21 Days in Africa

They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit.  I’m not sure if this is a myth created and propagated by fitness jockeys and Twelve Steppers, but while I was in Africa for a total of 24 days, it took far less for me - I am hooked. I am hooked on Africa. 

The bulk of my trip’s purpose was a two week volunteer expedition deep in the Namibian bush with a non-profit conservation organization Elephant-Human Relations Aid (EHRA).  The project entailed one week of building a wall around the local human water supply to protect it from the roaming elephants and a second week of patrolling the elephants and learning their habits and movements.  The organization is essentially aimed at protecting the desert adapted elephants of the Damaraland and educating both the local population and the Namibian government about these animals.  I chose this project among the infinite number of volunteer expeditions because it gave me the opportunity to experience something completely and utterly different from the reality of my life as a bourgeoning young professional (a yuppie puppy if you will) in Canada’s biggest city - Toronto.  It would challenge me both physically and mentally especially since the project entailed camping in the wilderness with no electricity or running water for nearly two weeks.  I wanted to find out what I was made of, what I wasn’t made of, and what I could be made of.  I also went on a three day safari in Etosha, the national game reserve in Namibia, on my way out, and briefly graced Cape Town on my way in.  Yet, my journey to Africa began long before I boarded the plane and arrived in CT.  I was longing for an adventure different from any I had ever had before.  I went to Africa with an open mind and an open heart to let the experience change me in any way it sought fit.  It did. 

             The experience was so all encompassing and overwhelmingly positive that it is still a struggle to compute it all and put it into succinct but emotive terms that any one would understand.  Instead, I have chosen 21 snippets of my first trip to Southern Africa - some random, some meaningful, and maybe, hopefully, some profound - in an attempt to tell my tale of self-discovery.  What I discovered very early on is how Africa can grab a hold of you and it doesn’t let go.  I felt I might leave a part of myself there. I did.  I want to go back, to reclaim it, to live with it.

Departure Day – Going In – Pens -  My courage to actually pursue a career in writing came hand in hand with the inspiration I felt in going to Africa.  Wide open spaces, breathtaking scenery and, well, the elephants fed my creativity in a way that the concrete jungle of city life just doesn’t for me.  So, as an aspiring writer a journal and pens were high on my packing list.  As such, I distinctly remember putting a handful of pens in my knapsack before leaving.  Despite such distinct recollection, I still found myself double guessing my preparedness and rummaging through my bag on the way to the airport for proof.  My best friend had generously offered to drive me and she was rather perplexed at my obsession over finding these pens.  Then again, we’ve known each other for 26 years and we know all to well all our little idiosyncrasies.  I pulled that bag apart in her car and no pens!  As it turns out I also forgot my headlamp too, whose whereabouts, along with those elusive writing utensils, still proves a mystery.  However, I was able to function without a headlamp pretty well as all they really did was attract the plethora of moths and allow you to better quantify your digestive intake of insect life at dinner time out in the bush.  It was better to just eat in the dark. 

Anyway, sufficed to say, when I arrived at the airport and checked in, after a bit of a snafu with my airline ticket that almost led to me missing Cape Town altogether, (which I won’t explain here as the extreme frustration I endured over airline inefficiency, impotency, and complete disregard for the notion of customer satisfaction, still makes my blood boil), I went to seek out some pens.  This also proved exceptionally exasperating.  It seems it is impossible to buy a straightforward packet of five generic pens at an airport.  What I ended up with was one clunky souvenir Canada pen for a typically outrageous airport price.  And this only after I discovered that I was missing another mere essential - - my bank card!!  Luckily, I did have my new pin-chip Visa card to not only make purchases but to also withdraw cash at pretty much any ATM anywhere.  So, I guess it’s true what they say, you can leave home without pens, but you shouldn’t leave home without Visa. 

In the end, I made it on the plane with a pen that turned out to suck, money, and my head, in tact, ready to leave this world and its daily grind behind.   And I began to write.  I tried to capture all that was happening around me and to me as best I could.  Where I can, I have included passages of what I actually wrote at the time, to not only hopefully bring a feeling of authenticity to this tale, but, for me, to remember and feel all those moments again and smile. 

