I don't have much time alone here and I have even less time to think. I'm often frustrated with the slow pace of the work and when I'm tired I suspect that I'm chasing magic bullets - technological short cuts to reduce infant mortality - instead of working on equity, the real driver of change.

When I'm tired, I wonder many things: why I choose to be so far away from my life and home. How to convey what I love about my days here. What exactly I DO love about my days here. How to make my faraways understand my Here.

I think about it when I ride noisy jeepneys late at night, when the warm, diesel-laden air is faintly, surprisingly, laced with the scent of magnolias.

I think about it when I sit down to lunch around a big table with my colleagues -usually older women in their 40s and 50s. They pile food on my plate and laugh a lot. Filipinos are FUNNY... really funny, in a ribald way that's even better when the speaker is a 55-year-old mother of three. We take a whole hour for lunch and i am happy to be part of the camaraderie, even if i don't get most of the dirty puns.

At a party this evening, I paused to wonder whether I'd ever even try to explain it to someone from home. i was at a birthday party that started with conversation but, typically, became increasingly centered around videoke. A small, enthusiastic, and remarkably untalented group of guests pulled out their greatest hits: "Hot Stuff" (Donna Summer. I had to google that), "Dancing Queen", and "Wonderwall". The high point of my evening was "Play that Funky Music (White Boy)".

The singers ranged from five to sixty-five, as did the occupants of the impromptu dance floor (the living room).

The music was terrible. It was pure noise. The sound system was scratchy, the songs were cheesy, the singers were offkey and truly horrific... and
everyone was having a great time.

my emotions wavered between glee, because it really was that bad... and agony (because it really was that bad).

i just like being here. It reminds me of nights my parents would take us to some fellow immigrant's home where there would be lots of food, a bunch of adults and a million kids. It was important to find the old people and say hello (Our parents intoned: "it doesn't count if they don't hear you" and made us practice our greetings in the car).

being here reminds me of rare weeks at a rented cottage where a bunch of kids and cousins and aunties and uncles would spend evenings singing old songs around a piano.

there's something i get on these trips that i don't get from my regular life...

I was born in Canada and my parents have been there for 35 to 40 years, so we're Canadian. My parents were a miniscule subgroup of a larger minority group to begin with (english-speaking catholic indians?) so there were never many tangible reminders of where we came from. Of course it is more than being brown and making decent dal, but it's just hard to explain to my friends who come from somewhere else.

(i just realized that i always write lentils as "dahl" - as in "Roald Dahl" - instead of the real spelling, "dal". If that doesn't encapsulate what i'm trying to convey, I don't know what does.

i can't lead a group of friends in Toronto on a singalong of "Jamaica Farewell" (harry belafonte?). I truly don't want to. But sometimes I want to sit back and let it wash over me, and I get to do that here.

There's no way to explain all this to anyone from life at home, so I never even try, and that's a shame.

11:04 p.m. - 2008-05-24