Bourbon tastes like Gulu

            This blog is different from the rest because I am different. My entire life is different. I am writing you from Washington, D.C., my new home. I am now an employee at IJM’s headquarters. I wear a suit every day, drink coffee out of a fancy machine, I have an entire team to help me with IT issues, and the air conditioning makes the office feel like a tundra. Reentry has been painful and isolating and joyful and this last blog is an attempt to start processing this past year. I have hardly even journaled since I got back because I can’t find the words.

I didn’t write nearly as much as I wanted to or hoped to while I was in Uganda. I love to write. I think words are beautiful and it is even more beautiful how they come together to describe something that everyone will experience differently and see differently in their individual minds. And how different words can incite different emotions even if the words have the same meaning.

            But words can only express so much. And I never found this to be truer than I did this past year.  Words cannot describe the things I learned that I thought I already knew. I thought I knew what evil was, but I didn’t. I thought I knew the resilience of human beings, but I didn’t. I thought I knew how much people, women in particular, were hurting in this world, but I didn’t. I thought I knew the darkest corners of who I am, but all I really knew were the edges. I thought I knew what friendship and love were, but I didn’t. I thought I knew what it was like to be so angry with God that you feel it in the deepest parts of your soul, but I didn’t. Gulu introduced me to love, joy, hatred, perseverance, suffering, loneliness, anger, confusion, loyalty, isolation, guilt, shame, hope and hopelessness in a way that I had never experienced them before.

            For the majority of the time I was in Gulu, I wondered what I was meant to learn while in Gulu. At this point, looking back on everything, I believe a huge part of why God placed me there was to teach me how to suffer and to serve those who were suffering.

It was an honor and a privilege to suffer with the people that came into my life. I cried for people who had never been cried for. I cried for our clients, I cried for my coworkers, I cried for my fellow expats and I cried for myself.

“When one cries the other tastes salt.”

--Hebrew Proverb

I saw the worst and best of humanity every day. When it was bad, it was bad. But when there was hope, it was the most beautiful and wonderful hope I had ever experienced. There are so many people in the IJM Gulu office fighting for widows when often their situations at home are worse than our clients’. They are the most beautiful people I have ever met. And I mean beautiful in every sense of the word.

I know this was my first job out of college, but I’m confident that this will be the best job that I will ever have, the best boss I will ever have, and the best coworkers I will ever have. Again, it is not something I can describe with words. My parents told me they had never seen my face light up like it did when I talked about the Ugandan women I worked with. I think that might be the closest to explaining how much I love them that I will ever get. I can’t help it simply because of who they are.

I moved to Washington, D.C. a month ago and I tried out a new church. The pastor came up to my boyfriend and I (apparently we looked new and out of place). I told him I had just moved from Gulu. He told me his daughter worked in Central Uganda and she visited Gulu and came back and told her father, “I have never experienced spiritual warfare like that. That is a dark place.” I fought back tears as I leaned back in my chair and he began to introduce us to other people. She obviously hadn’t met the people I worked with because there would have been a caveat to her statement… Their light is impossible to not see through all the darkness.

My roommates and I had a man fall through our roof, we found someone’s teeth in one of our rooms (we still don’t know who they belonged to), we laughed together and shared secrets with each other. We took care of each other when we got bronchitis that lasted months, malaria and dysentery (on my birthday, might I add). We were family. We learned to love each other. Amanda is someone that is hard to peel back the layers but when she lets you in, it’s that much more of an honor. John Wendel came in January, but became an essential part of the house. He sensed how our hearts were from the moment he met us and we told each other secrets that led to us crying together and laughing together and finding the beauty in each other that no one else had ever recognized. If the only reason I was in that house was to help him become more himself, I’m okay with that. The Van Dalen family was so wonderful, it felt surreal. Back in the states, I am finding myself getting excited about restaurants and other places that cater towards children because of the interactions I had with their little ones. Justin ALWAYS knew when I was having a bad day no matter how hard I tried to hide it.

The Allen family took me in as their own. Their daughter, Caroline is my sister and my friend. She is technically 13, but she acts like an 18-year-old. Their 9-year-old, Wilder, and I were attached at the hip at first sight. When I would go into town without him, everyone would ask, “Where is your son?” Wilder also insists that my last name is now Allen. John Allen challenged me, commiserated with me and loved me through every win and every loss. His wife, Kendra, was a mentor, a friend, a comforter, an encourager, and she is someone I want to be when I grow up. My mom is my favorite person in this world and I think God knew I needed Kendra during this time. My parents just so happen to be the same age as John and Kendra. Coincidence? I think not.

Will Lathrop. The best boss I will ever have. He inspired me and made me laugh at times when I didn’t think those two things were possible. I struggle with having hope in men, but John, Justin and Will healed so many of those wounds. His wife, Sherm (her real name is Arminda but Will nicknamed her and it stuck), is a friend—a very special friend. Will went to work at IJM’s headquarters, so he is there with me now. He brought his one-year-old son, Lucky, to work the other day and, when I walked around the corner, Lucky ignored the crowd around him, pointed at me and made his own little noises because he knew me. They are family.

One of the first things Tamara talked to me about was that she thought colors had personalities. Naturally, I thought she might be insane. It took us months but we learned to love each other. Our friendship is unlike anything else. She became my best friend not because we chose each other but because we learned how to navigate each other’s hearts. We would crawl under the other’s mosquito nets in the middle of the night crying. We would cope together and rejoice together. We walked home from work every day talking passionately about work, knowing we were in Gulu for the same reasons. If you met both of us, you wouldn’t immediately understand how we are friends because we are such opposites, but I think what we have can be truer and more genuine than the people we choose to be friends with because the people we choose to be friends with… that’s easy. Understanding Tamara was not easy. We were friends by default, but now we are friends by choice.

I wish I could talk about every coworker I worked with, but I can’t because there are so many things to say… My relationships with them are also much harder to explain with words than my relationships with expats. And, honestly, I don’t think I am ready to write about it. But I ache for them much more than I ache for my fellow expats. I am constantly thinking about them and hurting because I don’t know what is hurting them like I used to know.

And here I am back in the states—a new city, a new job, new friends and a new home. I still feel a lot of the things I felt in Gulu but for different reasons. I am still trying to sort out what I am feeling and where my heart is. I don’t feel like myself and I am trying to get back to who I am. But I am trying to figure out who Tyler is after this past year. She is definitely not the same person.

This past year was the most joyful and the most painful year of my life. But I experienced the joy because of the pain. It was far from temporal happiness and clearly everlasting joy, which is present in the midst of pain and suffering. That’s what makes it joy, after all.

I’m still working through compassion fatigue, post-adrenaline depression, vicarious trauma, etc. I know I have a long way to go. I am mourning the person I was, the people I met and the life I lived this past year. I have bad days and better days, but I would never take back this past year. I would do it all over again... and again… and again.

So here’s to Gulu being a part of this chapter of my life rather than the last chapter of a book that I finished reading and put back on the shelf.