Africa from the sky – Looking back over all I wrote, there exists already an acute nostalgia for the innocent excitement I felt in those first few days.  Everything was new, everything was different, everything was warm with sun.  As I flew over Africa in the plane that would eventually land in Cape Town I wrote, “I am smiling, I am happy, I am filled with my own spirit.  I wonder if it was this transcendental to everyone.  Really, all I am doing is looking out a small airplane window on to a hunk of land I had yet to even step foot on.  It’s not like I haven’t flown before.  I guess it is the anticipation of the unknown; Anticipation without expectation.”  I was obviously projecting, but as I took my first looks upon Africa, an Africa that had only been brought to life for me through books, pictures, movies, and legends, I truly felt like it was looking back at me - “Looking directly at me and challenging me with the confidence of knowing it had everything to offer me and me nothing to it.”  I turned out to be right on that count.

Cape Town – I won’t give an authoritative dissertation on all that CT is or has to offer, I was only there for a day and half and have only first impressions.  Yet, first impressions can be indelible and what I came away with was: Awesome!  Cape Town, at first glance, seems cool and trendy, but without pretention, vibrant, but relaxed, youthful, but historic.  The surroundings of mountains and oceans are gorgeous; it’s like Vancouver on steroids.  At the same time, I couldn’t quite lose an eerie feeling of a sinister past that runs beneath the pulse of the city.  “With all this beauty, there’s a corresponding melancholy in knowing that this place has been filled with anger, hate and despair.”  South Africa is the country that gave the world Nelson Mandela, but it did so because of the evils of Apartheid; one begot the other.  In the end, as the Cape itself is called – The Cape of Good Hope - that is what I felt the most.   I hope I will be returning there soon to bask in the splendor of second impressions.    

Savannah Cider – No matter how many times it may happen in life, you never forget the moments you fall in love.  They are the purest, happiness moments and, if we’re really lucky, they last.  This was no less true then when I took my first sweet, crisp, refreshing sip of Savannah Cider.  I can still remember it; I can still taste it.  I do possess quite the discerning palate for ciders having tried many the world over and Savannah truly is one of the best.   But, like so many love stories, this one is coloured by star-crossed circumstances, for, alas, we cannot be together.   Savannah is not available in Canada.   And, in this way, Savannah is representative of so many things I experienced and felt in Africa – they are unattainable here.  But knowing they are out there has made my adjustment back to my life in Canada not only difficult but undesirable.  Cheers to Savannah!

Swakopmund – It’s a tourist beach town in Namibia whose name sounds exactly as it looks, and which the town looks exactly as it sounds; in a word – bizarre!  It has the architectural ambiance of a German gingerbread house with palm trees and the feel and pace of what I imagine the Old West to be.  It’s as if the town just sprang out of the desert about fifty years ago and hasn’t changed since. 

Swakopmund was where I savored many Savannahs, ran along the beach, sand boarded in the dunes, gathered up souvenirs at the market, and met all the project volunteers, many of whom would become close friends.  Most of all, Swakopmund was the first time I started to really feel that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.  Not that I’ve been to Kansas and, frankly, don’t really care that I haven’t or probably ever will.  But, Swakopmund, with all its oddity, is a bit like Oz.  The juxtaposition of the famous sand dunes, which give it a sci-fi aura if you’ve ever read or seen “Dune”, along side the vast and mystical Atlantic coast is unlike anything I could gaze upon in Canada.  It wasn’t ruby slippers that brought me there though; it wasn’t even a full blown tornado.  It was a low rumbling in my soul.  A questioning deep inside as to whether there might be more to life, more to me.  That deep rumbling turned out to be my passions.  They gathered steam in Africa and are now thundering in my ears.  They are propelling me back.  Arriving at Swakopmund is a bit of a time warp, but in more ways than one I traveled through space and time and ended up in a new world and a new reality that I loved. 

