Actually, the weary traveler returned on Tuesday morning, but I've been too dang weary to do much of anything since then! No real problems with jet lag, I'm surprised and glad to say, even considering that I came home from the airport and crawled into bed at 11:00 a.m. and slept for four solid hours, which is the exact wrong thing to do for forestalling jet lag. But we were going at a terrific pace for the full ten days of the trip, with a godawfully long day of flying on either side, and I think my body basically just collapsed these last few days.
I'll start by saying that it was an amazing, fabulous trip. Unfortunately, one effect of my exhaustion and of returning home in general has been a wicked case of post-trip blues. I assume that this is a normal thing, right? At one point on Wednesday I suddenly "knew" with urgent conviction that none of the other faculty chaperones really liked me at all, and then yesterday I "knew" with equal conviction that I would never have an adventure ever, ever again in life and that all exciting fun was over for me forever. Fortunately, one advantage I've found in middle age is that I finally know myself well enough to recognize and take care of my inner toddler, who gets terribly fractious and unhappy when she is over-tired, so even as I was floundering around in despair, another part of me was patting myself gently on the back and saying, "There, there, honey, why don't we get you a snack, and then you can take a nap?" I'm glad to say that this morning I am feeling much more like myself, and I have hope that I will have regained emotional as well as physical equanimity by the time I go back to school on Monday. But thank goodness that we have these days at the end of spring break to recover! At St. Martyr's, they used to run international trips over spring break, but that break was only one week long, so folks pretty much came home from the airport and went back to school right away; I'm so grateful for our two-week spring break that allows for not only a longer trip but also some recovery time. One reason we have this extra long spring break is that we have so many international students, most of whom go home over break, and I have extra compassion for them now, since they get back to the States and to their dorms the day before classes begin; the faculty always get an email reminding us that they're both physically and emotionally fragile the first couple of days back, and that reminder will have extra resonance for me now.
The only real thing I've managed to accomplish since getting home is uploading photos to Facebook, so if you're friends with me there, you can see the photo album I've put together as well as some other photos that my fellow chaperones have posted. (And if we're not friends on FB, we can always make that happen.) I'll post some photos here as well, but I want to use this space to do some thinking about the trip. I kept a journal during the trip and have written a little more in it since I got back, and I know that I'll continue to think about the experience for days to come ... and, in other ways, for years to come. I think I finally understand why, for so many people, particular trips they've taken clearly become touchstones for the rest of their lives. A trip that my mom and I took to the U.K. back when I was 27 has functioned that way for me, certainly, and I think that this trip will be even more that way.
Let me start today with observations not about South Africa itself but about my experience of being me on this trip. As you know, I was super excited about the trip ... but I was also really scared. Because, that trip to the U.K. back when I was 27? Yeah, that was the last international travel I had done (other than trips to Canada, which I don't count in quite the same way, not in an American, colonialist, "Canada doesn't count" way but just because it doesn't require trans-ocean travel). My lack of travel experience has for years made me feel less cultured than other folks, particularly running around in academic circles where many people do a lot of traveling, and so I was looking forward to gaining a bit more "cultcha" but also afraid that my lack of travel experience was really going to show somehow. And maybe it did, but if so it didn't seem to matter so much. Three of the six chaperones had been on the last South Africa trip that FGS ran, another one had been to Africa before but not South Africa, and the other two of us hadn't been on the continent at all, but we were all having some new experiences and were learning together, and those particular worries that I'd had faded away pretty much immediately on the trip.
