Just touched down in Londontown....

As the plane landed in London, all of my African melancholy faded away and I was excited to see my old stomping grounds. I made my way through the airport to customs, smiling like an idiot at all the happy yellow signs of Heathrow airport welcoming me back to yet another of the places I consider an adopted home. Seven years both is and isn’t a long time, but I was ready for the reunion with this city (and of course my friend Jo) to begin.

Having just arrived from Botswana, where lines are the norm, and we’ve all come to learn to just stand in them patiently, I wasn’t at all fazed by the line at immigration/arrivals. I approached the unsmiling agent, handed him my pink passport and gave him my biggest dose of friendly African style greeting of “Hello! How are you?” complete with a big smile. I was soon reminded that here in London, that is interpreted as “crazy” and treated as such.

Unsmiling Immigration Official: “What brings you to London, Ma’am?”

Me (bristling only slightly that in the last 7 years I seem to have gone from “Miss” to “Ma’am”):
“Well I missed it! I studied here some years ago and….”

UIO (ignoring my charming story and flipping through my passport, which is a different one than I had at that time and holds no European stamps. This one starts In Africa as it’s my Peace Corps passport-the other one is expired) “Oh really. And where are you coming from?”

Me: “Africa! Or really, as one should be specific about this as it’s a whole continent, I was living in Botswana-I just finished the Peace Corps- and then I flew out of Jo-burg, but this most recent flight? Well it was from Egypt…….”

UIO (cutting me off): “And where are you staying in London?”

Me: “With my friend Jo! In Paddington!” (Which I know I had written on the little form that was right in front of him, but am quite used to answering tons of ridiculous questions asked by people who have the information right there in front of them.)

UIO: “Paddington is surely a big place. Any specific information about where your friend lives?”

Me (still smiling like a golden retriever): “Well I have it somewhere, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll pick me at the train station.”

UIO (sighing): “And how long will you be in London?”

Me (oblivious): Begin rattling off my itinerary to a man who clearly DOES NOT CARE.

UIO: “And what is your employment?”

Me: “Well I’m unemployed. And really homeless too, if you think about it! See I just finished the Peace Corps in Botswana……”

UIO (cutting me off): “Do you have a ticket to leave the UK Ma’am?”

Me (proudly): “Actually I do!” Begin repeating aforementioned itinerary.

UIO (cutting me off again): “May I see it, Ma’am?”

Me (riffling through my overweight carry-on bag that was put through by the ticketing agent in Jo-burg through just this type of friendly subterfuge): “Yeah, I’ll get it for you now. I’m so glad I had my shit together (insert noticeable eye roll from the immigration agent here) and printed them off in Botswana… Do you want to see all of them or just the one from Scotland to the States? They’re marked with the pink sticky tabs and the yellow highlighter.”

The Unsmiling Immigration Official reviews my travel document as I prattle on about my upcoming travel plans.

UIO (satisfied at finally finding confirmation that the idiot in front of him was not trying to stay in his country on any sort of permanent basis, and again cutting me off, whilst almost violently stamping my passport.) :” Thank you Ma’am, this will suffice. It seems as you are indeed leaving within the allotted amount of time I won’t have to ask you to provide proof of income (muttering)-as it seems you have none- and I have to remind you that you are (loudly) not permitted on this entry visa to work in the UK. Enjoy your visit.”

Me (suddenly realizing this man thinks I’m clearly some sort of terrorist): “Uh, thanks.” Repacking all my shit into my bag and heading to the baggage claim.

As I walked through the same duty free lined hallway I passed through to enter this country on another great adventure (with blinders on, as the amount of bright lights and perfume smells and just well, STUFF that lined the shops would have stopped me for at least a few hours if I so much as glanced left or right) I again grinned, happy to be back, and excited to see something familiar from my past. I grinned at all the people who were not waiting for me, and remembered meeting my former boyfriend here, as well as my mom and sister when they arrived.

I walked over to the cash machine and inserted my card, and punched in my code. Denied.

