Five Languages at One Table
A chance meeting on a street in Arnhem, an evening at an Irish pub, and a table where four people moved between five languages. On belonging, and a life lived on the move.
In 2016, I met a man in a bar in Dar es Salaam, through mutual friends.
I was new to Tanzania then, there to coordinate a university program. He was one of the people who made Dar feel like home. In 2018, I left, and like so many friendships made on the move, ours went quiet.
Seven years after we met, I was walking through Arnhem when I heard someone speaking Swahili. I turned around, and there he was. My friend from Dar, on a street in the Netherlands.
We greeted each other and went for a beer to catch up. Immediately.
From then until I left in 2025, he was a staple of my life there.
Back in Arnhem
When I returned to Arnhem recently, we met up again. He introduced me to a friend of his from Kamuli, in eastern Uganda.
Kamuli was my entry point to Africa. I first went there in 2011, as a graduate student studying beans, and I came back two years later to farm. Most of what I've written here about soil, land, and who owns it began in Kamuli. Meeting someone from there, in a pub in the Netherlands, felt like a small door opening onto an old room.
He, in turn, introduced us to a Dutch woman who had been raised in Kenya.
She looked at me, then at my new Ugandan friend, and said, “I thought you said you were all from East Africa?”
My Tanzanian friend answered for me. “He lives in Kenya, and I met him in Tanzania.”
I felt I was being sized up, and I knew I was sizing her up. That seemed fair.
I'm often cautious when I meet another white person who has lived in Africa. So I listened. I paid attention to her responses and comments, and watched her with my friends. Hearing her speak Swahili comfortably and talk about her life in Kenya told me more than an introduction could.
The table
We spent the rest of the evening together at an Irish pub in Arnhem.
A man from Tanzania, a man from Uganda, a woman from the Netherlands, and a man from the United States. Between us, we spoke English, Dutch, French, Swahili, and Lusoga, the language of the region around Kamuli.
There was no moment when the conversation switched languages. Moving between them was part of it from the start. We found our rhythm, and the conversation just flowed. Nobody seemed to be choosing a language. We were just talking.
Each of us had come to that table by a different road. Different countries, different reasons, different distances from where we started. I didn't have to account for my life before I could simply be in it.
Where I belong
I've written before about the Olympic Peninsula, the one place I call home, as much as I have one. It's where I feel most connected to the land.
But most of my life hasn't been lived there. It's been lived in Japan and California, in eastern and western Washington, in Uganda and Tanzania, in the Netherlands, and now in Kenya. Movement has become the shape of my life, rather than a lifestyle I chose.
A life like that makes belonging harder to locate. It isn't always tied to a place. Sometimes it shows up in people: a boy at our door in Japan, holding out a bunch of bananas on my fourth birthday; a voice speaking Swahili on a Dutch street; a table where five languages run together without anyone noticing. In moments like these, the world feels small to me. At that table, I felt I was among people who understood something of what a life like mine means.
Because of the way I live, I know these moments are fleeting. Someone always has a train to catch, or a flight, or a life somewhere else to return to. But they stay with me.
Four people and five languages, at an Irish pub in the Netherlands. None of us were home. All of us were.
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