Africa from the land – I’m not going to lie, not every moment in Africa was perfection.  Building week was quite grueling at times.  “The heat and sun can be suffocating, the dirt agonizing, the rocks bloody heavy, the flies the pinnacle of maddening, and yet the spectacular scenery, the glorious sunrises and striking sunsets have the power to make you forget it all; to dazzle, awe and inspire.” At every page, I tried to capture the beauty around me and the emotions in me.  It was sensory overload of the best kind.  The land scarcely knows you are there and the perspective left me speechless.  Out in the bush, once you are able to de-stimulate, you are no longer a human on top of the land, but a human in it and a part of it.  You are in your place and it feels, well, right. 

Accents, Lingo, and “fucking” – No, I don’t mean the act.  In fact, for once in my life, the act was actually not on my mind.  What I mean by this word and it’s relevance to my experience is that there is something about the incredibleness of everything around you that “fucking” gets coupled with every other superlative you can grasp at in hopes of conveying it. Africa IS emphatic.  Nothing about it is tepid or mediocre. 

The tragedy for me is that I don’t possess a crisp, eloquent accent in order to pull off saying “fuck” while still sounding sophisticated.  I am always acutely reminded of how boring and provincial I sound compared to the tapestry of accents I encounter while traveling.  Oh, except, I guess I do actually pronounce words like “about” a little like “aboot”.  I have had to begrudgingly acknowledge this fact because whether a person is British, Irish or American, or in the case of Yvonne and Jen, Irish American, all my new friends detected it.  One of the fringe benefits I hope to gain from moving to Africa is losing the “aboot” and picking up a much sexier elocution of all my verbiage, including, the more profane.

It is remarkable, though, how fast you can pick up, perhaps not accents, but local slang in only a short time, especially if you are immersed in a place.  I was bandying about the word “reckon” like it was going out of style and I even used “Man” in conversation – most commonly something along the lines of, “That’s cool man”.  Of course, if something is really cool, you say, “That’s fucking cool man!” This is part of the Southern African lingo it seems, and yes ladies, don’t be offended if men refer to you as “man” – it doesn’t mean anything even out in the bush where you start to look a little less feminine and feel a whole lot less so.

So, in short, if someone insisted that I describe my experience in five words or less, all I could say is this, “Africa was fucking awesome man!”

Showers – When almost all of your worldly creature comforts are swept away you are quickly able to prioritize those that you truly enjoy and those that are just self-indulgent, status-seeking expenditures.  I reckon most are the latter especially in their grotesque frequency.  What absolutely is not though is a good old shower at the end of the day, particularly a day filled with sweat, dirt and sunscreen, and the occasional drop of blood.  Clean clothes are a close second. 

The absolute hardest part of volunteering for two weeks in the bush was not being able to shower.  Building week was, at times, unbearable.  We looked dirty, we smelled dirty, we felt dirty; it was as if my skin was actually crawling with filth.  It reduces you to not quite feeling human.  Yet, at the end of the working day, with the heat diminishing and the sun setting, the rewards of the bush surroundings exalted us all back to heights of serenity and satisfaction unattainable back home after a hard day at the office. 

When we did finally have access to a shower again, it was a waterfall of liquid heroine.  It was an outdoor shower at EHRA’s base camp.  Now some people might think an outdoor shower with little fanfare is still quite “roughing it”, but for me it was the ultimate – earthy, natural, liberating.  Of course, when you are in the bush everything exists outside and we would only remain “clean” for about half an hour. In truth it took a good three showers after the project was over to feel that the layers of dirt and sunscreen had been thoroughly expunged. The experience never will be. 

Relativity – It’s not just a theory any more.  Out in the bush, without electricity, without running water, without any mode of instant communication, it becomes law.  Instant coffee, which isn’t even 100 percent coffee bean, becomes robust. Baby wipes are a precious commodity and reach the level of currency like cigarettes in a prison.  A mere 30 degrees Celsius is merciful.  And, most of all, after four days of not showering, dirty, moth-ridden well water becomes the nectar of the gods.  It’s the “bush effect” and everyone should get the opportunity to experience it.  It might help to cure the more nefarious elements of mass consumer culture.  Indeed, I have barely stepped foot in a mall since being home.  Some luxuries are desirable, some indulgences at times even necessary, but for me, my consumer appetite wasn’t just curbed, it was obliterated.  Too much stuff is just too much stuff sometimes.  Hopefully, all I need is Africa.

