My day in limbo

So I flew out of my first country late last night/early this morning.  It seems evident that I am doomed to not have a smooth ride to the airport at any point this trip.  My shuttle was an hour late picking me up to go to Kennedy and then last night my ride to the airport didn't show up.  I ended up taking a taxi with some weird driver who wanted to practice his English when all I wanted to do was get to the airport quickly.  The airport had some crazy security procedures including three trips through the metal detectors and a more than casual acquaintance with the pat down lady.  I mean really she could have at least bought me dinner before she got that friendly!  The third time through security they searched my backpack by hand.  I had just stopped and brought some snacks to use up the rest of my currency forgetting that I already had some snacks in my bag so I had an embarrassing amount of candy in my bag!  And really, I had already been scanned three times, what could I possibly be hiding at that point?

The place where I left from and the place that I am going to are only about an hour apart by air but that's just too easy for this part of the world.  Instead, I flew 2 1/2 hours west this morning, have a 15 hour layover and am flying 3 1/2 hours east tonight (probably directly over the city I left this morning).  So today has been a day in limbo.  I decided to be a bad traveler today and forgo the tour of the city that I could have taken during the layover and instead booked myself into the airport hotel and slept for the day.  I have a student who I know will be disappointed with me for not taking the tour but I know the next week has a lot of long travel days (due to my refusal to take internal flights) and I didn't have time to sleep last night so I thought I would be better off just relaxing.  I'm also in a country I know I want to come back and visit in the future because there's a lot I want to see so I'll be back here someday.

There were a lot of good guesses on my first destination.  My sister asked me if I was going to tell if anyone gets it right and I'm still not sure if I will make a final reveal before I get home but I will say that there were no correct answers for the first country.  It's sad that there have been so many genocides in world history that there were so many good guesses that weren't right.  It's also sad that the one that I spent the week learning about has been forgotten by so many. 

I will be off in a few hours to my next undisclosed location and the adventure (and the clues) will continue!

An American in Paradise?

It's always been true that I've never felt more like an American then when I'm in another country.  All of a sudden I seem to represent "American" and everything I say or do is construed as speaking for a nation.  Even today we were in a crowded market and I kept getting caught in traffic jams of people.  My guide said to me that I just needed to push my way through and my response was "if you push it's normal, if I push I'm the rude American shoving people out of the way."  This is the first country I've been to in a long time, maybe forever, where being American is actually an asset.  It literally has opened doors for me.  Show up at a museum just as they are closing for lunch - oh she's an American, come in, we'll eat later.  Go through security - oh she's an American, we don't have to check her bag.  I'm not used to being loved just for being American.  I've been liked, tolerated, and called imperialist aggressor but loved, that's just not something I can wrap my head around.

So I visited the capital city today.  It has 2 names depending on who you ask but whatever you call it I didn't really like it.  It's known for it's old city which like every great architectural wonder I have ever visited anywhere in the world was covered in scaffolding and mesh fences.  I've pretty much come to the conclusion that this truly is an ancient architectural style!  It's just a crazy busy city and it's growing very quickly.  They're building 5 star hotels, malls, fast food restaurants and amusement parks.  I think it's just getting too big too fast and it's losing the feeling that once made it special.  Of course, you didn't hear me complaining when I was eating chicken fingers in the food court at the mall!

In a few hours I leave for the airport to start the second part of my journey.  It'll be a long day of travel and sitting in airports which I'm not looking forward to but stay tuned for the next edition of Where in the World is Kerri O'Shea - maybe I need to make the clues a bit easier in the next round!

Last day in this city

Tomorrow morning I head out to the capital city for a day of sightseeing before flying out to my next destination on Thursday morning.  It's amazing how quickly this trip has gone.  This city has been wonderful so I'm sad to be leaving it tomorrow but I think I have seen most of what there is to see.  There have been quite a few good, well thought out guesses as to where I am (well except for my father who is convinced I lied to everyone and am really in Philly!) so keep the guesses coming. 
Yesterday and today I did a few more interesting things.  I visited a place that is internationally known for it's hiking.  I didn't hike too far though - I don't have that kind of time, I need to be back at work in September!  I also went for a white knuckle 4 wheel drive ride up the side of a mountain where two of the drivers managed to pull next to each other on a one lane path so that one driver could pass lunch to the other.  Luckily it was the other guy who was on the open air side of the road hanging off the mountain so I wasn't too worried!
Today I had the opportunity to go out into the very rural countryside and see some of the traditional villages with their mud houses (some of which now have satellite dishes on top).  I saw some beautiful scenery and also got to hear the very moving experiences of my guide who I have been travelling with for the last few days.  He has a story that sounds almost like something out of The Sound of Music or some crazy war movie.  When he was a child, his father was a resistance fighter.  Because of his father's involvement in this movement there was a contract placed on the lives of the whole family.  The family escaped the city with the assistance of several people who hid them in the trunks of their cars and reunited them at the military encampment of his father in the mountains.  They lived there for a time moving from village to village and even had a school set up in the area.  At one point, the school was bombed by the government and at least one student was killed.  At that point, the father was relieved of his military duties and asked to go to Western Europe to gain support for the resistance there.  The whole family walked for days out of the mountains and into the neighboring country where they were promptly arrested by the border guards.  They were imprisoned (his word) in a refugee camp in the neighboring country for over a year before finally being able to travel to London.  It seems like so many people here have stories like this and yet they all have this desire to rebuild and move on.  It's the same spirit and determination that I saw in post-apartheid South Africa, this idea that yes we have suffered for decades but we can either sit and complain about it or we can move forward and make sure it doesn't happen again. 

