Our plan to go to Chapel Hill was hatched as a result of several motivations. It had been on our list for quite some time simply because Priya had gone to grad school at UNC and one of her close friends still lives there. But a couple of additional motivations had arisen. One was that she had mentioned years ago that, at some point in her life, she would like to celebrate her birthday among some of her closest friends, most of whom are scattered about the world. Her August birthday happens to fall at a time when we are normally traveling and the day doesn’t often get the attention it deserves. Now, with the milestone fiftieth on the horizon, I wanted it to be something special. Initially, I thought about some sort of destination birthday. But the cost and logistics soon appeared to be prohibitive. After a number of ideas were vetted and rejected, it began to appear that a good and more practical option would be to celebrate the event by taking the “party” closer to where they are. There are two main locations: North Carolina and Washington DC. So we decided that, as a family, we would make the trek to Chapel Hill from southern Indiana, about a ten-hour drive. Then, at the tail end of our holiday, she would travel to DC a few days ahead of the rest of us to hang out with the friends there, we would then meet up in Amsterdam and travel back to Nairobi together. In the end, it all worked out.
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We left fairly early in the morning from Scottsburg. I entered Chapel Hill into Google Maps and off we went. I miss some things about pulling out the maps and plotting routes, but Google’s ability not only to plot the fastest route but avoid road construction and other delays makes a huge difference.
We worked our way down through Louisville, across Kentucky, some of West Virginia, Virginia and into North Carolina. It’s a reasonably varied and interesting drive over the Appalachian Mountains. But it’s long and I think everyone was more than ready to get out of the car when we arrived at our friends’ house.
I had met them when we were married but I didn’t know them well. And that was about seventeen years ago. But after getting settled in and hanging out a bit, it made me wish we had done this a long time ago. Such a cool family.
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There were other motivations for the visit that I alluded to earlier. One was to make a trek to the Duke University library to see the journals of Priya’s Japanese grandfather. It’s a long story as to how they ended up there. But the main thing is that the family (or at last I) was interested in knowing what was in them. Her grandfather was a Christian immigrant to the US in the early 1900s. He had a very interesting life and it was apparently intriguing enough for the library to want them as a part of their valuable documents and manuscripts collection. In addition to being a missionary, he and his family (including Priya’s dad) were interred during WWII in a camp in Arizona. Afterwards, her dad was able to make his way through medical school and became a medical missionary in India for thirty years.
Access to this collection required an advanced reservation. Once inside, we were allocated a room in which we could view the documents. We would spend a couple of hours photographing pages and dong our best to capture the essential of what was in them.
Her grandfather was a very meticulous man. He had kept a daily journal of the exact same brand and size from 1938 to 1979. Prior to his internment, he was apparently arrested by the FBI and questioned to find out if he was some sort of security risk related to his Japanese heritage. Two journals were missing from the collection: 1941 and 1942. My theory is that it was because they were confiscated by the FBI, but we don’t know that for sure. He nonetheless carried on maintaining the journals during interment and in the years after.
The main challenge in determining what content was valuable was the fact that they are almost entirely in Japanese. A modest attempt at using a character recognition app resulted in gibberish so there will need to be more work in sorting out what is in them. There are some words here and there that are in English including, for example, professional baseball scores. He had apparently become a sports fan (Cleveland Indians) over the years and for some reason chose to enter this “valuable” information in his journal.
I also found out that he has more documents archived at Case Western University. It will be interesting to begin to pull all this stuff together and generate some sort of narrative. Anyway, more to come on this.
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There was also an essential visit to Priya’s alma mater. UNC is an interesting place. It’s a public university that is challenging to get into, particularly if you’re not from the state. It plays the non-elite card compared to its rival Duke, but it seems to me that it’s rather elite by state school standards.
We walked around the campus. It was a warm day, but not as humid as I expected. It has many things to see but our group spent most of its time in the bookstore (looking at swag) and the basketball museum.
The latter is probably not for everyone but it was a hit with us. UNC has churned out great basketball teams and notable players – many of whom ended up in the NBA. If you’re not a basketball fan, a size 18 basketball shoe in a glass case may not be your thing.
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We have several friends in the area, including people we knew from Nairobi, so we spent time reconnecting. We even randomly ran into someone in a shopping mall that we knew from the French school. Crazy.
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While in Chapel Hill, we found out that there would be a football (soccer) match between two professional clubs that were in the US: Celtic FC (Scotland) and Manchester United. Though we would be unable to see the match due to our need to return to Indiana, they also offered the opportunity for fans to attend a public practice the day before. My daughter Kinaya, being the football fan that she is, was anxious to go. It was a rare opportunity for us to see all these famous players, including one of her favorites, the powerful and entertaining striker, Erling Haaland. Considering it as part of her birthday, I bought tickets (yes, you need to pay way too much to attend their practice).
Overall, it was a wonderful stay. I wish we were closer so that we could spend more time together. Such a cool family.
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