Friendship – like everything else in life, it makes something better, so to the bush.   Frankly, it was easier to be dirty and tired when you knew there were thirteen others in the same situation.  And, when loneliness can be a traveler’s greatest haunt, including mine, the friendships I found in Africa were unexpected and wonderful surprises.  It wasn’t just that people were there beside me or near me, they were with me.  Friendship, it seems, comes easier in the bush in the sense that you either have a connection or you don’t and you find out damn quick.  There is no time for subtle niceties and no need for forced small talk.  There is a shared experience that will either bring you close or it won’t.  You can still enjoy the shared experience with everyone while you are there, but you can quickly see with whom you have the opportunity for more.  For when the demands of daily life and societal constructs are stripped away, the close quarters and isolation of the bush leave little time to be anything but yourself and complete strangers can become kindred spirits in a mere two weeks.  This was captured most in my friendship with Stella, for otherwise, how would a 29 year old Canadian lawyer ever have met a 51 year old British pharmaceutical sales rep and become soul mates?  Because we simply weren’t defined as such; we were just Stella and Cara - partners in almost everything – eating, sleeping, and, yes, even shitting.  What can I say, the bond of the bush is strong.

EHRA’s Base Camp - as close to Never Neverland as I can imagine, but for adults!  What else can you say about a place that is nestled between cliffs of rock, on a sandy river bed as your backyard and a tree house as your sleeping quarters?  After camping in the out right wilderness for days, returning to base camp was like checking into a five star resort! And, what makes base camp unparalleled, of course, is the outdoor shower.  I have come to think of life in the bush as one of simplistic luxury - it is that which we can carve out of our surroundings without pulverizing them.  Both austerity and luxury co-exist in the bush – the luxury has to be earned.  It leaves you speechless, and not just from physical exhaustion, but from spiritual enchantment.  When I think of the splendor Base Camp, I smile.  It is a piece of the world so few get to see and I feel amazingly privileged to have called it home if even for just a few days. 

Elephants – This list of 21 things I have amassed about my African adventure is in no particular order.  It is not ordered chronologically, alphabetically or by importance.  Evidence of this is that this entry is in a completely inconspicuous place, yet, almost the entire purpose of my trip and of the volunteer mission was to trek the desert-adapted elephants of Namibia.  This experience is simply too hard to convey.  I could write an entire story book on the ellies, but I would infuriatingly never be able to come close to bringing alive the feelings you have before, during and after these goose bump inducing close encounters.  At the exact moments I would be watching them it was surprisingly not surreal; it was actual, tangible, exciting.  It was after that I realized how subtly, but fundamentally mind altering it was.  All I can say is, observing these animals will reduce you to feeling merely human and you will LOVE it.

EHRA’s Ecolodge – As part of EHRA’s quest to raise more money for it’s project, they had begun to build an Ecolodge near the base camp, which will offer tourists the rare opportunity of seeing the elephants up close and personal, but without the painstaking labour of the volunteer mission.  It’s remote and simple, a mere gouge between two mountains with little evidence of human indentation.  There are no beds, no ceilings, scarcely any walls, but there is running water.  In short, it’s fantastic.  When I returned to basecamp. I wrote“The view is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.  It looked positively like a perfect painted picture.  It reminded me of the magical land of My Little Pony. If I had seen a winged horse fly across that sky I would not have batted an eyelid.  The kind of beauty I’ve witnessed is almost too much to take in.  It’s so beautiful as to be almost painful.  To know such a place exists outside dreams, but that you can’t stay, to know others will never see it, and worst of all, to know some don’t even value it.  Perhaps what is most beautiful is that which is most precious, most  vulnerable.”  The Ecolodge possesses something beyond ravishing beauty, it’s ravaging beauty.  It tears at you as you try to tear yourself away from it, to go home, to be “normal”. 

