Do you know that first shock of cold ocean water rushing over your feet? You feel it shudder through your entire self before it touches your toe and reverberates, pushing up and out; up and out.

I like to turn back and watch the waves wash away my footprints; depressions in the sand smoothed away without any effort; no sign to prove I walked this beach to stand where I stand; facing this ocean so huge.

—

I have stepped into the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, felt the water twist into my hair and wring out of my clothes. There can be no difference in the water; but yet, I stand in it and feel it in my bones. Like the coasts it is named for, the water must have its own depths of personality.

Scientists well-versed in oceans and their particular nuances will, no doubt, tell me that I’m mistaken; that my flights of fantasy are indicative of a Literature degree and no degree of substance… but I feel the electricity in my toes spread through my soul; and every toe-dip is charged differently.

—

Last Nite blares on in the background; it’s drizzling again and you can hear it pick up as the wind begins to swirl it around and throw little bits of spit at you. Before you know it; the rain is a sheet and the palm trees are bowing in the face of the wind’s wrath.

Water drips on my knee.

—

As in guesthouses and hostels filled with carefree- and usually young- travellers, the breakfast ‘how’s it?’s turn into an evening of drinking games and ‘never have I ever..’.

Someone, at some point, will turn to me and say, ‘You don’t sound Indian at all’

‘No?’

‘No, you sound American’.

Others ask where in the UK you’re from and then laugh when corrected- ‘do you get asked that a lot?’.

At this point; my reaction is a smile and a ‘hmmm’.

Either way, you learn something surprising- about accents; the inflections people pick up, or the things they’ve done.  Never have I ever.

—

Backpacker-y spaces are always great when they have excellent managers who are constantly teasing, laughing, starting a party…

The lovely manager introduced himself in his thick Basque Country accent.

‘We’ve e-mailed!’ I tell him, ‘I’m Rishita’.

‘!!!’ is an approximation of his expression.

‘I thought you were Japanese!’

‘Your name is Japanese!’, he protests as I begin to guffaw.

He calls me Japanese girl and we crack jokes of tsunamis; harakiri; and make generally culturally-inappropriate comments.

—

We met a French bloke from Cannes who embodied every French Lothario stereotype imaginable.

An upended hairband planted haphazardly on my hair made me his princess, and we somehow devolved into a story of porno-princesses and conversations that have no space in a restaurant filled with 6 year olds.

Without any irony; he told us in the middle of ‘Never have I ever’..

‘Never have I ever had sex….. the French always make love’.

—

Frenchie, a lovely young English girl and I traded banter all evening.

As we walked back, navigating the pitch-black beach by the light of my phone app; I jumped down an embankment, accidentally turning off the flashlight.

He grabs me as a I begin to apologise.

‘Mean Indian Princess picking on the poor Frenchman’, he says.

I laugh. One second a Japanese girl and in another, an Indian Princess.

—

I have learnt to part with my books now. Books I devour in a few hours as I bathe in the [now hiding] sun. Toasting, browning, turning ever so often.

Leaving books behind to start a mini English-language library in a space dominated by German and Norwegian.

The English manager grabs every proffered text with a mixture of relief-gratitude.

My fingers catch a little as I force myself to hand it over.

—

I scribble postcards and sometimes I forget to post them from the city i buy them in. I find them nestled in the book I carry through countries but never actually want to read… they’re too serious/dark/heavy no matter how good they might be.

They tumble out in countries long after I’ve left or they hide until I’m back in Manila, showing themselves much too late and much too stampless for me to appreciate it anymore.

—

The candles flicker and mosquitoes hover; I try not to stare too long at a chest tattoo on  nicely-browned man as he leans against the bar.

I’m never quite sure what my eyes betray or what they’re misconstrued as.

I’m never quite sure of anything anymore. Not even my silences.

—

When you hang out by yourself on your solo holiday; you learn a fair bit about your own silences.

There are different kinds of silences, and lately; I feel as though mine aren’t quite as full of quiet as they ought to be.