Genocide Tourism

I have traveled all over the world and I continue to struggle with visiting sites where massacres and/or genocides have been turned into museums.  On the one hand I am fascinated to be in a place where so much history happened.  On the other hand, it seems disrespectful to be a tourist in a place where so many people suffered.  I think it's so important to bring back pictures of these places to share with my students but I don't want to trivialize the importance of the place by walking around snapping pictures.  I struggled with this in Dachau when I visited the site of the concentration camp, in Soweto when I saw the bullet holes from the police massacre of black schoolchildren and in My Lai where survivors take visitors on a tour of a re-creation of burned buildings and dead animals.

I struggled here as well.  In the last two days I have visited two monuments to genocide, both of them very moving in very different ways.  The first, in the city, was an actual place where killings happened.  The had statues set up to memorialize some of those killed and statues set up to depict the treatment of these individuals.  The buildings were riddled with bullet holes and in one spot the floor is said to still have blood stains on it.   The second was a memorial in a village in the countryside. This was one of the most intense places I have ever been.  The photos and stories were graphic and the tours were given by survivors.  The English speaking guide I had lost his father.  There was another guide there who had lost his whole family.  He was interviewed by television journalists right after the event and they played the video.  It's hard to understand how he can work in a place where he watches a video of the biggest trauma in his life over and over again in the hopes of educating others.  My English speaking guide asked me if I wanted to take a picture of this man and I posing next to a picture of this man taken by journalists during that interview.  I expressed concern that I didn't want to do anything disrespectful but he insisted that I do it and that they would ask him to pose with me.  Imagine my surprise when after the guide took a picture with my camera, the man posing with me took out his phone and asked the guide if he could have a picture with me as well because he felt it was so important that Americans came and learned about what happened here.  When the guides found out I was a teacher they gave me a book and some CDs of pictures and images to bring back to my classes.  All in all, it was a pretty intense day.

For those that are interested I am also keeping a journal of my travel and I will post some of that when I return and share where I have been.  In that post I will share a lot more information about what I learned in these places and my reflections on this genocide.

The tour begins!

I arrived at my first destination about 12 hours ago and got to see some of the sights today despite being tired and jet lagged.  What country I'm in really depends on who you ask.  Technically I am in the country that rejected my visa (3 times) but if I were to try and go where I originally planned I would be arrested for illegal immigration.  Many say that I'm in a country that doesn't really exist.  This morning I went to a museum that traces the history of the area back to the stone age.  It was interesting although they did have an overwhelming amount of broken pottery that looked like it had been put together with crazy glue and some of the English signs were a little bizarre.  There was one that I believe was supposed to say "Clay Lamp" but instead said "Clay Lump"  I don't know, it did sort of look like a lump so maybe the sign makers did know what they were talking about!  One of the very interesting parts was that at some point in history the people of this area buried bodies in pottery urns.  They had two of them on display with the skeletons visible in them.  After a hamburger for lunch I am back in the hotel for a little siesta before heading out tonight to visit a nearby mountain to get some panoramic views of the city at night.

On the road again...

Well, I left last night to head off to my undisclosed location.  I left from Kennedy and for those of you that watch the news I was not on the flight that was delayed because a woman refused to stop singing.  If I was, I'd probably have been arrested for throwing her off the plane myself  - I don't have a lot of patience for obnoxious passengers.  I had a long flight last night (not the longest flight I've ever taken but it's close) and now I'm hanging out on an 8 hour layover.  It's kind of a bummer layover - before I changed my trip the layover was going to be longer and I was going to have time to go out and see the one thing in this country I have always wanted to see and then stay in a hotel overnight and head back to the airport early in the morning.  Now that it's shorter I'm stuck hanging out in the airport.  Now I'm just hanging out watching the planes take off and land. 

So, I don't have any real clues till I actually reach my final destination but I can tell you I'm on a continent I have visited before - that should help narrow it down a little!

Getting ready to leave

Trip is finally planned.  Last deposit was finally confirmed yesterday -nothing like waiting till the last minute!  I had some visa difficulties- the visa for the country I was planning on visiting was rejected 3 times before I finally gave up.  Sometimes being American does not have its privileges.  I changed my plans a bit after some frantic research and am leaving the U.S. a few days later than I originally planned.  I fly out tomorrow and will be gone till the 20th.  It's a little shorter than I usually travel but the end date was not negotiable.

I have decided to torment my family by not telling them where I'm going and giving them clues so they can play "where in the world is Kerri O'Shea?"  I'll be posting clues on my blog so feel free to play along - maybe there'll be some fun and exciting prizes.  Sometimes the clues will be easy.  Sometimes they'll be harder.  Sometimes they will be in plain sight other times (like today) the clues will be hidden in the post.