The Snake - I introduced this story by saying that I wanted to find out what I was made of.  Symbolically, this culminated in me picking up a snake.  Yep, that’s right – a girl that couldn’t even touch a picture of a snake in a book or had to look away if one made an appearance on a television or movie screen, forced herself to conquer this fear.  This conquering was deliberate, but this trip allowed me to overcome so many more fundamental fears that almost all of us face, whether we admit it or not.  And, that is what it starts with – admitting it.  I’ve publicly announced my dreams; dreams to live abroad, to explore Africa and pursue my writing because I am no longer afraid to follow them.  Often our passions lay hidden, our deepest desires secreted away from others because if they don’t know then their faces and voices can never be reminders of all the things not done.  I am no longer scared, or at least not scared enough, to follow the path that is being laid out before me.  Africa dared me to dream again and this force is propelling me along with an exhilaration and inspiration that I have scarcely felt in years. 

Okay, so back to the snake, it may have been half dead when I stroked its body and it wasn’t a huge fat boa-like snake, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  I won’t be taking one in as a pet any time soon, but I won’t be frozen with fear either.  It’s quite liberating. 

Safari – After the intensity of the volunteer project, being on safari was my relaxation time.  Yet, safari was no less astonishing and confounding.  “I continue to be unable to articulate the aura and power of these places and this experience.  Just when I thought I had seen perfection, I am struck again and left dumbfounded by such luxurious simplicity.  It’s not that Etosha is better than Damaraland, it’s just that everything is so beautiful and peaceful in the moment that you forget about all else.  It’s not a fiendish competition, just the loveliest of compliments.” 

What Etosha did have that Damaraland did not was the abundance and diversity of all the quintessential African wildlife.  Looking out on large swaths of land occupied by all the animals I had only dreamed of while reading National Geographic, I was struck at once by both the simplicity and the complexity, the grand and the minute.  Long before I arrived it was ‘lions and tigers and bears’ that captured my imagination.  But, once there, what I found most surprising was that it was the chirping and fluttering of the birds, the loping of the giraffes and the prancing of the springbok, (both delightfully endearing and delightfully tasty), that stole my heart.  And, of course, the elephants, they feel my soul. 

Silence and Noise – The serenity of the bush is unparalleled.  At first I was unnerved by the quiet; the din of the city being so spectacularly erased the silence is an entity. But, as I let myself relax and adjust and blend into my surroundings my senses started to come alive.  For the first time in a long time I actually begin to listen.  I could hear the wind, the birds, the rustling leaves, the elephants.  Despite their size, they are surprisingly quiet and graceful.  You would scarcely hear them approach, but for the breaking of branches as they roam about.  The mesmerizing beauty of the bush and the wondrous intrigue of African wildlife also silences you and the people around you.  Sometimes out of necessity – noise might spook the very animals you are trying to glimpse, but sometimes because all that is being seen, heard, and felt must be absorbed in utter quiet; there are no words.  Your mind calms and you can happily linger in the most comfortable silences with yourself and those around you.   Of course not every sound was so relaxing or heart warming.  The mournful dirge of the local donkey during building week, the sanity-testing drone of flies, or the wicked, cacophonous cackling of baboons were at best distracting, at most, incredibly annoying.  Still, I would take that over the shrieking drills of construction sites, the enraged roar of motorcycles or the ear piercing emergency sirens of the city.  We are crushed by noise in the urban jungle – we can’t get away from it. We have to turn everything off or drive hours in order to establish some kind of peace and quiet.  But then, often, that quiet is so eerie and intense that we quickly return to the comforting buzz of our televisions and computers.  Perhaps because in that quiet, the voices of our own head might be heard questioning the noisy lives we are leading.  I realized that I was trying to ignore these nagging feelings, but now what I yearn for the most is the quiet and stillness; to hear the sound I miss the most - the gentle slap of an elephant’s giant, floppy ears against its massive body.  It is pure. 