I wonder what others perceive of my silences- do they see it when it is a retreat into myself or when it is a silence of remonstration?

I wonder.

Perhaps I am the only one who feels these silence as full of unsaid words, words that stick in my throat instead of breathing this air…

Perhaps, to everyone else, it is just another silent girl in the corner. Nothing more, nothing less.

—

I can hear my own voice in my head and I tune myself out; certain that the words are superfluous and really quite unnecessary to say out loud. It isn’t needed to speak all the time, or to hear yourself all the time. Sometimes, silence is even for the way your brain never shuts up.

—

I wonder if I sometimes find offence where none is intended, take things personally when it is not about me.

Sometimes, silence isn’t the best strategy- sometimes I should really just ask.

Find the words, and ask.

—

It isn’t just about offence either. I should learn to ask. For phone numbers or if people are free for drinks or a chat or time.. or just begin to pose a question before assuming that the ‘No’ is a given.

I should learn to not be quite so afraid of a ‘No’.

—

Everyone told me she’d get in my blood.

But, this is one tune I don’t mind listening to in the Holiday Season.

Happy holidays, everyone. I hope you’re all having a wonderful time.

p.s. I also kindofmaybe made you a video.

I always find it interesting then, to talk to other travellers in hostels and hotels, observe them and the ways in which they interact and chafe and rub up against personalities and tempers. The way they take up spaces in common areas, the way they speak to people around them, or to each other.

—

My toes are covered in sand, there’s Bob Marley on the radio, pancakes for breakfast, and a good book by my side. A rather loud American woman is pontificating on the finer points of the Arabic Language and Arabic Culture.

I am hard pressed not to roll my eyes at the inaccuracies.

It’s a familiar scene. I often find myself in spaces with other ‘travellers’ or ‘expats’ who wax on about cultures, languages, spaces; comparing and contrasting, holding it up and finding it wanting. I wonder if I do that too- compare two completely divergent cultures and find one wanting. Find a culture wanting (ridiculously)- rather than realising that the one wanting is me.

—

Swopping stories with the people sharing your table follows a simple arc of ‘Hi, how’s it going? Up to much today?’ before it devolves into an expected travel history of where from and where to.

A simple arc, but nonetheless interesting and exciting to follow. Familiar cities and old haunts, countries you dream of and yearn for, tips and must-dos carelessly dropped into conversations as tea is poured and fruit is devoured.

—

I grabbed a t-shirt from the depths of my backpack, not bothering to read it; I meander over to the bar. The bar keep reads it, loud and clear, ‘The Right to Live, the Right to Safe Abortion’. He raises an eyebrow, ‘Abortion is a crime’.

I make sure to check my t-shirts for unthinkingly offending peoples’ sensibilities.

I grapple with what that means: are my beliefs on holiday too, or is it OK that I’m too tired to deal with this on my holiday? Or am I selling out, betraying the things I believe in by not engaging in a dialogue?

I don’t know. But I did put away my ‘Sex Work is Work’ t-shirt.

—

My sunglasses, a grab from a UNFPA campaign, read ‘CONDOMIZE!’ on one particularly bright leg.

I sit at the bar, sipping my Bitter Lemon, and one of the friendly staff members reads it out and asks, ‘Condomize? What does that mean?’.

‘It means that we should always practice safe sex- use condoms to protect ourselves and our partners’.

‘I don’t know how to do that. I’d like to learn’.

I’m unsure if offering to show him sounds like a come on, or if it sounds patronising… but I err on the side of my principles and offer to do a demo if he’d like.

He giggles and nods.

—

I walked down through the village yesterday- a tiny village built on sand and a stone’s throw from the beach; supported by (and hidden behind) the huge, slightly grandiose hotels on the beachfront. Half of them weren’t finished yet, the stones a bit bare without the roof or thatched in places where the stones left gaping holes.

I didn’t want to take a photo and end up capturing lives I shouldn’t be privy to.

