Have you ever read anything – a book, an article, a blog post – by someone in between those two situations? That’s kind of how I feel. My family lived in Uganda for my first year and a half, which left me with very few direct memories (I do have about four or five) but it still left me with something. Perhaps all the African stuff, and family films, that we had at home for the next few years of my childhood was part of what.

When I visited Kenya as an adult, it was both the most foreign place I’d ever been, and familiarly nostalgic in ways I have a hard time describing. Things that seemed intellectually very strange were sometimes intuitively sensible; landscapes and smells and mannerisms were new to me but clicked. It was unsettling, exciting, and calming at the same time.