Click

So people who spoke with me right before I left Samoa heard me say that although Samoa was a wonderful country, we never really “clicked”. I liked Samoa and I could see why people would want to live there. But there was never really this feeling on my part of “this place is great and I want to spent my life here”. I had a “click” in Palestine after about a week and I had my Yemen “click” last night. Yes, I know it’s soon.

Admittedly I was in a good mood because I just got back my luggage. Like a fool, I had packed a lot of really special stuff. (When you only own 75 pounds of stuff, it’s all pretty special.) Uni, my stuffed unicorn who I have had as long as I can remember, was in there as well as the goodbye presents and cards from my students and friends. Anyway I degrees but needless to say I was pretty glad to get the stuff back!

Anyway, on the way back I let out a cry of surprise that nearly got us killed in the taxi. (Forget terrorists, if I am going to die here it’s going to be in a taxi accident.) There was some sort of atmospherical phenomenon that I had never seen before. In the middle of the blue sky, there was a bright oval spot of light in the sky and all around it was rainbows. It looked like the sky was opening to heaven. If I was much younger I would have thought that it was the hole in the ozone layer. As I stared in wonder (and wished that my camera was one of the things that I had checked) I looked at the mountains rising above us and saw houses that lined the top. Arabic script was everywhere, from the standard typed stuff to the unreadable graffiti and stylized advertisements to the artistic pages of the Koran that covered the doors of the mosques. And there was a guy in a white robe and a dagger shoved in his belt chewing qat hiking up one of the hills. It was all so much to take in, and suddenly click. I felt that I had never been so happy to be anywhere in my life.