A Place to Belong

Like little sand castles

Mia stepped off an absurdly small plane and onto the boiling tarmac with all the eagerness of a young person on the brink of “real life.” She had been waiting for this moment for years, ages, eons—to step out of her old, confined, all-American life and into a new, worldly, adventurous one. She had been aching to shake off the house that still stood in Yuma, weathered and ordinary and now slightly less crowded with her absence. She had been counting down the days until she could leave her too-noisy, too-numbered family in the dust of a North African-bound Boeing 767—and now, standing wide-eyed beneath a sky that had looked bluer in the air, the erratic movement of her heart assured her that the moment had finally arrived.

The instant her Keds touched the oil-spill of pavement that served as the runway, Mia decided that she liked this place infinitely more than she had ever or would ever like Yuma. It wasn’t exactly a difficult decision; she hated it there. She hated the yucca plants, the unnatural amount of palm trees, the stagnant air and the slow people. She hated that house, stuffed so full of children she thought it would burst. She hated how her father was so condescending towards everyone and everything; nothing was good enough for him. The elderly were lazy, as were the youth; there was too much out-sourcing and incompetence in the work place; people bought too much and earned too little. There was always something to complain about. Even worse than the bitterness of her father was the passivity of her mother. She loathed how her mother quietly accepted her father’s criticisms, and how she allowed Mia’s five younger siblings to run rampant through the house and the neighborhood. It was all too oppressive and embarrassing to bear, and so she found a way out.

She spent hours earning excellent grades that left her mother acceptably proud and her father unimpressed, she spent two precious summers doling out ice cream to locals at a nearby Baskin-Robbins, and she applied to every study abroad scholarship she could find. Her diligence paid off when she received a letter promising almost full financial support for a yearlong program in Northwestern Africa, learning French and Arabic. She was euphoric; the thought of an entire year spent on the other side of the world, thousands of miles away from the clamor of her home life, was heavenly. Though she would be spending her last year of high school away from the school and the people she had grown up with, she had too few true friends to worry about missing anyone or anything (her family was not an object of even the vaguest concern).

And so she found herself on a runway in an entirely foreign land, among a people whose language she could not speak and whose god she did not know. As she stood there, watching the empty, endless sky and savoring this first moment in a new world, the last of the passengers stepped off the plane. Their noisy American mouths drew her attention back to the world she had abandoned and she mused that this may be the last time in a long time that she would hear the words of a countryman. A small smirk of pride attached itself to her lips as she noted the man’s obnoxiously bright, floral shirt. She took extreme satisfaction in reassuring herself of the difference between herself and this man: he was a tourist, and she was a traveler. He came to Africa with his American wife, wearing American clothes, speaking American words, and dropping American money. She came to Africa alone, wearing simple clothes whose origins were ambiguous, speaking enough French to get by, and already carrying the local currency (she had exchanged it with her American money in an airport in Atlanta). He would go home in a few weeks, a month at the most. She wouldn’t return to Arizona for at least a year (she could never bring herself to call it “home” – it always felt so wrong). She might never return (running off into the desert with the next passing caravan was always an option). Essentially, he brought his old life and his home culture with him into this foreign land as though it were a security blanket; he lived the same life in a new place. She left her old life where it belonged, somewhere in the middle of an America she didn’t want, and began a new, bolder life in another, more interesting part of the world.

Mia gathered up the carry on luggage that was scattered at her feet and followed the tourists into the airport. It wasn’t until she passed through the double doors that led into the building and exhaled that she realized she had been holding her breath. She bit her lip to repress a childish grin of excitement as she surveyed the room, crowded with all manner of foreigners. There were Europeans waiting for posh jets that would soon deliver them to some Mediterranean resort town, where they would spend a few weeks relaxing in the sun before continuing on to Rome or Geneva or some other international destination that catered to high society. There were locals, dressed in delightfully authentic garb and patiently awaiting flights that would take them to some other city along the coast, where they would reunite with family in Casablanca or Tangiers. There were other Africans from elsewhere in the continent, who looked as if they wished they were somewhere else. And then, of course, there were the Americans, whom she tried to ignore.

As she scanned the terminal, she noticed the man she had forgotten to look for. His name was Ahmed, and he was holding a sign with her name on it. He was her new host father. They recognized each other and smiled, and Mia was thrilled to find that he appeared to be a perfect blend of Arab and African—he was perfectly local, and that was just what she had been hoping for. Unfortunately, Ahmed’s French skills were less than perfect, and Mia’s were sub-par at best. Though the introduction was warm, the ride home was almost silent. Mia didn’t mind, though; the scenery was enchanting. She couldn’t get over how lovely all the blue doors looked against the clean white walls and how quintessentially North African the clay buildings were, like little sand castles. She loved how the sand seemed to stretch on for miles when they passed through a less populated area, and how the sky was now so blue in mid-afternoon that she could barely stand to look at it.

