Remembrance

Despite my noble efforts to stay germ free, I'm sick this morning. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Fortunately, I don't teach until the evening time, which allows me a whole day to feel better. I've tried to be somewhat productive, using my time at home to do some laundry and catch up on my correspondence. I undertook the huge task of cleaning out my Inbox, sifting through old emails as I ditched some and categorized others into folders.

I came across an old e-mail that I sent late last year to a friend living overseas. I confess, it did my heart good to re-read the letter and remember my fall travels. I've been so consumed with getting settled into my life in China that I easily forget what a cool adventure I had in Africa and Europe. I keep a few of my favorite photos from Africa in my kitchen, and every morning as I fix my oatmeal I smile and try to remember that corner of the world. It would be such a shame to forget.

Anyway, I thought I would share the e-mail with you as I still find it to be completely applicable and would love for you to join me in remembering.


My favorite memory of Africa was at a construction site in a village outside Mwanza. The Guilds were helping with a certain building project. All the Sukuma women were collecting rocks for the cement because apparently it's not a man's place to do such a job. And so I crawled around on the ground with the women for several hours and helped gather rocks. I don't know why that memory is so potent, except that it seemed fitting. I always want to feel so important, to look the part or to impress. But there's nothing wrong with collecting rocks and siting criss-crosss applesauce in the middle of a field with a group of Tanzanian women who laugh at your inability to speak their language. In fact, it's up there with the most beautiful things a person can experience. So in some regard, Africa really helped free me from myself, if that makes any sense at all.

I know a lot of people travel to run away from things in their lives that seem dismal, and I don't think there is harm in that mentality. I've just always felt like I was running toward something, not away from it, like Africa, as general a term as it may be, was helping me become who God intended, though I am still far from that goal. Africa wasn't the missing piece, but rather a really great means to a much better way of life.

And I remember one particular Thursday evening in Barcelona, I walked home in the rain. Each day after hours of classes about adverbial clauses and dental, labial consonants, I enjoyed a café con leche and an hour or so of free time to decompress at this little bar, Rembrandt’s, located about six blocks from my flat and one block from the nearest metro station. I didn’t mind walking those six blocks in the rain that night, my last night in Barcelona, feeling as though it was somehow appropriate for the city to mourn my departure.

It’s strange how places can connect themselves to a person, as though they were building themselves into that individuals’ landscape and not the other way around, clinging to the clothes that person wears and lingering in their conversation for years to come.

I had gone to the ocean the day before. I needed to feel small and be reminded that feeling small is ok, that I don’t have to save the world to lead a meaningful life, and I can be content with the way the sand feels between my naked toes or the way the waves so consistently come up into the shore and back out into the deep.

And at some point on the other end of this huge mass of water, my loved ones were cramming for some final, enjoying time with their families or driving home after a long day at work. I closed my eyes and momentarily dreamt myself to Texas, remembering what it felt like to listen to music in my Honda, remembering how much I liked to sip hot chai at Jupiter House but most remembering how good familiarity felt.

And I knew that familiarity would have to come at the cost of ending a really great chapter of life, and standing on the beach and walking in the rain merely served as a sort of bookend to a season marked by free-spiritedness, Tanzanian laughter and new places ripe for exploration.

And so, dear friend, that is where I'm at — at another point on the map and waiting. Wondering how the next chapter looks, and attempting to internalize my experiences rather than taking them for granted because places and people really do become a part of a person, whether or not we choose to accept that reality.

I hope I get to go back to Kenya and especially Tanzania. I hope I get to see more of Europe and Asia and Latin America (you know Chile was my almost home) But even if I don't, the experiences I've had thus far are mine; I'll always have them. And someday I'll wake up feeling melancholy, and I'll remember picking up rocks in Africa, or I'll hate my 9-to-5 job and I'll remember standing on the beach in Barcelona and singing "Love and some verses" under my breath. And I'll remember how many places and how many people have connected themselves to me because I'll still be talking about them and I'll still be thinking of them when I get ready in the morning. And I'll be free again.