THE COMPLICATED SIMPLE LIFE

Every time I come back to the U.S. I experience a relief being home, excitement toward exciting trips and joy spending time with those I am able to see. Not long after my stay, however, I will ultimately experience a moment in which my whole being realizes it’s time to go home, wherever my other home may be.

My first year away, after spending eight months overseas, it took three weeks for me to become “done with America” and ready to go back to Singapore. The second year it happened around the same time. This trip did take a little longer but only by a week. Sometime around December 13^th I was standing in the shower and my whole body perked up, my eyes became suddenly wide and my brain decided it was time to go. I didn’t necessarily want to go back to PNG but I was certainly ready to leave the country.

Thankfully I have had a lot of in-country travel – and I was in D.C. at the time – so I haven’t exactly stayed in one place. In fact, I landed in America on November 9 and have pretty much been on this kind of schedule: home two weeks, away two weeks, home a week, away a week, home two weeks, away another week….or something pretty close to that.

In each of the places Paul and I have visited, we encounter numerous questions regarding Paul’s job, my sanity, our living situation and just how long we plan to stay in PNG. Surprising nearly everyone at the table I time and again stated that I honestly feel blessed to live in PNG and that I am grateful to experience a whole new side of life.

“What is it like?” everyone asks.

“It’s completely the opposite of Singapore,” I state. I often refer to Singapore as my bubble: the country is full of people, full of culture, known for its food and shopping and neighborhoods abound. Health care is amazing, the city is clean, the government works hard to preserve natural areas, the economy is great, there is no corruption, unemployment levels are extremely low, crime rates are extremely low and the local people are socially neutral.

Port Moresby, by comparison, has a lot of people but the population doesn’t come close to Singapore’s population density; there are cultures but they are tribal and many share similar histories. While Singapore lacks natural resources, PNG has miles of untouched, undeveloped, fertile land for produce, livestock and mining for gold, copper and liquefied natural gas.

Paul and I have not found any local food other than Big Rooster fried chicken; many of the restaurants we visit cater to the western population. There are a couple shopping centers but they are not known for their popular stores, high quality or cleanliness.

Local health care is not recommended; even the local people who work for Paul’s company see a private physician and travel to Australia for major medical procedures including childbirth. On the one occasion I needed a doctor and an antibiotic, I risked my life and entered a local clinic. To my surprise, the clinic was better than third world. I thought the tiny Asian physician was cute, pleasant and quick. I told Paul I would definitely go back if I needed to see a doctor. Our other two options are to pay for a private membership clinic out of pocket or to hop on a plane to Australia.

The economy is poor, more than half the population is illiterate and most people do not have jobs. Many people strive to earn what they can by selling cokes and bottled water in coolers by the road while others take produce from random fields and bring them into the city to sell atop newspaper.

Trash is everywhere – in the roads, on the sidewalks, in the water. Before we left we heard that the government was leading an initiative to clean the area and we began to see trash bags filled and left on the side of the road. Those same bags were left by the roadside, open, for weeks. I think we left the city before the trash bags did.

We also heard that in order to conciliate the trash issue, the government would soon outlaw street vendors – those who sold produce at bus stops and on sidewalks. In order to solve a trash problem, the government is allegedly taking away likely the only form of income these people have.

Corruption is all over the city on every level and crime is as well. While gangs no longer control the city, vigilante justice is common and we have been victims of illegal fines.

The social culture is a little bipolar. Most of the people that we encounter are extremely welcoming and kind. In a few church services, everyone wanted to say hello and shake our hands - everyone. The stern or unwelcoming people, however, are absolutely unwelcoming. Luckily we haven’t met too many unwelcoming people.

Security guards probably outnumber actual policemen and I can only think of one place we have gone that did not have a security guard present. Most security guards look rough but they can be very kind; some even lecture me when I exude confidence. The guards outside my favorite coffee shop often tell me that I shouldn’t travel by myself and they tell me not to park across the street. On occasion they have guided me to park on the sidewalk so that I can be on the property. They really look out for me.

I have never seen separation of wealth like I see in PNG. Americans talk about wage gaps and upper class vs. the poverty line but I see it every day. I live it. It’s just unreal.

When I moved to PNG, I had two suitcases: one with clothing and one with supplies. We have made a few small purchases but, for the most part, we have lived out of three suitcases for nearly a year. Furniture, clothing, kitchen equipment, towels, shoes, decorative items have all been sitting in a warehouse in Singapore since the first week of April, making me realize we don’t actually need those items. I am ready to donate almost all of it without even looking at what we have. I feel like calling the warehouse and telling the staff to just take everything to the Salvation Army. Except the Kitchen Aid mixer. I am not giving up my Kitchen Aid mixer.

