From Africa with Love: October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

Better than Prom

There is something that I call “The Prom Effect” that will
hit you hard if you aren’t aware of it.
It happens where you get super excited for one big event, decide that it
is going to be the best day of your life, and then it turns out to be a little
(or a lot, depending on the size of your imagination) less than you
expected. Just like prom. At the time, you are certain it’s going to be
the best day of your life, but looking back, the best part was eating pie at
Village Inn after the dance.
And usually that’s what happens. It’s the seemingly insignificant things that
you remember: the stuff that we don’t plan or organize always seems to be times
where we were happiest or living the most.
I don’t know why that is, exactly, maybe because we get so preoccupied
thinking that we should be having fun
we forget to actually do it. I don’t know.
What I do know is that while I have had an incredible time
on my various adventures, it wasn’t bungee jumping, or riding an elephant, or
petting a cheetah that I am going to think about when my mind goes to
Africa. What I am going to think of is
all those beautifully random moments I experienced while finding a home worlds
away from what I know.
I’m going to think of superhero dinners, late night forts,
unscheduled mud fights, and fuzzy critters found on my bedroom floor. But most of all I am going to remember the
people that made these things happen.
Some friends on this journey were finding Africa just as new as me, and
for other friends, Africa has always been home.
I think if you asked any of them today, though, every last one would say
that at least one piece of their heart belongs to Cape Town: how big of piece
is up for them to decide.
I posted some pictures: maybe not as impressive as Victoria
Falls or the jungles of Botswana, but arguably just as beautiful. These pictures show the memories I will miss
most. Because Africa is nothing like prom.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Three Little Birds (and one minibus)

One of the most frustrating parts about seeing cool things is that it is not always appropriate to take a picture of the cool thing that you are seeing. I know you know what I am talking about. Like the woman on the bus who looks exactly like your high school physics teacher. Or the boy in your Sociology class who is wearing capris. Or the man with the misspelled poster who was probably trying to prevent global warming. But hey, I won’t put up a fight if this guy wants to “Stop global worming,” as well.
It’s in those instances that you realize that no matter how easy it would be to whip out the Nikon and take a super quick picture, it just wouldn’t be polite. People get offended by random photographs that they don’t understand. And this is why, my friends, I am unable to provide you with a picture of Bob Marley reincarnated.
He told me himself that he was. I was trying to get to downtown Cape Town on a Saturday and he was sitting in front of me on those oily minibus seats. He turned around when I sat down in the back and said, “You’re not from South Africa, are you?”
Well, that was true, so I told him that no, I was in fact not from South Africa, and as I anticipated the Saturday afternoon traffic, I decided at least I would have someone to talk to on the long bus ride.
“I’m American,” I offered. “And where are you from?”
“I am from all over, Sister. And I was here at the beginning of mankind.”
Not many people can say they were there at the beginning of mankind, so I sort of smiled, because sure, I was supposed to respect my elders and this guy had apparently been around for awhile. But he didn’t stop there. “You may have known me in some of my earlier years. Ever heard of Bob Marley?”
Now, if there is one thing I have heard of, it is Bob Marley. And my obsession with the reggae king has only deepened while spending time in Africa. “Yeah, sure, I know the guy. You good friends with Bob?” Why were the bus seats always sticky? I tried to readjust to hear what this man had to say.
He kind of chuckled. “Nah, nah Sister. I’m a Rastafarian, so we are brothers because of that, but I’m here on this earth now as him. I mean, because you know he is dead and everything. But not really. I was born from Bob again. I’m here on this earth now as Bob was here on the earth earlier. I came back as him. But I’m a different person. Don’t call me Bob.”
He turned back around on the plastic seats and looked out the window. Like the conversation was over. But you can’t tell someone that you are Bob Marley and end the conversation there. So I tapped him on the shoulder. “If I can’t call you Bob, what can I call you?”
He turned around and kind of smiled. “John Doe.” And as John was smiling something incredibly odd happened. His face kind of wrinkled at his eyebrows and his eyes got shiny and his dreadlocks were long and stuck to his arms because it was so incredibly hot in that bus and I for the first time since our conversation, it crossed my mind that maybe this dude was Bob Marley.
We fell silent for awhile longer. He messed with his Rasta hat and I tried to get my hair off of my neck. John turned around again. “What’s your dream?”
“My dream?” Minibuses are so weird. Everyone crammed in one tiny little place with not an inch or personal space. I guess this lack of personal space had crept into my aspirations, too. But I answered. I’m not sure why but I did, “I want to be a writer,” I told him.
John nodded, obviously pleased that I had told him my dream and hadn’t questioned why he had wanted to know. There was a long humid pause; he messed with a dreadlock. “I have to tell you something,” he said.
And I will never know why John decided that he wanted to help out the white girl on the minibus that day, but this is what he told me: “You probably write now and the stuff you get paid for is probably stuff with strict guidelines. Stuff with a lot of rules.” My mind flashed to the various pieces of writing that people had wanted written and how specifically I was supposed to construct certain ideas. John continued, “But when you get the chance to write what you choose, you know, when you aren’t so young and learning and when you want to be mature, don’t write what you think people want to read. Because the people, they don’t know what they want. Write what you need to say. And that’s what the people will need to hear.”
He pulled out his wallet, obviously made of hemp with red, green, yellow stripes down the front, and dug around for a folded newspaper clipping. He handed it to me. “If what you write does not leave you as happy as I was in this place, then you are writing the wrong thing.” I unfolded the paper and found a picture of Hout Bay, a little town on the outskirts of Cape Town.
“How will I know how happy you were here?” I asked, still a little confused at what had just happened, what had just been said, and why I felt like this was some awkward scene in a nineties movie.
“Oh, Sister! You will just know,” he smiled again. And with that, John Doe skipped out of the minibus still rolling to a stop. He walked out into the hot pavement and smell of gasoline.
And at that moment, all I wanted to do was bring out my camera and take a picture of “Bob Marley” walking out into the Cape Town dirt and heat, but I knew I couldn’t. It wouldn’t ever do justice to how I remembered the event. Seeing a picture of a Rasta man with ripped jeans laugh lines wasn’t what I wanted to remember anyway. What I wanted to remember was that maybe Africa still has more to teach me. And that I am not going home just yet.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Homeschooled.

