It’s been a long time since I made a post, but the last one didn’t really accomplish what I’d like a final post to accomplish, so I figured I’d make one more addition. In the future, my presence on my website (if I decide to continue making online observations about the world as it relates to me), will be somewhere else on this website. Ujamaa will be finished. So, as I finish this blog it makes a lot of sense to think of where I started. I said in my second post:
“Ujamaa seems to speak to [a different way of thinking about the world and the people around us]… and I am interested to see whether there is truth to the notion that Tanzanians believe in the importance of extended community. In a few words, I am looking forward to living in a different society with different values, and beginning to understand how Tanzanians relate to their families, extended families, and society as a whole.”
It’s funny, because at times over the course of the year as I wrote I wondered whether I had picked a good name for this blog. Was I actually investigating ujamaa? In some sense you could say no, but as I suggest in the above quote, in a significant way I was writing about Tanzanians, and how I experienced them. This was something I thought a lot about over the course of my time in Tanzania, and as the post before this one suggests, I adapted to the Tanzanian experience (to an extent at least), and began to better understand the Tanzanian experience.
So, returning to the United States, I had to readjust to the American experience. I have now been living in the land of excess, refrigeration, and fast internet for nearly three months. And I like it. There were moments of reverse culture shock, most notably in a Target full of bright lights, lots of stuff, and frenzied shopping. but there’s no doubt about it: I like the American lifestyle. Or, maybe it’s better to phrase it as as I might have in Tanzania: I can get used to it.
The human capacity for adaptation is immense. I have moments when I miss the simpler things about Tanzania: returning home, cooking dinner on my porch, and having nothing to do for the rest of the night but read. But, it’s hard not to appreciate the excesses of American life. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that I have a greater sense of appreciation for aspects of life here, and a greater sense of disdain for the entitlement that many others feel about these excesses.
Am I changed? Not at my core, but I have a better sense of understanding -an understanding that only experience can cultivate. The end.