Fire – perhaps the single most important building block of human civilization, but not if Stella and I had been around.  There were ten of us volunteers on the project along with 3 project employees.  We broke off into teams of two for the purposes of cooking and cleaning each day.  One tandem would be in charge from after-dinner clean up straight through to making dinner the next night and we would rotate through.  Now, Stella and I aren’t too proficient around a stove to begin with; I don’t think we had any delusions about our culinary deftness around a fire either.  Of course, you can’t even begin to cook if you can’t build a fire.  It seemed we had an innate sense for selecting only poisonous wood from our bush surroundings.  We were caught in the nick of time by Cody, one of EHRA’s employees, before we lit the wood, which may have caused death, but at the very least a lot of sickness and disdain. 

Then, for our second time around, Stella and I were back at Base Camp, which should have made things easier because there was a stockpile of wood kept.  Unfortunately, for two giddy “adults” who were rediscovering their youth in Africa, we evidently were not listening when our leader, Dave, told us where we could find it, for, come the darkness of early morning, we scrambled and could not find the coveted cache.  It also seemed that for Stella and I we liked to make even the smallest endeavours adventurous – read:  difficult and stressful.  Stressful because one of the only elements of the project that mimicked Western life was the morning deadline – coffee and tea by 6:00 a.m. and breakfast by 6:30 a.m. sharp.  We knew that our sweetest smiles would never assuage a group of begrudged and hungry workers, so, in desperation, despite my left wing leanings and rather staunch views on censorship, we resorted to a slight book burning session in order to start the fire.  It was really only a mere singe in the contemptible history of book burnings though, and, it wasn’t that good of a book anyway. 

In the end, both times we got the fire going and we cooked without killing or maiming. In fact, one might venture our meals were quite tasty. And, in a pinch, I could start a fire again.  It might be a bit slow and unsteady, but I could do it.   Another accomplishment for the city girl who proved she could do it, but, moreover, that I enjoyed it. 

Self-Awareness – “The great thing about this trip thus far and maybe what turns out to be unique to the African experience (I hope it is, at least for me) is that I am refreshingly unaware of myself (although clearly not so much that I’m incapable of making this observation).  It is liberating!  Freedom from our Western world solipsism.  Ironically, it is this feeling that is allowing my thoughts to flow freely onto the page and write effortlessly.  My myriad of usual thoughts are not bogging me down.  I’m up.  I’m light.  My thoughts are in proportion and I’m allowing space and time to drive me along their own momentum.  I’m just letting it all soak in and enjoying it through some process of osmosis.  There is no trying here.  I hope it continues.”

Artful Articulation – Despite the entry above, effortless attempts at writing were some times dashed away.  I wanted to write, to capture the moments, the sights, the feelings and I did write everyday, but it wasn’t always pretty.  Sometimes sheer, unadulterated physical exhaustion reduced me to almost wordless: “I’m too fucking exhausted to write.  Mixing sand and cement, lifting heavy rocks and building a wall is tough.” Other times it was from metaphysical exhaltation.  As my mind was expanded and blown away again and again, writing the words that would convey everything I was experiencing became more and more arduous.  Despite rougher than normal living conditions, I was often in a state of “fascination and dreaminess causing the path of artful articulation to be rather clogged.  I need to let go of my cerebral self and let the innately physical take over.  Let Africa mould me and not the other way around. Here humans really do carve out a little niche and lay humbled against the land – not the other way around.”  And finally, there were times when emotions prevented me.  On my long trek home I wrote, “I’m almost too sad to write.  I’m on the plane in Walvis Bay and the paradox to my flight in is stark and mournful.” 

I continued to write through the incredibly lucid moments and through the agonizing blockages (all with that same Canada pen), because I had “a fear that later the perspective will be different and skew the purity of the experience in the moment”. But, the point is, that I wrote.  Since returning home, despite being the aspiring writer I am, I have scarcely written an original word.  I may have been without words at times in Africa, but I was never without inspiration.   I can’t say that returning home has changed the experience for me.  At the time I knew I was living out one of the happiest and most momentous times of my life, and that remains true; there is little hint of rose-coloured hindsight.  I still grapple with trying to express, in a clear way, all that Africa was and is to me.  The fact is, is there are gaps in the articulation of the experience that are beyond just a mere deficit of words.  It is because it is within those very gaps that the experience must be lived.  For me it is the lushest of feelings and an unparalleled intellectual stimulation.