As much as it amazes and pains me to type this, I have to begin to deal with the fact that I am on the home stretch of my African adventure. I feel sunshine when I wake up in the morning and walk home from dance class while it is still light out and while I smile, smile, smile at this approach of summer; it is also a soft reminder that at some point, I need to go home. And, as an attempt to be the incredibly mature homework-oriented-future -knowing-no -candy-for-breakfast-and-hair-brushing individual that I am not, I have compiled a list of just a few things that I have learned over the past couple months. You know, so I can tell people if they ask. Or remind myself if I forget. Because I guess that’s one of the things I am scared of when I think about leaving this place. Forgetting what I realized I came here to get.
1. Things are worse than they seem if you are cold or tired. This was something that I figured out when Africa was new and winter was a little colder than I anticipated. I realized that if I took a step back, took a mental survey and understood that this winter thing really wasn’t a joke, or that sleep hadn’t come so quickly the night before, then whatever I was thinking was so completely awful at that point, probably wasn’t so bad. Its displaced stress. Take a nap; get a sweatshirt and its good looking up.

2. A lot of times, you can laugh instead of cry. This seemed to be the mantra for me and my beautiful roommate these past few months. Those night where you turn your oven on and leave it open just to try and warm up the kitchen, or when you eat oatmeal for dinner again because you don’t really know how to cook anything else, or when the electricity runs out right when you need it because apparently leaving the oven on to warm up the house uses a lot of power, those were times where the laugh/cry choice was in order. And most of the time, we learned to laugh. Because most of the time, it really is kind of funny.

3. Differences get subtler the more you understand them. So when ‘pap’ is served for dinner, you start to realize it is kind of like mashed potatoes. And when some asks you “Wasswera sei?” it maybe could sound like “What’s there to say?” which is obviously a complex way of asking, “How are you?” And then there you go. African languages are figured out.
But in all honesty, the longer a talk I have with someone, the more their accent fades, and the more familiar their words seem and sometimes, I can forget that we are so different and from completely different worlds. And maybe my accent fades to them; too, as we both start to understand. Maybe things aren’t so different after all.