A small part of me was swept back to 7 years ago, when I arrived in this same airport, alone and more that slightly freaked out at the prospect of 5 months in a foreign country where I knew no one (with the exception of the location of some graves that apparently held some long dead ancestors that my great uncle had told me I should go visit). I was trying to call my mom to tell her I was in London with the calling card that she gave me. We had known it was going to be the middle of the American night when I got in, but she wanted me to call to let her know I was safe so I did. The card, which we thought would last at least few phone calls was finished in about 5 minutes (first lesson about foreign pay phones and calling cards learned the hard way) and I was suddenly alone in a very big city (at least until the study abroad babysitters came to collect me, when the flight with everyone else from the East coast arrived) and I was scared.

But the bigger part of me has been dealing with bullshit of this nature in foreign lands for the past two years, and simply knew it was a matter of making a plan.

I quickly cursed myself for impulsively buying the overpriced magnet of the green World Cup 2010 mascot in the gift shop in the airport in Jo-burg, as cashing in those Rand might have been enough to try to get a tube ticket at least to Paddington to meet Jo. The little guy is creepy and weird, but I was feeling nostalgic and wanting something to commemorate my time in South Africa leading up to the world cup. Here’s his picture.



Creepy, huh?

As it seems everywhere in the world besides the Maun airport that has wireless internets locks it down and makes you pay, using my laptop to get on Skype or the internet was quickly eliminated as an option.

My next move was to try to use my card to use the internets at the little kiosks (using one's card-three pound minimum-of course-plus international fees) to see if I could get a hold of my mom (unlikely as it was still early in the States and she's usually not on the internet unless I warn her that I might be) or the bank to sort this out.

My "make a plan" skills kicked in once I realized if I could get someone on Facebook who was in the States to call my mom to alert her to the problem she could probably call the bank and we could sort this out. A second cousin of my fathers was quickly found to attempt this duty and my mom was soon on the internet and calling the bank. (thank you so much Lori!!!!!)

After a few hours, a few international calls on my credit card (the irony of using my credit card to determine why I couldn't use my credit card was not lost on me) to determine why I couldn't use the damn thing to get cash or buy a train ticket and I was feeling an awful lot closer to the girl who was here 7 years ago. I had used the internet to ask Jo to come rescue me (bless my amazing friend's warm and wonderful heart, as well as the crazy technology of everyone having the internets on their phones. I did have my Botswana phone that I tried to get a sim card for but that particular machine was allied with the cash machine and the train ticket machine in rejecting me)and was waiting for her in the train station below the airport.

As I waited for Jo's undoubtedly smiling and distinctively unencumbered with luggage figure to emerge from one of the trains, I put my ipod in my ears and felt sorry for myself. This readjustment thing was going to be harder than I thought.I chided myself for the rookie mistake of forgetting to have my mom call the bank and remind them that I would be in the UK for a month (This lovely mistake was confirmed completely the next day when I tried to get cash from the ATM at Paddington station-thinking there was a perhaps a 24 hour hold or something to do with the British bank holiday-and the machine ate my card. Thanks, Visa. This leaves me with no credit card- it shut itself down from disuse from two years in Botswana without using it and now no cash card. Awesome). My ipod was playing a shuffle playlist apparently designed by the gods to bring me right back to all of the happiest times I ever had in Botswana.

I sat against the wall of the station surrounded by my bags and thought back to the disdain in the Unsmiling Immigration Official's voice as I explained my current (and flippant) life plan. I was homeless (and now looked it in the train station sitting against the wall surrounded by my worldly possessions) and jobless (although I did briefly consider that busking might be a positive career move for the time being, before remembering that I HAVE NO TALENTS past giving my friend's cheeky nicknames)and at this point at least, penniless.

Botswana and Africa seemed so close and yet so far away, and I was swept up in longing for the kindness so commonly and frequently shown by strangers there. In Botswana if someone had seen me sitting alone in a train station they most likely would have stopped and chatted with me. They would likely have inquired as to what I was doing alone in a train station,and when I told them what was happening, they would have shaken their heads, muttered "hey" in disbelief, helped me buy a train ticket to be paid back when we got to Paddington. I quickly realized this was not going to be what happened here in London when I briefly tried to greet someone and ask how the automatic ticket machine worked and they looked at me with complete fear in their eyes that a fellow human being might be speaking to them and needing something from them.

Jo rescued me soon after, and I only made friends with one African (the smiling Nigerian ticket taker on the train) on the way home. The impersonality of the western world is going to be a tough one to get used to, but as with all things, we move forward....

Out of Africa

The sun rises over the horizon from the plane. A new day. The first out of Africa

I sit on the plane about to leave Egypt. I’ve only been here a few hours and I never even left the airport. But as I sit here, in this crazy luxury, (yeah it’s just coach, but I’m having some trouble schooling myself on how to use the in flight TV counsel thing in front of me) something pulls. I can’t even feel where exactly it’s coming from and yet something in my chest is physically hurting. I’m leaving Afrika. Like for real. When this plane takes off, I will no longer have my feet on the ground of the land that has been my home for the past two years. It’s a different panic than when I left London 7 years back, looking out the window of the black mini-cab, my mother and sister beside me and yet feeling strangely alone.

Back then I calmed myself with the knowledge that I could (and would) return, all the touristy/cultural things I hadn’t quite done would still be around and I could always come back and do them. London wasn’t going anywhere. I set myself a personal goal to come back and do England again, along with heading to Ireland and Scotland before I turned 30. It all seemed reasonable enough then, and now here I am, a year early even, on the plane to do just what I promised myself.

But Afrika is different. Sure there are plenty of things I didn’t get to see while I was here, touristy and otherwise. Many of the things I might have missed seeing are animals, or super old rock paintings or natural wonders that again, aren’t going anywhere (unless you listen to the conservationists, who will have you believe the animals, the delta, and the rock paintings will all be irrevocably changed in the next five years. Who knows. Maybe they will.) But the thing about Africa that has intrigued me and shaped me and will make me miss it is not the powerful natural beauty (although hanging out in the world’s largest inland freshwater delta hasn’t hurt for that) but the people.

And due to HIV/AIDS, the “scourge” that I was sent to Botswana to help reduce, eliminate, stop the spread of, educate about, ect-those people may not be there when I return. When the sweet people of my village would ask, “But when will you be back? (as if Seronga, a very healthy two if not nearer to three days travel from the capital city of the country which was at least a twenty something hour plane ride from Minneapolis away were just a quick hop and a jump to get to), I would have to answer honestly that I don’t know. The ex pats and white locals in Maun, more certain of the economics that dictate these decisions, asked the same question and followed it with insistence of “well you have to come back, we’ll just stick you up at fill-in-the-name-of-the-camp with our bed nights.”

Without a solid plan of what would be next in my life, or even how any income might be generated to possibly forecast when all this might actually happen, it was a hard question to answer. But like everyone who has come before me, and in everything I read, as I sat on that plane, I felt the pull. Africa is under my skin now, and I know that I’ll be back. The comfort of living in uncertainty that I learned within her borders now comforts me that although I might not be able to name how or when, (or with what money) I’ll be back.

To South Africa: A sincere good luck....

As I crossed the border from Botswana to South Africa, a feat that took no less than an hour and a half, standing in a long line in weather of a temperature which has come be feel pretty damn cold to me (good luck MN winters), I was reminded that my sister country to the south will soon be hosting the World Cup. I have to be honest and admit that at first the idea of trying to go to a game of the 2010 world cup was an exciting one, hell I was already here, and I know enough people in SA that I could have certainly found some couch to crash on. This naïve excitement was soon replaced by the reality check of what a stupendous f*ck up the whole thing could and likely would be, and I sat back and smugly congratulated myself on my brilliant foresight in avoiding the whole circus and heading to London.

The further I got into SA, the more skeptical I became. Over and over again I saw workers working at a typical southern African pace to finish projects that should have been done long ago. When we tried to take public transportation, we had to inquire with no less than ten people as to how to find which route could take us to the Apartheid Museum (which they might want to brush up on as I would imagine there might be a few people wanting to go there, and not every person who pitches up in this country is going to have pockets bursting with money, as seems to be the general impression). When numerous people tried to rip me off, I chided them in my broken Setswana (and I just learned that SA officially has 11 languages, which explains a lot), which they laughed at and thought was perhaps Sesotho. Ishrugged and shook my head thinking of all the world’s people (mostly Americans from what I’ve heard about ticket sales) who were about to descend on this logistical African nightmare.

