“Though mine Protestant blood doth chill in mine vessels in earnest contemplation of the Papist heresy of ‘purgatory,’ there doth be a certain fitness to said conception as an allegorical figure of speech.” -Rev. Vidad Dogo

We are in a strange type of purgatory right now.

I am currently sitting with my laptop in a hotel room by the airport. Every few hours, a flight escapes paradise, headed off to colder and more civilized climes in Europe and North America. Thanks to Corona-Chan and the excited response of government, the airport is barely open. We are waiting for a flight, but before that, we need some final papers from the US Embassy. The flight part of the equation has been taken care of by a very good friend who knew we were ready to get out, but the papers are another issue.

We are heading back to Florida. We just don’t exactly know when.

Back? What? What? You are moving back?

In the midst of a PANDEMIC?

Yes. It is time. We could have pressed on, building our main house, planting more trees, expanding the gardens and working on the new agroforestry project at our church, but we are simply ready to go home.

There is a tension in the air here. We are not as welcome as we used to be.

And that is fine. It’s not my nation.

I am glad I never decided to reveal our exact location on the internet. You never know when keeping your cards close to your chest may pay off in the future. If we had blurted all our personal info on YouTube, we would have attracted a lot more local attention. As it is, we are just an object of gossip on the street, not some celebrity family that would draw unwelcome visitors. There is something unsafe in the air now that we did not feel before.

We decided to leave the US because it appeared to be nearing collapse. This collapse seems even more obvious now, but it is still home. Being away for over four years has made us realize how very American we are, and how foreign we are elsewhere. And I have hope for America now, believe it or not. Where we go one, we go all, as someone once said. The resiliency of the people is amazing. There is an ingenuity and brilliance that is lacking here. A standard-issue American redneck in a pickup truck does better work than almost any professional plumber, electrician… or government leader here. That is not hyperbole, either. When you deal with repairmen not showing up on time – or at all, no one knowing their job, no one getting things done – you start to miss these things. The little things. You also miss pipes that don’t break every few days. Hot water. Clothes dryers. Air conditioning. Working internet. Decent mechanics. Waiters that pay attention to their tables instead of disappearing.

Going expat has been a very useful experience. It has proven that we can live without a lot of amenities, but also revealed how nice those amenities are to have.

Yes, I may have made a mistake on my location, but that is fine.

As Nassim Taleb writes in Antifragile: