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A tragic typo

September 28, 2014

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Kopano

For some reason this morning, either the loud downpour of rain or the shouts of drunk international students returning home, I am awake early and unable to return to the warm comfort of sleep. I know that I am still very excited to be here. Now, the early morning birds are chirping away outside my window (a more pleasant noise than the get-to-bed students). When we arrived, the IAPO (International Academic Programs Office) people (called green shirts because of their distinctively visible lime green uniform t-shirts) brought us from the airport to Kopano, a vacation dormitory on the lower UCT campus. The rooms are a touch rudimentary, with bare wood furnishings, a padlock for your door, and a surprisingly comfortable cot. The toilets smell like toilets. The walls are quite thin. Still, each room is a single occupant, so my first couple nights did not need to navigate sharing a sleeping space with a stranger. Small blessings. While preparing for this trip, I applied

Isolation Art

What Lies Beyond I made these pieces in isolation following a fraught air travel home. Having lost my mother and my dog, I passed two weeks alone in my basement to protect my husband. I did not need to bring home any viral stow-aways. I had not created anything for several months, since before my mother first went into the hospital for an operation. I do not know how to read these pieces and whether they are indicative of my emotional state...but then I never do. Weathered Assistance Is This Aloud? Family Care Toxic Snowglobe Skewed Experiment in Perspective Fragile Findings Portion Prince Pie Chart by Committee

Back in Wisconsin...

In the fifth grade, we all had to do a report on a specific explorer from the Age of Exploration. Some kids chose Vasco de Gama. Others presented reports on Francis Drake or Francisco de Coronado. I chose Ferdinand Magellan, the first man to circumnavigate the globe. In researching and ultimately presenting my report, I came across the name of a small island in the Pacific Ocean, where, after months of hard transoceanic sailing, Magellan and his crew stopped to refresh their water and food supply. This island was Guam. Little did I know at the time, this would not be our last encounter. Unlike countless other American school children, I would not be able to simply forget Guam’s existence once the report was over and graded. It was the summer before 6th grade. We lived in a small wooded community on the extreme outskirts of Milwaukee County. It was almost suburban. We had been living in that town since we moved from California so my dad could help run an airline in Milwaukee. There may

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