The scenic route eventually came to and end, though, and Mia met her host mother and her two young host brothers. Fadila, Esmail, Hafiz. Yes, this was definitely an authentically local family. They had roots here, she was sure. She felt lucky; she had been worried she would be placed with some wealthy, westernized family in the modern part of town. Fadila had prepared a delicious meal – maasems with couscous and mint tea, and a nutty assida for dessert. Mia was in heaven; her own mother’s cooking abilities started and ended with frozen dinners. She was beginning to settle into her suddenly transposed life; she had unpacked her clothes, arranged her books on the little stand beside her bed, and tacked her class schedule to the wall beside the mirror. She hadn’t thought to bring any pictures of her family (why bring them if she didn’t need them). She opened her window to let in the smell of geraniums and the sounds of the city – the cars, the children, the eerie music that every seemed to emit from every Arabic radio station. She felt excited, hopeful, and proud all at once. This was all hers now. The city, the sun, the streets, the sea—she felt as though it all belonged to her as much as it had ever belonged to the locals who had built their lives here.

She stayed in her room until sunset, absorbing this strange and comforting world through the open window. She eventually rose from her bed and walked back into the common area, hoping to somehow communicate to her host parents that she wanted to do something—play a local card game or learn how to make that mint tea. As she crossed the hallway, she could hear what sounded like a television, and was a little surprised; she hadn’t noticed any such thing, and had assumed that the family didn’t own one. Televisions were so…western. She was even more surprised when she recognized what her family was watching—reruns of Seinfeld, dubbed over in Arabic. She couldn’t believe it. She felt a hint of anger, as though she had been cheated or tricked, though she knew it such feelings were senseless. She sat down beside Fadila, forced a weak smile, and turned numbly to the television screen. Her world had suddenly gotten much smaller, and much older; she felt a small wave of grief as she accepted the fact that she had been wrong, that there was no one country or culture isolated from the rest of the world, secluded with its private beauty and private songs. The world was becoming one; people from all over the planet were folding into one another.

The summer weeks passed, each one lovelier than the last. Mia hadn’t looked back yet. The day before classes, Mia decided to go down to the water. She hadn’t really been yet, and Arizona was completely landlocked, so she felt she should take advantage of the sea spray while she still could. She caught a bus most of the way and walked the last five or so blocks, catching peeks of the impossibly blue water in the gaps between the buildings. She finally broke free of the city, emerging onto the waterfront with her breath all caught in her throat. She had been unprepared for the beauty of it all. The water was too turquoise, too lovely for her; the color was welded with the sky so you couldn’t be sure where the sea ended and where the atmosphere began. She hurried across the sand to the lip of the water, beside herself with the joy of discovery. She peeled off her shoes and stepped out, slightly shocked by how cold the water was; she had imagined it as warm and inviting. She smiled just the same and looked out over the water, greedy for the sight of more blue. Her attention immediately turned to a pair of pelicans, awkwardly wheeling in the air before diving and settling on the water. Something snagged in her heart.

Her memory pedaled backwards ten years into the past, to a family vacation to San Diego. She was only seven then, and her mother was pregnant with the first of what would be five more children. She was standing in the water, just like she was now, only she was in a cove in La Jolla and her father was standing beside her. His hand was on her shoulder, and she was pointing to a pelican.

“That’s a big sea gull, Daddy.”

“No, baby, that’s a pelican. If Arizona’s education system was worth a dime you would already know that.”

The present-day Mia smiled a very small smile as she stared at the sea birds. The strength and fortitude that she’d been building dissolved as quickly as her heart beat, and she began to ache a little, and then a lot, for her father, and then for her poor, exhausted mother, and then for each of the siblings she’d left behind, in Arizona—at home. She missed them. She realized then that, though this sea and this sky and the city at her back were beautiful, they did not belong to her after all. Rather, she belonged to far-off yucca plants and palm trees and worn-out homes full of babies and memories, and they to her. Maybe that’s what travel was about—when done right, it makes you want to go home again.

She decided to stop at a café on the way home to buy a post card to tell her mother not to worry and to complain to her father about the insanity of the local transportation system. She’d ask them to send her a few pictures, too.