i spent 5 days in a 4x4, bumping around winding dirt roads with a team checking the quality of services and the availability of drugs and equipment in various community sites and health centres in the most rural areas. So dusty, basic amenities, very very cold. Coming from a heat wave at home, I was extremely unprepared and so i just wore everything I'd packed all at once, just like people used to do in the cold snaps in New Orleans. (It does not work).

Arriving back into the regional capital on the 4th night, I felt we were driving into a major metropolis. All the shops! All the people! [Antsirabe, population: 250,000]

The thing about visiting the provinces with capital-based colleagues is that there's always a special thing that you have to bring back. In Ethiopia I have driven back to Addis with pounds and pounds of butter in the trunk and bags of charcoal on the roof. In Tanzania there's a special side place to load luggage in one of the regional airports, specially built for the buckets of fish that people are carrying back to Dar es Salaam. My friend has a funny story about driving back to Nairobi with a frozen goat in the car (like, literally, a frozen goat, wrapped in plastic, in the back). She said that as it thawed, the head just started sort of nodding at her every time they went over a bump.

I love everything about this obsessive and excessive sourcing of food. It is the difference between being a tourist and the privilege of spending time with people from a place.

This time... my colleague knew two places with Very Special Cheese. Of course there was no address for either, so we drove along a busy market road, stopping every few metres to ask, "do you know the place with the good cheese? They have a glass case with cheese in the window"...of course everyone thought they knew where to find the cheese so we went up and down, into all kinds of shops, but to no avail. Things were closing so we left it for next time.

The other cheese place is in the side yard of a family home. I have been a few times - at 7 am, at 7pm, it doesn't matter, there is always a line. If there was an Antsirabe dairy Yelp, they would have 5 stars. As far as I can tell, the place is run by children and teenagers - i have never seen anyone older than 15.

I got little box of fondue cheese, still warm. I later ate it for dinner with a spoon - the best fondue I have ever eaten. I also got a tiny cup of yogurt and a coconut cookie. I sat on the side and waited for them to pack up my colleague's immense order (she brought a cooler just for this purpose). I looked at the full moon. I ate my incredibly fresh and delicious yogurt and my perfect coconut cookie. At that moment I was pierced with pure joy. Maybe it was the sugar. Maybe it was because we were out of the highlands and I was no longer freezing. The absurd cheese scavenger hunt. The bright bright stars and the unfamiliar constellations. Regardless, it was a wave of feeling so intense that as I write about it 2 days later i think my heart just contracted a bit. I am missing a lot of things in my life right now and I'm mostly not where I wanted to be and I'm sad quite often, but no regrets.

1:06 p.m. - 2019-07-19