My bigger fear going in was that I simply wasn't going to be up to the trip. In my family, I'm the "delicate flower," the one who fades if the weather is too hot or the sun too bright, the one who gets overly tired, the one who feels faint, the one who gets weepy when tired and over-stimulated. Not that any of us is so very strong and gung-ho, actually, but the others seem more stoic in the face of physical discomfort than I am. And my fainting episode this month no doubt contributed to my sense of myself as somehow fragile, perhaps not up to the rough and tumble that other folks can handle. So I was seriously worried that I wasn't going to be able to keep up on the trip, that the sun and different food and bus rides and people around all the time were going to get to me and that there would be no holing up by myself for a few hours to bring relief. The day and a half of safari was my biggest source of anxiety, and I did get a little tremulous the night before in anticipation. And if it had been hotter, as it was when the last FGS group did it three years ago, or if I had forgotten to bring my own snacks, my fears might well have been realized; fortunately, we were blessed with good weather throughout the trip, and I was blessed with good health, and I made it through the experience -- and, indeed, all of the experiences on the trip -- with no problems. But there were a couple of kids who weren't feeling well on the day of the safari, and I felt so bad for them. (I'm really glad that I opted against taking malaria pills; I did so on the grounds that our time in Kruger National Park was the only period in which there was any exposure risk and that I'd rather soak myself in DEET for a day and a half than have an upset stomach from malarial pills [and those pills were in every case what caused the students to feel under the weather] ... and then, as it turned out, we never saw a mosquito in the park at all, and I didn't even bother wearing bug spray on the second day.) Anyway, my South African adventure has actually not changed this sense of myself as someone who easily gets faint and flustered; I think that's still true, and I was just lucky on this trip. And it's something that I will take into account and plan around for future trips; the stories that D tells about the conditions (heat, food, transportation, living quarters) of her trip to Liberia last year, and the stories that one of my fellow chaperones tells about her trip to Ghana a couple of years ago, make me feel faint and weepy just listening to them, and I am pretty sure that I wouldn't even attempt such trips (and in fact my friend wound up in a hospital in Ghana). I recognize that this inability to rough it will leave me out of some adventures, but there are still plenty of adventures left for me in which I take some risks with full knowledge of my own limitations, which is pretty much what I did in signing on for this South Africa trip.
And the fact that I'm thinking about further adventures is one of the best things to come out of this trip. I have traditionally thought of myself as a bad traveler -- the "delicate flower" business in conjunction with anxiety in the face of the unknown and a potential lack of flexibility -- but of course I hadn't tested that particular theory about myself in years. And even a seasoned traveler might quail in the face of chaperoning thirty-six 8th- through 12th-graders (with five other adults, of course)! But I actually did fine. We worked with a tour company, so there really were limited decisions that I needed to make, and two of the chaperones were clearly our leaders, so I mostly just had to step up and do what they asked, and our girls were so responsible that they just weren't a problem. (As one of my more seasoned colleagues said to me the first day in the airport as I started getting anxious about keeping track of my particular six students: "WN, they don't actually want to get lost, which is a huge head start." A much different attitude than I remember in some of my fellow students on the few high school trips that I took.) My fortitude was tested mostly in the airports, both going and coming, when I inadvertently wound up sort of "in charge" on three different occasions, and in every case I rose to the occasion; I'm still having nightmares, literally, about getting everyone through customs in Washington, when more than one Dulles (or maybe TSA) official did his best to make life really, really hard for us (including their attempting to send 8th-graders off on their own to a different terminal and then getting nasty with the chaperones when we intervened. WTF?!) ... but the important thing is that I managed it without getting weepy and distraught until afterward. D. had reassured me several times beforehand that the presence of students would mean that I was in teacher mode -- i.e., competent adult mode -- throughout the trip, and she was absolutely right.
So here's some of what I got out of this trip: A reassurance that I am indeed a capable grown-up (question: when am I going to stop needing that kind of reassurance? Wouldn't you think that, by age 44, I would have internalized this more?), a recognition that there are all kinds of adventures that I can have even if I'm not the halest and heartiest person, and a deep desire to have more of those adventures. Yes, I've finally gotten the travel bug at this relatively late stage of my life! (Not that I'm so old, but that most people get bitten by that bug much earlier in life.) Not that I have any money to pursue further travel, and I'm afraid that will be the case for at least the next few years until D. is out of school and making a salary and we've paid off the debt we've accrued in the last couple of years, but of course I now realize that there are ways of traveling without footing the bill. I'm confident that I proved myself as a chaperone on this trip, and I'm eager to see what other school trips might arise. There will probably be another South Africa trip in 2 or 3 years, and I'd like to go again, but I also want to throw my hat in the ring for other possibilities. Unfortunately, (1) I'm not eligible for any of the foreign language trips, what with my being limited to English, and (2) there's really no "ring" exactly to throw one's hat into. Most things at FGS are very open and transparent, but the international trips are not one of them, and most of the planning for them happens behind closed doors and is then announced as a fait accompli to the faculty as a whole. I'd like to see this pattern changed, but in the meantime I think that I'm now in the secret fraternity of successful chaperones who may get invited for future trips. And once D. and I are in a better financial situation, we can start saving for a big trip every few years, something she's been talking about for years but that I kind of resisted before now.
Okay, I know that none of this was specifically about South Africa at all, and I promise to write about the country itself next time around. In the meantime, a couple of photos from our Kruger National Park safari:

Pretty dang awesome.