Do you miss home?

It’s 11:26pm and I’ve been writing this post for I don’t know how long. Kisses in the Moonlight by George Benson is playing on my YouTube. Elle sent me some pictures of the moon she captured on her camera I don’t know when. I watched the moon last weekend and it has been glowing behind the dome this week. I have seen again tonigh. Music, pictures and reality in the sky have spoken the same language of the moon. So I’ll have the moon as my blog image. If my writing is dry, it’s because I need to jumpstart those writing muscles.

I sometimes get asked this question by friends and family back home. It’s closed ended. Which means I have two, no three, possible answers. Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t usually have a straightforward answer.

There are things I don’t miss. I don’t miss getting stuck in traffic jam for hours. I don’t miss being extra careful when using my phone at the back of a taxi on my way home from work for fear of a petty thief grabbing it. I survived a few of those attempts. I don’t miss that road from my house in Kisaasi that would be muddy and slippery when it rained I’d carry mud under the soles of my shoes to the office and deeply apologize to the cleaners when I left pieces of mud that looked like poop on the cleaned floor. I don’t miss the extra caution when walking at night along some routes, always looking back to make sure no one is following.

There are things I miss, like Soo Many Stories. I miss reading with those children. Soo Many Stories is lighting the reading culture of children and are currently raising funds to reach more children with books. You can donate here.

I miss knowing the sun will rise every day because now I know there are times when the sun does not rise. Clouds take over. Trees lose their leaves. It gets cold. That’s also how life is in a way. Sometimes the path is easy, things work out, we build momentum. We get comfortable thinking the sun will still rise. Then it doesn’t come our way from the east. And things hit a snag. But we must adapt.

I miss the ease of making friends, starting conversation with anyone without seeming like a psycho. Try that here (even before the covid-19 pandemic) and you’ll have people giving you a suspicious look. I miss roadside chicken and roasted maize. I miss gonja.

I miss this blog. I have been away from it for over two months. That’s a long time. Fortunately, Animas held the fort over here while I was giving excuses for not writing. She left her heart on some of these pages and there are more stories from her that I should’ve posted. Put the blame on me.

My days have been filled with work, my evenings with school and my weekends, with laziness and sleeping in. I’m studying a course that delves into philosophy and ethics of some of the technologies used in biological sciences. My course asks some controversial questions like, “How do you feel about producing a baby whose biological mother or father (or mother and father) had never actually been born?” “How would you feel if you discovered that your mother had been aborted at 18 weeks?”

It might seem impossible to imagine that an aborted fetus can be a mother. At 18 weeks, a fetus has eggs that can be harvested. Using reproductive technologies, an egg can be fertilized with donor sperm and if implanted in a carrier womb, it can grow and mature into a baby. But that’s not what this blog is about.

When I opened my blog after a few weeks, I found many comments. One was some sort of threat. This person claimed they had hacked my accounts. They said they had information about me including log in details to my email and social media accounts.

I smiled.

They demanded I pay a ransom of $250 so that I would sleep without worrying about the information they had about me.

I read on.

They gave me seven hours to pay this money. I pasted a link to their bitcoin wallet.

I said nyet.

Next day they sent another threat, said I hadn’t yet transferred the money. They claimed they would sell my information to the darknet for over 10 times what they were asking me to pay.

I said LOL. The joke’s on you. I deleted their comments.

Anyway here I am doing push ups to get my writing muscles active again. I hope I’ll work my way back to the world of words with ease.