Teacher on Two Wheels

Above: Inside New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a good representation of the type of modern design I write about in this piece. I didn’t take any pictures of the scene described below for fear of being tackled, questioned, detained, and ultimately accused of being a terrorist.  Airports are no longer safe places to take pictures

Thursday   21/1/10  Gulu, Uganda

This is a piece I wrote in my journal about flying back to New Jersey, a visit home that had been two years in the making.  Landing in London’s Heathrow airport was…surreal.

I walked off the plane and followed the crowd.

The air in the walkway to the gate was oddly crisp.

Everywhere inside, glass.  And architecture infused with art.  Nowhere, trash.  Or dust.  Or faded shirts and muted colors.

We rounded a corner and entered it—the main lobby area of Terminal Five, the newest structural addition to London’s Heathrow airport.  A glowing cave of modernity.  Flat screen monitors hung in place of posters, advising travelers to get to gates early and to alert officials of some thing or another.  A line of X-ray check points, each manned with a crew of six or seven security officials, spanned the width of the main hall, more than a dozen stations in all.  Hundreds of travelers waited to pass through the beeping gates of the security stations, and each and every one of them looked awkward and slightly uncomfortable as they removed their shoes to prepare for inspection.  I couldn’t help but wonder if some of them felt strange standing shoeless on the cold, sterile floor.  Strange not because they were embarrassed by the smell of their feet or their hole-in-the-heel socks, but because at that instant, feeding their warm shoes into the flap-toothed mouth of the X-ray machine, it becomes clear to them that the world is no longer as safe as it was when they were children.  Now, death hides in the soles of shoes.

*****

As I waited my turn to be poked and prodded, I peered over the heads of the people around me, looking toward the center of the room.  There, like glistening pearls, sat two new cars under lights:  a Lamborghini and an Audi sports car.  Intended to inspire passerby to first salivate with yearning and then buy a raffle ticket for a car lottery, the cars both repulsed and fascinated me.  Such symbols of decadence seemed impossibly silly, considering the fact that mere hours earlier I had been in a country whose citizens live on dollars a day and spend their childhoods pot-bellied with malnutrition and intestinal worms.  Yet the cars also held my gaze, whispering siren songs to my eyes and ego. Want me.  Need me.  Lust for me, they cooed.  Turning away, however, would have amounted to a denial of the artistry in their engineering.  At once they were symbols of both everything right and wrong with man’s lust for innovation.

*****

My friend and I had some time to kill before our connecting flight was scheduled to depart.  Hungry, and because every food from every corner of Earth (with the exception of British food) can be found in Terminal Five, we entered a ‘Japanese diner’ overlooking the main lobby.  One salad, five dumplings, two bowls of ramen, and $60 US later, we left the restaurant and headed our separate ways.  The meal left me dazed:  I couldn’t help but think about how, for the same price, I could have had 30 lunches in Uganda.  Thirty.

I walked to my gate.  Along the way I passed duty free shops selling sunglasses, perfume, and portable DVD players, most of which cost more than it cost my organization to put a kid through school for an entire semester.  Well-dressed travelers, many bundled up for winter, whizzed by me in stylish peacoats and scarves, and as they walked, they fidgeted with smart phones and iPods.  I wanted to stop one of them and ask if they had ever visited Uganda, or any place, for that matter, that was far less shiny than the sleek metallic corriders of Terminal Five.

I suddenly felt my vision begin to wander and dart around.  Quick glances.  Quick.  Glances.  Toward the ceiling.  Then down toward the floor.  Anxious, I realized the sight of the people and stores around me was too much for my eyes to digest, too much for my brain and soul to digest.  It all seemed so brittle.  All veiled in the illusion of progress.  I let my eyes lose themselves in the geometric shapes of the floor and ceiling tiles.  I stopped walking—a stuck log in the surrounding river of shuffling travelers.  Pangs of nausea, like ripples running from a dripped stone in water, spread from my stomach up into my throat.

*****

I had never experienced such crippling culture shock before.  For a few minutes, taking deep breaths with my hand on my stomach, I feared my entire month-long visit home would be overshadowed by such distracting and troublesome feelings of disillusionment.  Everything seemed so frivolous.  So transparent and grotesquely revealing.

After a week or so at home in Jersey, and with the help of company from friends and family, thankfully, I felt more normal.

Times Square, NY = Modern

Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts = Modern