It’s not the White House...

...but now I can say I’ve lived on 16th in Washington, D.C., just like the Obamas (they live at the intersection of 16th and Pennsylvania), who also happen to be former residents of Chicago just like me.

Tonight is my last night in my first home in D.C. For the past six weeks, I have been living on my own as a temporary bachelor in a tiny, one-bedroom studio apartment. It has its own full bathroom (with a shower only) and a small kitchen area (with just a two-burner hotplate). It’s a room in a large, three-story house where several other people live in small rooms too, I’m sure (I’ve never seen the other ones), although I think they use the common kitchen on the first floor, which has a full stove with an oven.


This place is located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, which is largely filled with immigrants from Central and South America. So I’ve heard a lot of Spanish spoken these last weeks. The way I like to describe my location is that if I get on my bike and ride directly south for exactly three miles, I run smack-dab into the White House! It’s so cool to live in a city and in a neighborhood where I can go just a few blocks and see the Washington Monument and have the White House come into view.

It was strange that I ended up on this very street as my first residence in this city because it’s where some other members of my family – three generations of them – have started out and/or lived. My great aunt (my grandfather’s sister), who lived in D.C. for decades (from the administrations of FDR to George W. Bush!), lived in a grand old apartment building called the Chastleton a couple miles south on 16th with her mother. When my own mother was young (younger than I am now), she moved with her sister from Seattle to D.C., and they moved in to this apartment with their aunt and grandmother. Later they would get their own apartment in this same building, and my mother would meet my father, and they would get their own apartment in this same building. I think this is the story of who lived where and with whom, but if I don’t have it all right, suffice it to say there was a lot happening in this one building with previous generations of my family, all on 16th, the same street where I happened to have ended up when I first landed in this city to start a new life.


Today this building has been renovated and is now all condos, with each selling for upwards of $176,000. It’s in the hottest part of town, mere blocks from Dupont Circle.

My parents were married at Grace Lutheran Church, several miles north, but also on 16th. This is the street where everything happened, and the same is true today. We have an active new president who is marking his first 100 days in office today, and from a busy White House down there on 16th, he and his family have established themselves in this city and have gotten down to business in these first 100 days, planting a new garden, modernizing the Easter Egg Roll and sneaking out from their home to try some of the restaurants in town.

Tomorrow I move to my second temporary residence, a larger place that can accommodate three of us, since Sarah and Lexi will join me here at the end of next week when they come from Nairobi. We’re renting the first floor of a house in the Brookland neighborhood in the northeastern section of the city. It’s in the shadow of The Catholic University. We’ll be there at least through the end of August.

I’m a bit sad to be moving away from my neighbors on 16th – the Obamas. But further adventures await in a new part of the city – parks to walk to on summer evenings, a Franciscan monastery to retreat to, and a college campus with a bizarre shrine to our country’s patron saint, Mary, Mother of our Lord. It’s all a testament to how interesting this city is.

From the capital of Kenya to the capital of the U.S.

Time for an update on my/our relocation plans. The execution of the plan has begun!

I left Nairobi on the night of Sunday, March 1. It was a very long journey to Seattle that involved a very long flight that was extended unexpectedly. The Dubai-to-NYC leg of my flights was long anyway – normally 14 1/2 hours – but we circled over NYC because of the snow, which was preventing any planes from landing there. So add another hour on this plane. We finally started getting low on fuel (as if 14 1/2 hours in the air wouldn’t do that in the first place), so we landed in Philadelphia to refuel, which meant we sat on the plane for another hour. Then we went back to NYC. By the time we finally landed, I had missed my connection at JFK to Seattle. But I ended up spending the night in NYC at my brother’s place in Manhattan and having lunch the next day with a good college friend, so it wasn’t all bad. Plus I got to sleep in a horizontal position that night, since I was headed into my second straight night of sleeping on airplanes.

