Monday, August 23, 2010

"So how WAS Africa?"

We are liars. More accurately, Scott is a lair for promising to keep up with this thing, and I am just lazy for failing to write a single post in almost two months.

We are home. We have been reunited with our families, friends and non-PC computers. We have been acing job interviews, cooking up some mean fried-chicken-free meals, playing every backyard game in the book, and soaking up even more sun (Canadian sun, not African sun – there’s a difference). It’s strange how seamlessly you can transition back to life as you knew it after five months in a world that could not possibly be more different from your own. It’s strange how much you can think about a place before you’ve been, and how little you find yourself thinking once you’ve returned.

But I do think about it. While waiting to cross the street, I am amazed when a car actually stops for me. While reading the Vancouver Sun, I chuckle at a headline that reads “Closing of elementary school forces 8 year old to walk 3.5 kilometers to school”. While sleeping safely in my single bed, I dream of the laughing, hopeful children we met and wake up to realize that some of will not see adulthood. Some may already be gone. It’s not an easy thing to come to terms with, so I push it out of my mind and check Facebook instead.

I want to tell you what Africa meant to me. I want to tell you about the mothers with the babies strapped to their backs, the colours of their kangas, the children in their HIV POSITIVE t-shirts, the ingenious things they could make out of wire and bottle caps, the houses they lived in and how fantastic it felt to be invited into them. I want to tell you about their warmth, their vitality, their faith, despite what seems like such dismal circumstances. I want to tell you about the beauty and the tragedy of Africa, but I’m afraid I’ll come up short; I’m afraid I’m not a skilled enough writer; I’m afraid that regardless of my inarticulacy, words alone aren’t enough.

It seems to me that Africa is a land of inherent contradiction. One day, the people are friendly, the landscapes are indescribable, and minibuses really aren’t that bad. The next, the people are bordering on malicious, the landscapes have turned dismal and you’re on a 14 hour bus ride with a large, perspiring woman literally sitting on top of you. In Africa, very little time is spent in the space between absolute despair and unfettered bliss, and a great deal is spent at one of the two extremes. That is probably one of the only things I can say about Africa with any degree of certainty: you will forget what complacency feels like. Africa draws extreme reactions from people, and, like the maggots that laid their eggs in our bed sheets, it’s tough not to let it get under your skin.

Africa is life intensified. The colours are more vibrant here – the reds of the fertile soil, the greens of the undulating hills, the blues of the sweeping skies. The flavours are sharper – the cinnamon and the coriander and the rainbows of peppercorns. The noises are louder, the going is slower, the journey is far more convoluted and intriguing than it appears. Everything is so pure and in the moment that even the most cautious person will want to launch themselves into the throes of it all and despite the frustrations that doing so sometimes caused, I’m so glad we did.

Everything you have ever seen or heard or read about Africa is true. All of it exists in some measure, and then some. I wish I could tell you that the kids on TV with flies on their faces are a myth, but they’re not. You will see some of that. You will see the victims of landmines hauling themselves around on the ground with whatever is left of their bodies. You will see a lot of white UN trucks, men with guns, and people who act like that’s completely normal. But you will also see laughing, energetic, healthy kids, fathers with steady jobs, mothers learning to diversify their crops, prosthetics, local languages, songs, and feel a prevailing sense of peace. It will shake you to your core. It will make you think. It will make you want to go home and tell everyone you know about it. And ultimately, it will make you want to go back.

We have returned home with memories, experiences, and a renewed enthusiasm for life and what’s important. We hiked amidst the colourful rondavels and maize crops of the Transkei. We survived a night of food poisoning aboard a decaying steamship in the middle of Lake Malawi. We joked with the border officials in Tanzania. We explored the empty ruins of an ancient city. We watched the sun set over Kenya from a fishing dhow. We ate spaghetti and watermelon for breakfast. We took cold showers. We asked for help. We paid too much for taxis. We camped on a cliff. We ate goat. We learned to say “thank you” in half a dozen different languages. We used that one a lot.

I cried over stray dogs and begging children and my faraway family. I laughed at Scott’s Zanzibari haircut, Adam and Aviel’s beauty salesperson spiel, and the disbelief on just about everyone’s face when we informed them that we were neither married nor Muslim. I was excited, anxious, frightened, depressed, ecstatic, hot, dirty, tired and hungry. I wanted to come home on more than one occasion. I also contemplated putting down permanently with relative frequency. I hated it, I loved it, and not once did I feel apathetic towards any of it.

I guess what I really want to tell you most about Africa is that you should go. There is no other way you will understand it. Even then, you might not, and it’s entirely possible that you will return home with even less to say on the subject than you did at the outset. But there is no doubt that it will affect you. Though you can’t pinpoint exactly how, and you can’t explain exactly why, Africa will move you to feel more deeply than you ever thought possible. You will see that this is not a land of rape and lions, but a beautiful, largely peaceful, inspiring place, which is so often misrepresented, ignored and abandoned by the outside world.

What Africa meant to me is not something I am capable of telling you. So just go. See it for yourself. Marvel at all the things that simply don’t translate to words. Try to understand the incomprehensible. See things from a different perspective. Let it challenge you, change you, seep into you. Then come home and tell me about it.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Yikes!

Okay, so when I said that we'd 'keep the posts coming' that was obviously a gigantic -- though unintentional -- fib. Turns out when there are jobs to be applied for and apartments to be hunted and decks to be reclined upon, the motivation to hunker down and pump out a post seems to die a little. But we can assure you that there are more posts on their way, because we are going to finish this thing, darnit. So everybody should all keep checking back on an hourly basis for, say, the next six months? We'll get there. Thanks!

Just for fun, here's Alanna and mine's respective reading lists for our five months of travel:


Alanna
  • The Puppeteers - Renesh Lakhan
  • We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
  • The Corporation – Joel Bakan
  • 117 Days – Ruth First
  • The Whole World Over – Julia Glass
  • Stealing Water – Tim Ecott
  • Southern Cross – Jann Turner
  • America Wife – Curtis Sittenfeld
  • The Dive from Clausen's Pier – Ann Packer
  • Juliet, Naked – Nick Hornby
  • The Last King of Scotland – Giles Foden
  • The Condition – Jennifer Haigh
  • State of Blood – Henry Kyemba
  • The Constant Gardener – John Le Carré
  • One Day – David Nicholls
  • A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon
  • The Other Hand – Chris Cleave

Scott
  • The Snows of Mt Kilimanjaro – Ernest Hemingway
  • The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
  • Papillon – Henri Charrière
  • The Corporation – Joel Bakan
  • Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
  • True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
  • The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
  • Regeneration – Pat Barker
  • Juliet, Naked – Nick Hornby
  • The Last King of Scotland – Giles Foden
  • Pilgrim – Timothy Findley
  • Stealing Water – Tim Ecott
  • Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Constant Gardener – John Le Carré