Moving all over the place

With Labour Day fast approaching, I’m sure many of us are wondering where our summers went. I know exactly where mine has been spent: all over the place.

This has been my family’s nomadic summer, and here’s how it started: with the help of very friendly neighbors in Orem, Utah, we packed all of our belongings into a 17-foot moving truck and headed eastward, me driving that gigantic thing while my wife and son followed in our car. We made it over the Rockies and onto the Great Plains, where we spent a week with my parents in Kansas. There, we unpacked most everything we owned into a smallish storage unit and turned in the moving truck – even though Kansas wasn’t the end of the line.

Leaving our 12-year-old cat with my parents, we packed up our little car as best we could and continued due east. We rolled across eight states before arriving in Baltimore, Maryland, where we’d be spending the next three and a half weeks for my wife to finish her Masters degree. And, after that, it got even more complicated: my wife and son headed south while I flew west. During a 15-hour stretch back in Kansas that included unloading the storage unit, loading the truck, reuniting with the cat and briefly visiting my parents, I was on the road yet again — on my way to Atlanta, Georgia to move into a house where we’d never been before.

That’s another thing about our nomadic summer: we sublet a row house in Baltimore and this bungalow in Atlanta sight unseen, except for a few pictures that those respective landladies sent us. We had no time to travel to either city beforehand, so we just had to hope that the photographs were fairly accurate when we walked through the door (they were).

This summer felt all kinds of crazy, but of course there was a goal to it all: we moved here because of a school for our son’s special needs. I am relieved that we were able to pull it off because, at some points along the way, I honestly didn’t know if we could. But we had three things working for us this summer: choice, opportunity and planning.

And that’s more than millions around the world have going for them.

Over the course of this nomadic summer, I’ve often thought about families — and entire communities — who’ve had to move under much more difficult circumstances, often at a moment’s notice. And I realize, as challenging as my family’s move might have been, there were two very important and fortunate facts:

1. Despite not knowing exactly what it would be like, I did know the precise address where we were going.
2. I had just about everything we owned in the back of those trucks — everything we needed to remake a home.

That’s very different than the reality faced by more than five million flood-displaced people in Pakistan, most of whom have no idea of when they’ll be able to return to their villages —or what they’ll find when they return.

It’s very different than what happened five years ago to thousands of families along the U.S. Gulf Coast as Hurricane Katrina neared.

It’s very different from what happened to Majok, a young Sudanese man who I sat next to on my plane flight yesterday from Washington, DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Like many of Sudan’s orphaned and displaced “Lost Boys” who sought to survive civil war, Majok walked hundreds of miles through Hell to safety and then — in 2001 — boarded a plane to Atlanta, Georgia to begin a new life. That’s sight unseen. That’s truly starting over. This is only his second trip back to his homeland, to see his remaining family, in nearly a decade.

And my family’s nomadic summer is very different from the daily realities of life in northern Uganda, where I will be spending the next several days on assignment. The last time I was here — four years ago — millions of people were displaced from a generation of conflict and terror. Since then, most of them have returned to what was once their home villages to try rebuilding a life from scratch.

All moves are hard; they truly uproot us and we have to plant ourselves back on solid ground to begin growing again. But, in the case of my family’s nomadic summer, our move was a choice to go somewhere where all of us — especially my son — could flourish. Every day, in all kinds of places around the world, millions are moving to simply survive.

I know I will meet many of them as I travel through Uganda and then to Ethiopia during these next two weeks. I will let you know what I find over the course of this most recent trip.