Catharsis

My most profuse apologies for the hiatus ... I've been on kind of a tear at work that's gone on for, well, five months. I work and work and work and move and move and move, but lately, particularly in the weeks bracketing my 36th birthday, I've felt pretty emptied out mentally and worn out physically.

Stepping back and looking at that time, it figures things were/are that way. Work is my life, simply because there is precious little else to do in Mongu. Similar to Senanga, there are a lot of bars, churches, and children.  You can derive the according pastimes (wink, wink). However much I might integrate into Zambian society, there is a limit to those activities which provide the sort of mental diversion that helps one be ... how do I say it? ... content? Relaxed? At peace? As I often sardonically say to people at work when they ask me if I have time for a task, "Well, the Mongu opera house is closed, so my weekend's free." (Looks of puzzlement abound whenever I say these things, remember non-Western audiences are not good at sarcasm).

Anyway, the recent heat that is symptomatic of this time of year, moving as we are through the middle of the hot, dry season, and the avalanche of work finally caused an physiological breaking point of sorts. I'd gotten so numb and unblinking with the amount of fire-fighting inherent in our line of work (development is all about reaction) that I didn't realize that stress manifests itself in strange ways. Early last week whilst in Lusaka, I had a particularly bad day of online conference calls with HQ; they use some means of web conferencing (WebEx) that is broadband intensive (though not as bad as AdobeConnect) and therefore hard for our VSAT connection to handle ... I ended up using my own laptop and the mobile [Airtel] internet using a dongle. This kept me in the office until 19:00 or so, and I went back to the guest house and turned in early after reading a bit of Vonnegut [Breakfast of Champions, great book].

The following morning, I awoke around 4:30 from sheer pain in the right ... I wasn't able to lift my head off my pillow and had to roll off the bed, stand up, and move from there. The pain emanated throughout my upper back, and would carry on unabated until I made it to the clinic around 14:00. The doc, a middle-aged Irish lady, informed me I had something called wry-neck. Hearing it phonetically, I asked if it had anything to do with Canadian whiskey, which I haven't even smelled in almost a decade. She blinked at that one, and then smiled ... finally, somebody gets a joke. Anyway, the weeks and months of being crouched over a desk like a vulture on a perch, and likely my involuntary tendency to clench my jaw whenever I'm stressed, had lead to some facet joint or another to let go.

It's subsiding now after a week, but I realized I need to bleed off some of the stress in healthy ways. Exercise is one ... I've been walking at least an hour each day and found a local gym in Mongu from which to work out. Keeping a schedule is another; I'm trying hard not to work past 18:00 anymore. More rice and beans. And writing. Write, write, write. When I was in the village, I remember writing a few pages (in the form of letters home, work journals, or my own journal) that was somehow cathartic. This was further evidenced in the lone week (in two years) in which I ran short of candles ... I nearly flipped for lack of this catharsis (in an inspired bid to wear myself out, I dug basins for six hours and earned myself a case of heat exhaustion).

Blogging. Writing. Scooping out the accumulated crud and flinging it on the wall, so to speak. Here it is. And lots of shoulder clenches and neck lifts. And lifting. And sweating.