Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

their common sayings. My older sister, the language prodigy in the family,
when buying bread, pronounced perfectly the side comment used often with
greetings or farewells: the Arabic equivalent of “God bless you.” The man
across the counter looked up in shock and proclaimed in quick, loud Arabic
that she spoke better than his grandmother.
AI: You recently mentioned becoming a part of wherever it was you were living. Have you
taken a part of all the countries you’ve lived in with you? If so, how does this translate to
your everyday life in the United States?
ELP: While leaving America was hard, coming back was harder. I had
shed that skin of stereotypes and generalizations that so frequently clothe
the American race and understood more about other countries than about
my own. Bosnia, for instance. left me with a stubborn paranoia of walking
across open grass. My family had once walked inadvertently through a
minefield, managing to make it back to safety by following a path my dad
said he saw but which was invisible to my eyes, and the memory has stayed
with me. The sense of adventure and success that comes with experiencing
new things enfused my soul until it was more a part of me than my original
patriotism. All the places I lived slipped memories into thin sockets along
my flesh until I felt as if my skin was made of the dust storms of Khartoum,
and my soggy clothes after a rainstorm seemed to be soaked by the drizzles
of Holland and the icy puddles of Romania. When I taste a food, it recalls
meals I’ve had overseas. When my family went to an Outback restaurant,
we hung around outside chattering in a strange mixture of all the languages
we knew and chortled internally when a man remarked in a Southern
accent to his friend as they passed by us that he “thought it was Chinese
or sumthin.’” To this day, I find myself using a phrase of Dutch or French
in my conversations without realizing those around me won’t understand
it. When I walk the streets I hear people chattering in English and my
first impulse is to whip around and point them out to my family – we
had become used to singling out Americans in crowds, as seeing other
Americans in some places was very rare.
AI: Why did you and your family decide to go to Africa?
ELP: There’s a certain rite of passage within the United Nations: to
spend at least a year in a “mission.” When my father got the opportunity to
take the mission in Sudan, helping to structure the legal system of newlyautonomous
South Sudan, he snapped it up. Africa was a place of great
mystique to me. Even after having mental image after mental image smashed
during my travels, I hung pig-headedly onto the vision I had of my family
living in a tukul (a small round hut) in a small town stranded in the Saharan
desert. Khartoum, of course, was nothing like that. We didn’t get to travel
much within Africa but the time we spent in Egypt and in Kenya were great
awakenings for me. Although our initial reasons for going to Sudan may
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