My appearance standards have lessened since living in PNG. I am now absolutely O.K. leaving the house (in PNG and in the U.S. on a few occasions) without makeup, without having my hair done, wearing workout clothes and sometimes sans shower. I just don’t seem to care a whole lot anymore. I hear this happens to old married couples but I thought I had to have a few kids first.

So many things in life just don’t matter anymore. Maybe a better way to phrase that is that a lot of things just don’t matter to me as much as they did a few years ago. I have lived with and I now live without. I am starting to really appreciate the simple life.  

HOUSE HUNTING

Does your brain ever get hooked on something and then that one thought consumes your entire being, even if the thought will never, ever come true? I feel like I make fun of Paul a lot for the short-term things he pours his entire being into (buying a Jeep Wrangler, buying a house in the middle of nowhere and going off the grid, moving out of America), but here I am doing the exact same thing.

Paul and I like to play a game when we travel. It’s called, “Could We Realistically Live Here?” The first time Paul played the game, to my knowledge, was two years ago when we each got stuck in Dubai on our separate flights home for Christmas. While I immersed myself in the local culture, riding dingy water boats, cruising over giant sand dunes and riding a camel before eating dinner on a pillow while a belly dancer shook every part of her as she danced, Paul decided to go to the grocery store and check gas prices. He even went to a furniture store to find out how much the required pieces would cost if we ever moved to Dubai.

When we were in Bangkok in October, I found myself playing the game. I had a few days in the city before Paul joined me and, when I saw him I declared that we could absolutely live in Bangkok, if we learned to speak Thai. I had already learned to say “thank you very much,” which is a great start but is also the extent of my knowledge. Paul laughed at me when I told him my revelation, first because he, too, had been thinking Bangkok was expat livable, and, second, because, as he so eloquently stated it, “We live in Papua New Guinea. Any place is livable.”

So, now that we are back in the U.S. on an incredibly long holiday, we have the U.S. bug. It happens quite often and our minds start to wander. We have spent time in Northeast Ohio with our families, a week in New Jersey where I found a couple potential houses near the Short Hills Mall, a week in Vermont where I picked out a cute town called Woodstock where we could have a holiday home. And then there’s our first house on Nantucket and the one in Maine on the banks of the Atlantic. Right.

Among the rest of our travels, we spent a week in Columbus, Ohio, downtown in the hotel where nearly five years ago our wedding reception was held. We were two to three minutes from Paul’s favorite neighborhood, German Village, which was settled in the early 1800s and established as the old south end in 1814.

The houses are mostly brick, mostly compact and mostly literally right next to each other. The streets throughout most of the neighborhood remain brick and in the wintertime the whole area is simply magical.

We have several favorite shops we like to visit, including Mohawk Restaurant, Katzinger’s Deli, the German Village Coffee Shop and the Book Loft with the Cup O Joe next door.

Our first full day in Columbus, Paul had already found a German Village house for sale and he retold his encounter attempting to find the sale price via a QR code printed on the sign that Paul had to reach through the gate to photograph only to find that the website was under construction.

One morning after a fresh snow, we again found ourselves house hunting in German Village.

After viewing an afternoon movie, we found ourselves driving around Upper Arlington, house hunting in the expensive suburban neighborhood with giant houses and grand driveways.

Watching hours upon hours upon hours of HGTV shows about house hunting and renovating, I am fantasizing about buying a house. I have actually started documenting items on a wish list Paul and I created for the dream house that we will likely never build.

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, we started thinking about cities on the west coast and San Francisco popped up. We have no actual plans to move to San Francisco but, for some reason, I found myself on HGTV’s website, San Francisco’s official website and Google Maps scoping out neighborhoods and – get this – actual available rental listings. What the heck is wrong with me?

After more than half an hour, I had to consciously tell myself: we are not actually moving. Stop looking at these web pages. Stop saving the potential housing options. We are not moving!!

Paul went back to PNG last week and I moved my flight to give me a couple extra weeks here in the first world. He’s still talking about moving apartments but I just don’t see that happening. I have come to accept our two-room, 700-sf funny apartment and all of its quirks.

Funny enough, I am actually looking forward to going back. What?! What did she just say?

Yeah, I think I just crave normalcy and, over the last six months, PNG has become my new normal. I look forward to being with my husband who is now a world away. I look forward to having a routine that includes a daily workout and being able to cook my own food. I kind of look forward to not looking pretty nearly every day, digressing back into no-makeup days and daytime outfits appropriate for a 2 a.m. Walmart visit. I look forward to seeing my housekeeper, Susie. I also look forward to doing a little more traveling. Apparently I haven't done enough.

MY BEST FRIEND’S BABY

Katie had a baby. She is my first really good, long-time friend to be pregnant and deliver. Sure I have friends who have had babies – one friend and two family members were pregnant and delivered but I was not around for either big bellies or the births; a few friends I met while they were pregnant – but it’s different when the pregnant lady is my best friend of more than a decade and she is my age.

