I touch down onto the tarmac wearing a scarf, hooded winter coat, and underneath it all a thick woven sweater. Now I'm hot. I think about all of the cold weather clothes that I packed with me and know I'm an idiot. I'm in Tunisia for christ's sake. I breathe in and can taste Africa on my lips.
Tunis smells like dust and sunshine and salt, like the sea. The breezes that blow through the trees carry with them tendrils of cigarette smoke and something much sweeter, shisha. I can hear the clanking of tongs not so far off even though the chairs I'm sitting in are much more comfortable than the Cairo ahua-style plastic seats that have become so familiar to me. Interlaced in this melee is also a soft murmur that flutters through everything. The language is complex at first, being a rapid-fire hybrid of Arabic and French, the two languages that I know separately, but never together. Never together. The words become easier to tear apart as time goes on, and the part of my brain that has worked so hard to compartmentalize languages by Wednesday has dissolved, like a rubber band released. I can now type in English what the members of these meetings are saying in French and sometimes Arabic at a nearly fluid rate and I feel good and proud and as if I have actually earned my living wage.
I met the most fascinating people while in Tunisia - members of the Finance Ministries, members of the Prime Minister's cabinet, internationals working at the World Bank and the IFC and prominent consulting firms like ECOPA, other Tunisians dealing with the promotion of foreign direct investment, brilliant minds dealing with the intricacies of trade... I have never learned more, nor have I ever had to so severely test my own limited knowledge - built from the haphazard scraps of first hand experiences crudely strung together by an-almost university degree. O what life has given me.
The woman who has hired me and who has taken the risk of bringing me along to Tunis, talks to me on our second to last evening about God. She tells me the story of her life, from being raised in a Soviet-occupied Armenia to this vengefully successful reality in which she lives now. And it is vengeful, and beautiful, and twisted and yes, blessed beyond belief.
I feel that I have lived seventeen lifetimes in the span of my 21 years and so many times my mother and father's friends congratulate me on being so lucky. And I've never been one for blind belief and I've never been one to really put stock in serendipity, but as I'm standing on the edge of a precipice staring out at the Mediterranean with the cobalt blue doors framed by stark while stucco-ed walls of Sidi buSaid behind me, I know that it has to be just a little more than luck guiding me.