot of joy and satisfaction from the experience, but grudgingly faced the fact that teaching there was linked to my increasing pains, heart rate and exhaustion. But I'm trying to stay optimistic, and I'm counting on the best remedy for homesickness to also remedy my stomachsickness: being home for the holidays