Having a pregnant friend makes my mind wander. I have a million questions, most of them admittedly stupid, and, thankfully, Katie answers every one, most of the time laughing.

The birth process was different than I had expected. Katie did not deliver the old-fashioned way, so her mom and I sat in the waiting room until well after the surgery. I was expecting more people to be around, and I was expecting to be able to see her sooner than we did. Instead, Katie’s mom and I kept each other company and watched a couple episodes of Downton Abbey until she received the invitation to head upstairs.

Yesterday I felt in the way and a bit awkward because though I am nearly family, I am not family, so part of me wondered if I really should have been there. Katie’s husband later told me that subtlety is not his strong point so if he didn’t say, “Get out,” I should just assume I was in the clear. “Why do you keep asking if it’s OK?” he inquired last night. “Because I was instructed to do so,” I responded, “just in case my visit comes at an inconvenient moment.” "Just come in."

Katie was amazing. People around me leading up to my wedding told me that I was the calmest bride they had ever seen. When my wedding planner was hours late and had not yet shown up with the flowers 10 minutes prior to go time, I looked at my bridesmaids and said, “If she’s not here in five minutes, I will just walk down the aisle without flowers.” She showed up in five minutes but that’s another story.

If I was calm then, Katie was completely placid in the hours leading up to her delivery. At her house 6.5 hours before she was to head to the hospital, she was eating a giant mug filled with organic mac and cheese, giving me a hug and thinking about sleeping like it was any other Saturday night. But it wasn’t a Saturday night. It was Tuesday night and she was supposed to be having a baby in the morning.

I sat on the couch, Van to my left on his phone, Katie to my right on her phone and Katie’s mom in a chair on her own phone. “Am I really the only one who is incredibly excited right now?!” I exclaimed. They all looked at me like I was a bit delusional. Apparently I was.

A few hours after the delivery, I got to see little Colton and Katie, just as calm as the evening before, suggested I hold him. I was pretty much terrified. He was the first newborn I may have encountered since my own brother’s birth 29 years ago. I was 2. I don’t think I was trusted to hold him at that time. Why was I trusted now?

I was nervous but Katie and her mom insisted that I would be fine. And I was. Longer than we all expected, Colton’s skinny body measured more than 20 inches (more than 51 cm). I looked at him, sleeping and snorting, not yet keen on opening his eyes, and I just sat there and thought about the wonder behind what had just happened. “It’s so weird to think that he didn’t exist four hours ago,” I said.

All three of them immediately bantered: “He existed!”

“Well, I know he existed, but he wasn’t here – out here.” Amazing.

Then my brain went on a roller coaster ride, trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to go through this whole process. To be completely honest, sometimes I want a kid and sometimes I just don’t, for a million different reasons.

In the waiting area I saw kids running around and not listening to their parents. No, I’m good, I thought. Later a couple came through the doors. The wife bolted through the crowd and pushed through an older couple, wincing and holding her back with one hand. She was clearly in labor. Her husband casually stood in line, three people deep, as the line continued to form behind him. He stood there, patiently, with a smile on his face as he chatted with another person.

“Do you want to go ahead?” a gentleman asked. “No,” the husband responded. “It’s O.K.”

Cut to the wife on the couch breathing through the pain. Katie’s mom and I kept looking over at her, offering support and trying to get someone’s attention. We even looked over at the husband and tried to insist that he move to the front of the line.

“Uh,” the gentleman murmured. “I think you’d better go ahead.”

At that the husband casually moved to the desk and quietly inquired about the delivery area. The wife yelled from the couch, “I called ahead!” The next thing we knew, she was on her way to the desk, answering all the questions as she used the counter to support her while she bent over during a contraction.

Poor girl, I thought to myself. A few minutes later, she and her husband were directed to the delivery area. As I watched her turn the corner, bracing for another contraction, I felt something inside me perk up and say, “I want to be her.”

WHAT!? Where did that come from?!

I sent Paul a message. “Being here is not healthy.”

He laughed. At least he typed a little “lol.”

Being with Katie and her family in the recovery room, my mind went back and forth. I became anxious thinking about them going home in a couple days to an empty house where only the four of them will be. And then they are stuck with this kid for the rest of his life.

But then I think about his actual birth and what that must have been like for Katie and Van to witness, and how this little person is a product of the two of them, a new life. And then I want one.

And then I think about how much money a child costs and how much more stuff needs to go with the kid and then how life has now changed for them. And then I might not want one.

And now, on day two, I am completely in love with the idea. Paul is toast. In all fairness, I did warn him days ago after his first flight on his long journey back to PNG. “Once I hold him, you’re done,” I said. “Yeah. I know,” he replied.