Keeping in Touch

I have been TERRIBLE about keeping in touch with my friends and extended family since moving to Mozambique. Every morning I think, "Today I'm going to write a group e-mail and let everyone know what I've been up to," but the task is somehow too daunting. I haven't sent out a proper group e-mail to my friends in over a year. A year! How on earth do I begin to tell them about my life, about being engaged, about living in Mozambique, about all of the struggles and triumphs of the past year. I tell myself that it's not necessary to write about all the details, that a few lines reassuring everyone that I haven't dropped off the face of the planet will suffice. But even then I can't seem to get it together to write...

Part of me feels very frustrated when I receive an e-mail from a friend back home asking what on earth I've been up to and why I never send news. This blog is public, and before leaving the US I sent an e-mail to everyone with the address, explaining that I would keep regular updates about my life on this site. Back then I didn't know what my internet connection would be like here in Mozambique, so I figured that a blog was the best option for keeping in touch with multiple people with little connected time required on my part. Every e-mail I write to family or distant friends, I remind them of my blog address and let them know that this is where I regularly post updates and photos. Many people do, in fact, keep in touch with me via the blog, but many others have never even clicked on the link. It is often the people in the latter category that then remind me how long it's been since I e-mailed, how I've disappeared from the radar of the people in my past.

I wonder why it's so hard for me to write an e-mail these days...Back when my main form of keeping in touch with friends and family was writing actual, honest-to-God letters, I never had a problem. Writing a letter was a fabulous exercise in creativity. I'd carefully select a piece of stationery and a coordinating pen color. Sometimes I'd make my own personalized paper by drawing an intricate border. Sometimes I'd paint a background before writing on top with a thick black ink pen. I'd always decorate the envelopes as well, sometimes even making my own out of colorful photos from National Geographic or Nature, carefully folding the magazine pages into the right shape, taking care not to smudge glue on the beautiful letter inside.

My friend Lambros, who I met when I was 14 at a tourist office while on holiday in Greece, was my faithful penpal for 7 years. Each month we'd each painstakingly design a letter full of news from our respective lives. He is an artist, and would often include comics and portraits for me inside the envelope. Once e-mail took over, however, our correspondence decreased. How strange that in a time when it is much easier to communicate across borders, instead of flourishing, our words to each other came nearly to a stop. We are still unbelievable friends, and each e-mail we do manage to send goes straight to the heart, but there is something about the magic of letter writing that I doubt will ever be recreated electronically.

A similar trend emerged with all of the people that I used to so faithfully write letters to each month. My friends from music camp (yes, American Pie fans, I went to band camp, but don't get any funny ideas - I played the piano!), friends from my exchange summer in Italy, my host family from Brasil. As soon as e-mail became the preferred mode of communication, I increasingly lost touch with everyone.

It's not only e-mail; it seems I have an aversion to most modern technology meant to facilitate communication. I have Skype installed on my computer, but I am always on invisible and only talk to my Mom and Dad on a regular basis. I never go on MSN or Yahoo chat, even though I know half of my friends are on my contact list. There's something about the instantaneous nature of the conversation that makes me shy away. How do I go about chit-chatting with someone I haven't talked to in nearly 2 years? What do I say? "How's the weather? What's new with you?" And what do I answer to the inevitable question that comes my way: "So, what's it like in Africa? Do you like living there?" How can I possibly begin to answer that in a chat message when I don't even have a clear answer myself?

Last month, mindful of the fact that I struggle to keep in touch with the people I care about, I did an experiment. Although it's been proven time and again that I can't reliably receive mail in Mozambique, I decided to sent out a handful of letters to family in the US and Brasil. Imagine my shock when, not 3 weeks later, everyone confirmed they'd received a letter in nearly perfect condition! Now that I know the mail service here works at least one way, perhaps I can take up letter writing again. Even if I can't explain everything about my life on an A4 sheet of paper, at least I can personalize a letter, include a photo or a drawing, address the envelope in calligraphy - anything to transmit what I feel so direly lacks in e-mail and chat rooms.

So friends, family...if you are reading this, send me your physical address. Now that the possibility of writing letters has returned to my life, you just might get a little something in the mail from Mozambique.