Princess Diana or how fast ten years can pass by

To start with, I am not a particular fan of Lady Diana. I am neither much interested in knowing the circumstances to her dead, or the tragedies of her life. I am not flipping through the hundreds of articles which are currently on all news sites reminding the world about her unexpected and mysterious dead.

No, the reason why I grant her a posting on my blog, is the surprise by which the anniversery of her dead made me realize that ten full years have passed in my own life.

I vividly remember the day when she died. It was on a hot and sunny afternoon in the summer of 1997 when I was – for the first time ever – engaged in some kind of student job. The job was not too bad: waitress in a hotel next to the beach in Bibione, one of these “summer-high-life---winter-ghost” towns along the Adriatic coast of Italy. I was just about to finish up setting the dining hall for the dinner, when suddenly the door opened with a loud noise, and in came an elderly German man, his face painted in shock. In a whining voice he said four words, and rushed again out of the hall. “Lady Di is dead”. “And?”- was the only thing coming to my mind. And? She was a princess, with some affairs, an unhappy marriage, too much money and a bit of charity. And?
Yet, not everybody seems to think like me.

Ten years later she is still remembered – more than ever – as the princess of the people, the best mother on earth, the woman that could have changed the course of things (which things?) if she wouldn’t have died at a young age in a tragic accident (was it really a tragic accident?).

But again, what shocks me is not the fact that ten years have passed since Diana’s dead, or the fact that she is still in everybody’s mind (and heart, as it seems), or the fact that her life and dead are still filling page over page of tabloids around the world (keeping her memory alive has seemingly developed into a real industry!). No, what shocks me is the fact that ten years have passed in my life, too, since that hot afternoon in Bibione!
I remember how adult I felt by then! And yet, I was only a sixteen year old teenager, who – for the first time ever – tasted the air of freedom, working three hundred kilometers away from home in a hotel next to the beach, in the middle of summer-high-life. But if I was adult by then, what am I now? An oldie? Might not even be a totally wrong assumption, after all. Having been two years in Somaliland, has made me one of the “oldest” expatriates in terms of years spend in this small country, yet one of the “youngest” in terms of absolute age. With 26 I am still in the lowest age segment, but hardly anybody else can beat the length of my stay in this country ;-)

What happened all the years? Ten years, that is more than a third of my present life time. Maybe I wasn’t that adult after all, in Bibione. In some ways I am maybe still not adult. Sometimes I still feel like the sixteen year old teenager who just can’t do else than doing the opposite of what the mass around her does. When everybody else was working as a babysitter in the hometown, I left for the beach of Bibione. When everybody else learned somewhat normal music instruments, I decided to get myself a bass violin. When everybody else chose architecture, medicine or psychology for University, I chose African studies. While many of my primary school mates have kids and a stable job, I am hanging around in a self declared country that doesn’t even exist formally, investing my energy into increasing literacy rates among girls and women (yet, often I am investing a considerable amount of my energy in getting along with ministries, drivers, consultants, administrative stuff, and other silly things).

Funny, how fast ten years can pass, and yet how many events and moments of this past ten years are so colorful in my mind as if they would have happened yesterday. For instance the day when I missed – together with my best friend – a plane to Ireland (we managed to look desperate enough at the travel agent to get a free ticket for the following day and enjoyed three wonderful months working and traveling through this marvelous island). Or the day I stepped into the Institute for African Studies in Vienna, laying ground for so far three years of study and work in East and Horn of Africa. Or the morning I was sitting in a plane and suddenly the door fell off. Or that balcony party where I met my – nowadays former – boyfriend. I also remember the first time when I wasn’t a traveling as a student anymore and thus wondered what on earth I should fill into the immigration form at the JK Airport in Kenya. At the end I opted for a vague “consultant”.

Sometimes I wonder whether I should be proud of the things I did and the path I took over the past years, or whether I should regret the fact that I left my home town and became one of these “modern-computer-ipod-digicam” equipped nomads that loose a tiny piece of home with every new country they transverse. While my horizon has grown beyond what I would have dared to dream ten years ago, I am a bit concerned to loose the sense for belongingness. It’s great to know that I can adapt to pretty much any kind of living circumstances, but it scares me that I can’t imagine a life in the no-name village where I came from in the first place.

I wonder if Lady Di will remember me of the fastness (and sometimes uncoordinated way) in which I walk through life again, in ten years from now