A woman sang her baby to sleep in the courtyard, her house in darkness as the sun set.

We stopped by the street vendor grilling pieces of chicken. Seeing by the glow of a lamp, we devoured our chappati wrapped chicken and licked our fingers clean. I could hear the waves crashing in the distance.

A child poured water over my hands so I could wash them clean of chicken-chappati-seaair.

I was reminded of India.

—

I woke up to the sound of thunder.

Sitting at the breakfast bar with the rain pouring down around me; lighting in the sky, I felt like the world was ending.

It was OK that I was in a sarong with sand in my hair.

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But here we are, years of heterosexual activity later, I’m unsure of my previously held convictions about my own sexual preferences.

I have never before been attracted to a woman. I met someone fabulous, funny, clever, charming- all the Fs and Cs I have always liked in people; with all the sexual attraction I’ve always felt for boys…all bundled up into someone amazing. Someone female.

As with most 20-somethings these days, I too have thrown around terms like ‘girl crush’, or remarked upon an actress/musician/sportswoman who was hot/awesome enough for me to want to ‘hit that’ [followed by the invariable and redundant 'hit it hard'].

I’ve never actually been confronted by the desire to do so. Not until quite recently, anyway.

I’ve always held that sexuality is fluid- that to pigeon-hole oneself is silly. I now have to sit here and examine my own beliefs in connection to myself rather than as an abstract construct that I can throw around at work or in the ‘right’ circles.

A few months ago, a fellow activist overhead a throwaway remark I made, ‘Oh, he’s not my type’; and countered, ‘There’s no such things as a type‘.

I’d said then [and will continue to] that yes, yes; there are ‘types’ of people you’re attracted to. It’s simple- either you are attracted to them, or you’re not.

Again, I have to live up to the words I’ve been mouthing- I am attracted to her [and that is unmistakeable. The sweaty hands, the giddy smiles, the secret giggling at random reminders...].

It isn’t that I’m going to do anything about it or that I will ever have the opportunity to. It is that something that I assumed to be core to my identity no longer seems to be so, and I must grapple with the inevitable ramifications.

I am asking myself what it all means, whether it is just that she is so unbelievably special that she’s an exception; or whether this is a sign of something larger? They’re important questions to ask myself, questions I can’t assume to know the answer to; but ones I must really test myself on.

And so I ponder these things as I walk through one African airport after another, smiling at charming; handsome men and feeling that familiar tug of harmless attraction. And a fresh wave of doubt, questioning, and uncertainty comes to visit… best summed up in a simple, ‘what?’.

I’m in Addis Ababa, attending the largest regional conference on HIV/AIDS in the world (second in number of attendees only to the global International AIDS Conference)- ICASA2011. If you follow my @rishie_ account, you’ll have seen me flooding your timeline with tweets from sessions and other inane, but related, commentary.

Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS; Knight Commander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe; and now of aids-free world, spoke at yesterday’s plenary session and my heart is still breaking; my lower lip is still a little wobbly; and I am still filled with an overwhelming sense of despair, dismay, and bafflement.

I’m not sure that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is something that makes the news, or is something that people who aren’t impacted by HIV/AIDS know about.. but, it’s a really; really; really big deal. Governments made a commitment to fund initiatives and to scale-up responses to HIV/AIDS. And now, they’ve cancelled an entire round of funding until 2014 because governments did not fulfill their promises. They have, in effect, condemned hundreds of thousands of people to death.

The anger, fear, heartbreak is hard to escape here. People are upset, they’re scared, they’re angry. And who can blame them? We have been failed by our leaders, failed on a colossal level; and how are we to hold them accountable when it feels as though they, quite simply, do not care?

Stephen Lewis’ speech left many members of the audience wiping away tears surreptitiously, nodding emphatically, and plain breaking into applause every few minutes. My colleague, an African, remarked, ‘It makes me sad that we needed someone else to speak for us. Where are our African leaders? Why didn’t any of them ask these questions?’. And, I’ll be honest, it made me a unbearably sad- not because African leaders weren’t asking these questions; making these comments; or prioritising their people, but because it seems as though nobody is. Nobody in power is prioritising peoples’ lives, their health, or their rights. Nobody.

Lewis’ anger and frustration has mirrored so much of my own annoyance:

I’m thrilled at the creation of UN Women, and the possibility, once they join as a formal co-sponsor of UNAIDS, that the focus on women will be given a new lease on life. But I can’t dislodge from my mind the experience of my years in the role as Envoy, and subsequently working with AIDS-Free World, when it became clear that in every aspect of the pandemic women were rendered subordinate. Gender inequality doomed their lives. Sexual violence fed and feeds the virus. The entire survival of communities and families was placed on their shoulders. Men were the social determinants of women’s health, and men simply didn’t care. As we come to this thrilling moment of potential progress, I can’t avoid the spectral faces of stigma, discrimination, isolation, and pain, and they are the faces of women. That doesn’t mean that women aren’t the core of courage and strength in this pandemic; it simply means that they have to struggle valiantly to challenge the phalanx of male privilege, of male hegemony. Just a few days ago, coincident with World AIDS Day, the Harvard School of Public Health held a symposium called AIDS@30 to assess the past and plot the future. The symposium had a Global Advisory Council of nineteen eminent experts on the pandemic: 17 men and 2 women. It is ever thus.  It’s the rare woman indeed who doesn’t ultimately report to a man in the world of HIV, or who can command, ever-so-rarely, the place and presence that legions of men command automatically.

He perfectly reflected my own anger, disbelief, shock, and as always, disappointment, with the world:

I’m thrilled with the turnaround in South Africa. The dramatic roll-out of treatment is nothing short of miraculous. But I remember all those years of denialism, and not a single voice at the most senior levels of the United Nations—Under-Secretaries-General, the Secretary-General himself. Not one of them said publicly to Thabo Mbeki, “You’re killing your people”. Oh, to be sure, it was said in private by everyone. They took Thabo Mbeki aside and begged him to reverse course. He didn’t budge an inch. Around him, in every community in South Africa, and in communities throughout a continent heavily influenced by South Africa, were the killing fields of AIDS. As we come to this thrilling moment of progress, I can’t forget the millions who died on Thabo Mbeki’s watch, while those who should have confronted him before the eyes of the world stood mute.

He was able to articulate the thoughts of thousands of advocates who work with these numbers on a daily basis, doctors who have to choose who to put on ARVs because the medicines are in short supply, people who have to beg donors for a little bit more money, or turn away people because we just don’t have the resources to help.

So if you sense a certain impatience in me, you’re right. We don’t have another day to lose. Peter Piot did the arithmetic yesterday … 1,350,000 put on treatment in 2010; 2,700,000 new infections, exactly double the number in treatment in the same year. It works out to 7,397 new infections every day. And it’s 2011, for God’s sake. It’s appalling that such numbers continue to haunt us; it’s heart-breaking beyond endurance to contemplate further exponential agony. We cannot delay another minute in putting the ‘prevention combination’ to work.

And I think, judging from the mood in the corridors, that’s what seizes this conference. But right at the moment when we know, irrefutably, that we can defeat this pandemic, we’re sucker-punched at the Global Fund.

What’s a sucker punch? It’s when a boxer in the ring gets a punch below the belt that he doesn’t see coming. No one expected a complete cancellation of Round Eleven, with new money unavailable for implementation until 2014.

It’s just the latest blow in a long list of betrayals on the part of the donor countries, in this instance the Europeans in particular. I’ve heard from several people that the politics of the Global Fund meeting in Accra two weeks ago, when the decision was made, were not just complicated, but amounted to miserable internecine warfare. Certain governments on the Board of the Global Fund simply discredited themselves. They give a soiled name to the principle of international solidarity. The Chair of the Board, in a remarkably convoluted effort, tried to explain things in a press release. He would have done far better to remain silent.