Once I arrived in Seattle, I stayed there for ten days. My main purposes in going there were to:

• see many friends and family (and I was crazy busy seeing everybody over lunches, dinners and coffees and the unexpected phone call with some)
• sort through and clean out my stuff that has been stored in my parents’ basement for the last 18 years and get it ready to ship to Washington, D.C. One of our reasons for moving back to the U.S. is because we now desire a house (i.e., a detached, single-family home) that has more living space so we can spread out, a place that includes a yard for our children (so far just Lexi) to play in. This is our chance to get everything we own in one place (stuff that has been scattered around the country for the last several years) and then enjoy many of the things we have collected on our travels around the world.
  

It is strange to be back in the U.S. Whenever I visited the U.S. while we were living abroad, and especially returning now after living abroad for 5 1/2 years, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. It’s strange because this environment and culture is familiar to me, but it’s not what I’ve been surrounded by for the past year or so. The culture of Europe was closer to that of the U.S., but the African culture was further removed from the American culture. It’s difficult to keep two cultures that are so far apart together in my mind. It was doubly strange being in Seattle as well. Even when I visited Seattle when I was living in Chicago, I never felt like I fit in anymore there. It is the place I lived as a child (until I was 18 and left for college on the East Coast). It is not a place I have spent much time in as an adult. Where I feel comfortable and where I fit in now is Chicago. That’s a city that suits me as an adult.

I have just arrived in Washington, D.C., and will begin the next – and main – phase of our relocation. What steps do I plan to take/what will happen now (the question I’ve been answering a lot since returning to the U.S.)?

• I made my travel plans to arrive in D.C. in time to attend Ecumenical Advocacy Days, an annual event put on by the D.C. advocacy offices of the mainline churches (including the ELCA) and their related advocacy agencies. This is a good chance for me to network with a crowd I would like to work with, although I have pretty much already exhausted all job possibilities with these offices for the time being.
• For the first several days after my arrival, I will be staying with a friend who lives in a central location in D.C. One of my first orders of business will be to find a longer-term place to live. I want to find a furnished apartment to lease/sublet for the short-term – for five or six weeks – until Sarah and Lexi join me. I may be able to find a place that’s big enough to add another adult and child later so I won’t have to move again, but I won’t know until I start looking at some places.
• Another task - my main one in the coming weeks – that I will start immediately is looking for a job. I believe that I need to acquire things in this order: a place to live (a place on my own – an apartment – see above), then a job, then I can get a mortgage to buy a house, and then (or maybe at the same time as the house), a car for our family. So this is my list of big tasks in order of priority. Then we will be able to execute the moving arrangements for our stuff to come from Seattle and Salt Lake City and have a house to receive it in. Can I even look for a job? Yes, I am finding plenty of openings on various websites that I am monitoring for my line of work (nonprofits). These are openings that I am qualified for, interested in (more or less), and at places (in addition to nonprofits, I am finding openings at universities, trade associations, foundations, etc.) where I could work.
• As I job hunt, I also have various other networking events I am scheduled or plan to attend and individuals I have planned or can contact with to meet for networking purposes. Friends and family have given me the contact information for many people who are working in D.C. whom I can contact with for job help or networking. But I am open to more contacts if you want to share them with me.
• In between all of this, after my “job” of job hunting, I hope to get out into D.C. and enjoy some events – concerts, festivals, etc. – that are offered and visit some of the great landmarks of the city.
  

As you can see, I have been and plan to be quite busy in the coming weeks and months executing my plans as I’ve described above. If you want more details or need to know more about why or how I’m doing something, unfortunately, I can’t respond to every inquiry. I hope I’ve provided enough details (about the how and why) on what I plan to do for the time being, and in several weeks, I will write another update on my progress. I’m hoping to satisfy the curiosity and interest that is coming from many of you with these written updates, and I’m sorry they have to be for a mass audience, but there are many of you out there, and I can’t take the time to repeat this information for everybody who asks.

In the meantime, I thank all of you who are supporting me in various ways – those who responded to my first update and who keep in touch through various means, those whom I saw recently, and the rest of you who read this and who silently offer your good thoughts for my well-being.