Staring at a blank laptop screen is frustrating; white like the static of a television channel you can’t quite receive, but in high definition so that it looks smooth and purposeful. That’s what a MacBook does when it’s starting: the silhouette of an apple missing one bite appears (if everything is normal), and then the operating system starts.
It’s April 12th 2016. I boot my laptop to check Ugandan daily newspaper websites as I eat breakfast. The Apple silhouette doesn’t appear, instead replaced by a file folder silhouette bearing a question mark, flashing like a warning light on a car’s dashboard. After a few retries yield the same results it becomes obvious that my laptop, my faithful MacBook, is not booting this morning.
My forehead compresses atop my nose, lips purse, I sigh deeply. I don’t have time to fiddle with hardware or software issues.
Arrow, my roommate and co-intern, is preparing for travel to Kibuye and leaving later in the morning, and lends me her laptop. I pack it into my bag and leave to catch a matatu.
There are programs on my laptop neither free nor common that I was using for work at Arise and Shine. But it’s just a machine.
It’s the connections you lose that really burn, not the functional things. My mom recorded videos of my family wishing me well and gave them to me before I left, instructing me to open them only in April, roughly half-way through the six month internship. I had only stored them on my laptop, along with all my photos of the first three months. I hadn’t even kept those photos on my camera’s memory card.
I would have kicked myself every moment for the rest of that day, if that was physically possible, though I think the following week of sleepless nights made up for that. Losing videos reminders that people care about me and the memories I had chosen to capture in my camera was like being pierced foot to forehead by a steel rod. Knowing I could have saved those videos and photos was like removing that rod myself.
…which I think is why I didn’t even tell my roommate and co-intern, my mum herself, or anyone else until now that I had lost my mum’s videos. I felt idiotic enough to have lost my photos, so I just left it at that. That was the event that curtailed blog entries in the last three months of the internship. I had and still have almost two dozen written, but those, like that loss, remain unshared.
That will change.
This is your mom and she has the videos saved for you and will get them to you again!
Your description of loss helps me to understand what it felt like – very painful. As usual your written word is very clear and descriptive. As long as you learned from this and are now practicing a safe computer back up regime. I am looking forward to you sharing the rest of your blogs. Keep it up