Decompressing amongst the expats

This weekend was supposed to be a very productive one. It wasn't. This weekend, I was supposed to get a lot of schoolwork done. I didn't. This weekend kind of reminds me of last weekend.

I often have grand plans for all that I'm going to accomplish on my weekends, and I invariably fall hopelessly short of achieving them. Yet I don't think there's anything particularly worrisome about that fact.

I'm coming to understand that my weekends are more about decompressing than anything else. I tend to read a lot on weekends. Maybe send some emails. And I spend a lot of time talking to my fellow expats, who are easily among the most fascinating people I've ever met.

Yesterday, I was hunkered down to tackle a children's literature essay at Bliss Patisserie, an aptly-named and oft-frequented refuge for the expat community living in the city's west end.

In an air-conditioned environment, they serve delicious pastries and have some of the only passable coffee in Freetown (or so I'm told). They also don't mind if you use their generator power to work on your laptop all day, as long as you buy something. Needless to say, the place is abuzz with activity and white faces every weekend.

Yesterday, my colleague Kari and a former colleague of hers from Voice of America named Nico stopped in, as they were crashing in our spare room for the night. Their arrival marked the end of my short-lived productivity, and I mean that as a compliment, not a complaint.

Nico Colombant is yet another example of the thoroughly interesting people that seem to spring from the expat mold. A French-American raised in D.C., he attended school at Concordia before working in West Africa for a few years.

A couple of months ago, he moved home, though he's already made two return trips to West Africa, a three-week visit to Cote d'Ivoire and this two-week stay in SL. He said he's been enjoying getting to know the region from a different point of view, removed from the stresses of work.

Along with Bryna and Patrick, we spent most of the day chatting, as the venue for our conversations shifted from Bliss to Smartfarm to Montana's (home of the best pizza in Freetown) to Paddy's (the country's most famous bar, though it was less happening than usual last night).

Nico's stories included getting punched in the face by a gun-toting Senegalese drug dealer for smart ass remarks made while refusing to give up his table at a Dakar club, as well as angering 50 recently released criminals in an airport check-in line, only to find out that he and Kari were about to share a flight with all 50 of them, and no one else.

Kari has told me similarly fascinating tales over the last six weeks, including finding herself trapped in a small town during the midst of an attack, lying still through the night as she listened to gunshots ring out around her. I'm hazy on the exact details and location, as she told me about it in the first couple days we were here.

The craziest thing about it, though, is not that these people are part of my (still fairly small) social circle in Sierra Leone; it's that they're not especially atypical members of it. Living in an environment like this, you rub shoulders with a very interesting assortment of people.

And, as Kevin pointed out to me, you have access to a much larger social range than you would at home. Lawyers for the Special Court for Sierra Leone and higher-ups with the UN and US Embassy frequently socialize with VSO volunteers living on $300/month and students doing field research.

We're tied by our outsider status, and we interact commonly in ways that would be viewed as extraordinary back home. Imagine the President of UW or the RIM CEOs grabbing a pint with a local truck driver or construction worker. And not for a photo op. Just because.

It is these types of exchanges that replenish my soul every weekend. Last Sunday, I spent four hours doing little other than eating at Bliss and chatting with Patrick and Kevin, both of whose experiences abroad dwarf my own.

None of us really knows what's in store for us on the other end of Freetown, and it is a question that looms especially large for Kevin, whose JHR contract ended when mine began. Development work in Somaliland. A return to Toronto. Reporting for Al-Jazeera, or a small broadcaster in Kamloops. Grad school in New York, or maybe the UK. Though he's since ruled out Somaliland, the possibilities remain many.

In our 20s and early 30s, we have almost no accrued possessions. We are not propertied. We have no families. Just a host of experiences.

We pontificate on when harsh reality will bring an end to our worldly dalliances, and more or less agree that the harsh reality will take the form of family. Once the perspective necessarily becomes about more than simply ourselves and our own livelihood, things get a lot more difficult. Accepting a job in the most consistently lawless place on earth over the last 20 years is no longer a feasible option to entertain.

Admittedly, it's the sort of selfish musing that has for a few years led me to associate fear with the notion of settling down. But it's interesting to take in. At 23 and single, when I shrug off the question of what I'm going to do come May, it's strangely so much more acceptable than when colleagues seven or eight years my senior do so.

Our conversation shifts to our decision to throw ourselves so far outside the familiar, a conversation that naturally invites comparison to our friends that don't.

Also from Kitchener, Kevin is blunt in his appraisal of life in K-W; even though it was a good enough place to grow up, he wanted out and made his escape at 18. I'm more forgiving to K-town. Life was great back home, in a community I love with a broad and amazing social circle of support. It would've been very easy to fall into a life there and wake up one day to realize I was 50.

And I don't really think there's anything wrong with that, at least not inherently. I'm sure some of my friends will never leave K-W and that doesn't have to prevent them from achieving their full potential. The problem comes when a person's only reason for not leaving is that staying is both safe and comfortable.

Admittedly, stepping beyond that safe bubble can be mildly terrifying. For me, though, never leaving, even if only for a short time, was more terrifying. As I've said before, throwing myself into an unfamiliar and challenging situation is the easiest way I know to test my mettle and broaden my comfort zone.

Ultimately, I don't really know what it's going to be like returning home. The general consensus is that re-assimilating into Canadian life can be difficult, even after a period as short as seven months. It's hard to imagine having any difficulty returning to a loving circle of family and friends, but I suppose accepting a more conventional job might be a little strange after this experience.

I really don't know what the return home next summer will be like and, to be honest, I'm not too concerned about it one way or another. All I know is that I'm going to be glad I decided to pursue this opportunity and I'll have undoubtedly learned more than I would've from another seven months in K-town.