#3: Boredom, Silence, and the Space In Between

Jan 17th. 9 a.m. GMT+3. Lake Point Villa Hotel, Entebbe, Uganda.

I am sitting at a table waiting for my driver to arrive. I hope he can find me. I hope he shows up at all. His name is Patrick, apparently.

I am bored.

Over the past few months, I have become very good at avoiding sitting alone with my thoughts. This was not particularly difficult, thanks to a great modern invention called the internet. In any lull of my American life, I would turn on Netflix, sometimes in the background, sometimes as my sole focus, and try very hard not to fixate on my own life. If there was a moment of quiet, I filled it.

Now there is nothing to fill it with.

No internet. No working phone. I am waiting for someone I have never met to pick me up and drive me for more than four hours, pothole-dependent, through a country I do not yet understand. I have no way to contact 999, the emergency number in Uganda and the equivalent of 911 in the United States, if something were to go wrong. I have intentionally placed myself in a situation where I must sit still.

I do not love this.

I would very much like to zone out and watch Gilmore Girls on repeat until I physically import myself into the world of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Lorelai Gilmore’s problems feel easier to manage than my own. Her life has a rhythm I understand. Mine never seems to have the same level of entertainment as the characters in movies or TV. Not shocking, but still disappointing.

Instead, I am sitting here. Looking at palm trees. Looking at flowers. Journaling and writing poetry. Trying to read, but being forced to stop because of cognitive dissonance. Why would I download The Great Gatsby onto my kindle, whose characters could not be further from life in rural Uganda? That was such a silly choice, when all I can think to do right now is try to adjust to my new life here.

I am forced to exist inside my own head, with no distractions and no escape hatches. I am forced to live my own life.

Ugh. What a drag.

What do I feel right now? Mostly boredom. My brain feels understimulated and I hate it. I feel like I am wasting time. I feel like my travel, my schedule, and my life are completely out of my hands. And they are. There is nothing for me to do except wait until the powers that be can get me to Kakumiiro. I did pretty well to get to the hotel in the first place. I was not expecting there to be no internet in the entire country when I landed. This meant that I could not transfer money between bank accounts, so I could not withdraw cash. This meant that I could not contact Henry. This meant that I had to find a money exchange kiosk, a driver, a hotel, and a local phone to contact the hospital. And there was no internet. However, I got it all done within 2 hours and fell asleep sometime between 1 and 2 am. (Time is completely irrelevant to me after that flight path.) When there is stuff that HAS to be figured out, I am actually pretty good at getting it done.

My hotel in Entebbe

But I am not good at waiting.

In the United States, boredom felt like a personal failure. If I was bored, it meant I wasn’t doing enough, optimizing enough, multitasking enough. There was always something else I should be doing. Here, boredom feels imposed. Unavoidable. There is no way around it.

The internet, when it works, keeps me from fully living my own life. It cushions me from discomfort. It smooths over awkward silences and dull moments. It prevents me from feeling the full weight of my own thoughts. But it also keeps me from fully experiencing the highs and lows of whatever this new existence in Uganda is going to be.

That does not mean I am suddenly grateful for the injustice of it all. I am still annoyed. I still cannot get over the fact that a switch can be flipped and entire populations can be cut off from communication. I still want to text my loved ones and tell them that I am alive and not dead in a ditch somewhere.

I will explain why the internet is gone later. That explanation deserves its own space, and more care than I can give it while sitting here waiting. For now, all that matters is the result: quiet.

I hate this painful silence.

And I am bored. So I am writing.

I do not have a particularly noble reason for this. I am writing because I do not want to feel purposeless. And that is exactly how I feel right now. There is nothing I can do. I cannot move forward. I cannot fix anything. I can only stand still.

I have spent years training myself to believe that stillness is something to escape. That productivity is virtue. That motion equals meaning. Sitting here, unable to do anything useful, feels like a personal affront to that belief. I should really ask Todd for that Buddhist book back, because I feel deeply incapable of mindfulness right now.

Right now, I am just sitting. Waiting. Breathing. Watching the morning stretch on longer than I expect it to.

Maybe this is the point. Maybe learning to be comfortable in the waiting is the real goal of this experience.

Patrick will arrive eventually. Or he won’t. Either way, the minutes will keep passing. The palm trees will stay where they are. And I will still be here, forced to occupy my own mind without distraction.

For now, I’ll just have to deal. Oy with the poodles already.

My in my first hotel room on the continent of Africa :) Surprisingly, I slept great.