Back to 'city' life...



I am sitting in the shadow of the huge mango tree which I face every morning when I step out of my room. It’s a very quiet Sunday, even more quiet than usual as my fellow Italian colleagues this weekend are not here. I am back to Rumbek after the past 3 weeks spent in the middle of the forest and strangely enough I have this feeling of being back to the ‘city’ – although I am not so sure Rumbek can be called such. I am thinking of these past 3 weeks and the ‘full emptiness’ of living far from the noise and from everything. Somehow I feel aware of the priviledge of starting and ending the day with the sun light, of waking up at 6,30 every morning and going to bed dead tired at 10 pm and to have the moon as the only light around me (besides the one of my Mac, obviously...), of going in the garden and pick the vegetables to cook dinner with, of not caring at all for the clothes to wear. I like recalling that strange and overwhelming sensation of walking alone across the endless field facing the camp and feeling a tiny part fallen almost by chance in totally new world.

This morning, while I was ordering some papers in my suitcase, I came across my return ticket to Nairobi-Paris-Rome. I've rationally realized that in nearly 2 weeks I will leave Rumbek and will refind Paris first, then Rome and Napoli. I wonder what of this place I will bring with me in Europe and above all in which mood will I return to Sudan in July. Here many thoughts and worries seem so distant and small that sometimes I'd wish to forget they even exist. In a way returning to Europe feels like being ‘charmed’ and falling again for many small things and feelings that here are missing. But at the same time there is also bit of fear of leaving this sort of timeless world in which I ended up almost by accident and to which sometimes it feels impossibile to belong.