4. You never really regret the times you decide to dance. But you almost always regret the times you don’t. There is a lot of dancing going on in Africa. So if steps are clumsy the first time around, there is always a chance for round two. Most people aren’t looking to be impressed. Most just want someone to dance along with. In the mighty words of my fearless Xhosa dance teacher: “If you don’t get up, and dance together like a village, well, then that’s fine, but don’t come crying to me when you have your ancestors speak to you and say, “Why you weren’t up there dancing?” I must say, I can’t exactly picture my ancestors saying that, but I think they’d be proud. Confused, maybe, of how their lineage made it all the way to Africa. But proud. Because, o Cape Town, I danced.

5. And one final thing in this short list of what to remember when I return home. An old Zulu adage says something like this when it’s translated: “A path is made by walking.” So I’ll keep walking. Walking on back to my apartment for the night. Walking into my final weeks in South Africa. Walking into my old life back at home, but with a fuller heart and a bigger mind. And maybe one day, God willing, walking right back onto this African dust again.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Hungry.

If my calculations are correct, there are four types of hungry out there. The first type is the one I am most familiar with. I don’t know its technical name, but my roommate and I refer to it as something along the lines of the “It’s your own fault hungry.” It happens when you forget to go to the store, and the only food in the apartment is instant oatmeal and a potato that we found next to the refrigerator that is mostly there for decoration.
It’s in the midst of this type of hungry when you think, “I could go to Seven-Eleven and attempt to buy candy but they might as well change their name to “Seven-Whenever we feel like closing” because they are generally not open when the really, really big hungry sets in.” But it’s my own fault, really. Food would have been available if I had planned better.
The second type of hungry I like to call the “Sister Hungry,” because it’s the kind that Sister is always trying to explain to me. Sister is the homeless woman who lives outside my flat. She likes to sit on the curb of the side walk and argue with the man who sometimes claims to be her husband, and sometimes swears he’s just her brother. It usually depends on how sassy she is that particular day.
Sister is always hungry. And rightfully so: the woman is thin like a tree branch and stings like one when she lashes out at her husband/brother. Hers is the kind of hungry that is never really satisfied; the kind where there is just never quite enough food. “Sister Hungry” also results in me constantly carrying protein bars and potato chips in every purse and backpack I own so I can share some snacks on the way in and out of the flat. And it’s probably her sass, but Sister holds a place in my heart, and this can ultimately lead to “It’s your own fault hungry.” Because it’s when I pass her on the way out to a restaurant and sit down at those booths and stare at my food that my thoughts gravitate towards Sister. And I save half of the food to bring back to my girl faithfully on the pavement outside my home. Her toothless smile and a kiss on the cheek are generally worth it though.
Then there is the third type of hungry. It’s the “channel changing hungry” because that’s what everyone does when it comes on TV. Toddlers with knees and heads that aren’t quite in proportion with the rest of their tiny bodies. And I’m guilty as charged because when those ‘Save the Children’ commercials come on, I try and change the channel too, but that just isn’t really that possible or appropriate when we watch documentaries in my “Growing up in Africa” lecture. The ones where they show the Zimbabwean children crying in the dirt because there is no food today. Or tomorrow.
And when the man with the video camera (who everyone grows to hate) asks the little girl in her flower dress what she had eaten yesterday, she gets frustrated, throws her hands in the air and yells, “Upona!” Nothing. She didn’t get to eat anything yesterday.

And, that brings me to the fourth type of hungry. It’s the kind you get when Sister asks, “You got anything for a sister, sister?” and I don’t. Or when you watch those documentaries and you realize that you don’t have to go as far as Zimbabwe to find babies that have eaten “Upona” that day. Or that you were in that place you saw on TV and you saw those kids yelling in the dirt and you didn’t really do much more than smile about the little ones who tugged on your hands in those dusty streets. Because, I don’t really know what to do, you know? If I am supposed to bring candy bars around with me like I do for Sister, of if I just give them the money I have, or I just hold their brown little hands and say a prayer, or tell someone about it, or cry, because it breaks your heart if you think about it hard. Or if you think about it at all.
Then what I did was just take pictures of them because they love to see themselves on the screen afterwards, and then you have something to show everyone back home. A bright eyed, greedy souvenir, or something so you can say, “Hey, you know those beautiful hungry children on the TV? I saw them in real life. And they really do want food.” Or maybe you just don’t eat like they can’t eat and then ease that guilt because these days KFC plays more on my conscious than anything else out there. And this fourth type of hungry is awful and this hungry burns your soul and this hungry comes from the fact that I have enough and others don’t and I just don’t know what is supposed to be done about that.
Because you can’t feed this type of hungry.