The decision on the part of the donor countries is unforgiveable. In a speech a few days ago, I addressed the Global Fund predicament by talking of the moral implications of a decision that you know will result in death … death on the African continent.

I won’t copy and paste the rest of his speech (despite the contentious numbers on whether Africa gets less money than it pours out), but it speaks to me on so many levels and it sucker-punched me in the best way- in the way that I never saw it coming; I never expected it; but it smashed into me in a way that made me explode. I can’t ‘this!’ his speech enough. I recommend you read it.

And that was all just one journey to get to Cape Town.

By the time the end of the year rolls around, I will have hit 12 countries this year.

That’s at least 10 postcards I’ve sent myself, addressed to Lisa.

‘I wish you were here. With love, from Africa’.

As with all excellent works of Literature, this ’05 commencement address to Kenyon College graduates means different things to me through different phases of my life, certain paragraphs resonating more now than at other times; but always, always relevant to my life.

I’ve been battling extreme levels of exhaustion this past week. 2011 has been a tough year and it’s catching up with me, making it difficult for me to be productive or responsive to things. I’m constantly irritable and my patience has disappeared. I was Skyping with a friend last night and I remember thinking [unkindly] that I just couldn’t be arsed dealing with his pseudo-issues because I was too tired, because I had no energy left, because I didn’t think his issues were valid.

I woke up thinking about DFW’s words and certain things stood out for me this time; making me aware of how selfish I was being, so self-centered, how much I functioned on my ‘default setting’.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

While I’ve always thought of myself as sensitive to other peoples’ emotions and needs, I’ve never fully considered how I’ve always approached them from one particular centre: me. I often say and sometimes convince myself, ‘it isn’t about me’; it still comes from the fact that even whilst negating an experience, I am at the centre of it.

And as DFW has somehow always managed to do, [and again, I make this about myself] this particular section has reminded me how I’ve felt the past few months, how everything has been a chore, and a constant assault on my sense of space; self; and being:

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

[...]

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

[...]

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

I have felt this so keenly, resented it on such a deep level that I have walked around the stupid supermarket with such a strong sense of rage that it has exhausted me more than anything else. It’s toxic to be that way, to walk around with such pointless and unwarranted indignance because things are inconveniencing me, because I’m unhappy or in a hurry or tired. And DFW’s right in that I can make it easier on myself [!] and at least attempt to stop looking at the world from my jaded, me-tinted glasses:

It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

And he’s right. I do get to try and pick how I view things, whether I am kinder to the people around me, or whether I stop seeing things as ‘owed’ to me or as though I automatically ‘deserve’ something for merely being me. It’s just down to me [!] on how much I value the world around me more than myself, or really meaning what ‘it isn’t about me’ means.

I thought of that for some reason as I hovered between sleep and barely awake.

I’ve felt it all day.

It’s a familiar panic, my stomach in turmoil, and my mind scattered. I am incoherent and disjointed. I just can’t pinpoint why.

I’m in a strange mood, uncomfortable with myself and with everything around me, I feel as though I must scrub myself from my skin. I don’t know what it is, I just know I don’t like it.

I just want to run. Leave without explanation, without reasons and justifications, without any regrets. I want to leave you behind, erase you from my world, from who I am. I don’t want to know you anymore.

And so I’ve hidden it all away, put away all the posts and the stories. They’re all private now. No trespassing.

In all the amazing, wonderful, strong women that I am surrounded by, I wonder if I sometimes disappear. If sometimes, my voice is lost. And like Simon in The Misfits, if I too have the power of invisibility.

Sometimes I blend into the wallpaper and entire conversations take place with me in an awkward centre. An awkward that only I seem to feel. A muttered ‘Excuse me please’ unacknowledged, the words continuing without a pause.

In the middle of explaining something, people will interrupt and a new story shall begin and grow and explode into gales of laughter.

I wonder sometimes, if it isn’t better to stay quiet.

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