Sublimity – Since being home I have been advised that this word is now so over used as to be labeled trite.  But, I am going to insist on its inclusion here only because the word did not actually come to me until about half way through the volunteer project. But, also because sublimity really does adeptly convey how I felt; it is a word I had personally scarcely used before.  “This experience has been speckled with a few moments of just wanting to throw the shovel down and collapsing from complete exhaustion and disgust at my dirtiness.  But these were mere speckles on a canvas swathed with moments of tranquility, excitement, contentment, hilarity, beauty, awe, respect and untortured self-reflection.  In this way the tougher moments are part of the wholeness of the experience and not an aberration.  I’ve experienced sublimity on a much deeper and wider scale.  If I’d ever experienced it before I didn’t know it or it was too fleeting to pin down. This has been more; it has been a meandering interlude through sublimity, serenity and a deep sense of contentment and satisfaction.”

Departure Day – Coming out - Basil-Ginger soap – This seemed to me to be the most absurd scent for soap I’ve ever seen.  Now I know that in the human excrement cubicle they like to call the airplane bathroom, scent control is of utmost importance, but isn’t this a bit ridiculous?  Am I actually supposed to forget where I am and be magically whisked away to the sights and smells of an authentic Thai restaurant!?!?  What ever happened to soap scented soap – let me just smell clean.  Wouldn’t that smell be more reassuring to the germaphobes of the world anyway?  What if I was actually in a Thai restaurant and this was the soap – no one would know whether I washed my hands or not.  What more fundamentally annoyed me about this product, as I made my way home, is the mark of indulgence and frivolity this product symbolized.  In our mass consumer consumption society we are inundated with products and advertising aimed at bogging us down and making us settle for simulation instead of stimulation.  The constant and overwhelming barrage of choice may only serve to distract or deter us from exploring other avenues of life.  And, often, when we feel unhappy, we just buy more.  Well, I’m here to say, that if that desire has ever stirred within you, toss aside the Ikea catalogue (as exceptional as it is), forego the new shoes for a time, and try on Africa.  And, believe me, in the bush, a plain old bar of Ivory soap will do you just fine. 

Re-Entry – despite wanting to capture, in writing, all the important moments and insight as they happened, in the end, the most fundamental realizations came after I arrived “home”.  I guess you do have to come full circle to truly see where you came from, where you went, where you are, and where you want to be.  In fact, I really didn’t think about how I was changing when I was there – I didn’t care.  I didn’t ruminate, scrutinize, analyze or obsess.  I just was.  I was whole.  I was happy.  I didn’t care until I came home and I missed Africa so much it was a physical aching.  I had a sensation of living in suspension between that world and this world.  People want to hear a few tales, flip through a few pics, and then move on and expect you to as well.  The demands and reality of home tug at you, while your heart and soul lingers behind.  Will you allow yourself to be distracted and move on, or will you hold on to those memories, even though they just might make you live in constant and sometimes tortuous state of questioning?  On my first day back to work I wrote, “It is my first day back at work and it is already mightily tedious.  Most everyone, except those that get it, keep saying that it will just take time to adjust back and I say to this, WHY!?!?  Adjust to what? Complacency?  Is that our society’s apex of expectation?  Is it the thread that keeps the fabric of society together?  If I found sublimity in Africa why should I not continue to aspire to it?  I DO NO WANT TO FORGET.  Forgetfulness is the road to complacency.  Maybe reintegration will bring about that state of ignorance is bliss and this will be less torturous, but it truly is an ignorant bliss.”

It has been difficult to try and express why I loved Africa so much and why 24 days was enough to have fundamentally changed me.  This is the best I’ve been able to conjure thus far:  “The crux of the African experience is that it brings your intellectual capacity and your sensual desires (the ego and the id) into stunning harmony and utter satisfaction.  It swells your brain and it pumps your heart. It is a holistic captivation of mind, body and soul.”  But it is this holistic captivation that then begs the question, can you ever be whole again?  I’m not sure, but I’m going back to find out. 

Cara MoroneyBA, LLB