But then, as is always the case in southern Africa, we did find what we were looking for. The Apartheid museum. It was wonderful. As my eyes welled up with tears again and again (what!!?? They had an exhibit about Mandela. That man is so inspirational he makes me well up every time.) and I thought about what not only this country but in many ways this region has been through in the past hundred or so years. As I walked through the exhibits I thought about what I’ve learned from not only the black but the white South Africans I’ve come to know and understand here, and how many sides there are to every story. I was able to put my American cynicism and judgment aside (after all, we were going through some pretty big growing pains during the time Apartheid was being instated on our side of the pond as well) and feel true empathy for what this place and all it's people have gone through.

And I was reminded of the most important lessons that Africa offers up to those of us lucky enough to spend a decent amount of time here. The lessons are about hope. And perseverance. My time in southern Africa taught me a lot about holding out for things that I believe are important, even when it seems like they might never be accomplished, or are impossible. It taught me a lot about letting go of the things I previously thought to be important, or at least to question those things, as in a majority of cases I was hanging (sometimes quite desperately) onto a lot of stuff that didn’t truly matter.

The next day on the plane out of Africa I watched “Invictus” (more tears, this time because I missed all my South African friends and their crazy accents, and because hell, it’s a beautiful story, and more Madiba). For those of you who haven’t’ seen it- and I would highly recommend it- it’s about how after Apartheid the new South African sports ministry wanted to eliminate the name and colors of the national South African rugby team, the Springboks, as they considered them to be symbols of Apartheid and oppression. Mandela convinced them to keep the team, name and colors, and the team went on to win the 1995 South African hosted Rugby world cup (I have seen how passionate South Africans are about their rugby.. getting rid of the team would indeed have been a big problem.) and provide a unifying source of pride for the country.

As I reflect back on my so recently departed adopted homelands from the creature comforts and confusion of London, I am again warmed with excitement for South Africa again on the eve of their big show. Whether they are completely successful in their big debut onto the world’s sporting event stage, they have approached the big event with excitement and hope. I put my cynicism to rest, and my heart smiles on behalf of the country and continent that eagerly awaits its turn to shine and be acknowledged for something besides the heartbreaks and hardships which seem to be all one hears about from Africa on the evening news.

Good Luck South Africa. May your World Cup debut show the world all the good you have to offer.

“Invictus”
By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Seronga Village: Joy Division

The fierce Seronga militia, ready to defend the humble hamlet in any battle....

(The title for this blog entry comes from the movie “Control” which I watched after a visiting Australian (Thanks Liam) put it on the hard drive of my computer. I found it a bit weird, but couldn’t get the band’s name that the movie was about out of my mind… and so here we are)

As the time approached for my family to arrive (back in late September.. yeah this is a bit of an old story, but it’s still cute to me) I began to look around my hut and realize some… “home improvements” might be in order. I was hoping to convince my mother that indeed I wasn’t living in the sort of squalor she imagined. The plan for when they came to visit was for all of us to spend at a night in the place so the family could really get the feel of bush life and what I had been describing about a night in a hut. As I thought about three members of my inevitably over packed American family arriving in Seronga I began to panic, and decided I needed to do a major and thorough cleaning (which ended up being really good-as despite risking heat exhaustion cleaning that oven all day I got rid of lots of shit-and the place probably needed it.)

Although I thought moving to Botswana would cure me of my pack rat habit, indeed in some ways it made it worse. I hate to shock you with this unsettling information, but there is no Target store anywhere on the continent. The dry goods store and hardware dealer in the village are only open until 5 on weekdays, and I’ve run into enough weirdly timed emergencies wherein I need strange things that I have come to save nearly everything.

Couple this with the fact that I have learned in this village how many uses there can be for what I previously would have considered garbage. As it seems the recycling center in Seronga is yet to be constructed (perhaps after the water treatment facility, road, bridge, electricity and Target store arrive… although I’ve heard a rumor that there is one in Gaborone) I also have guilty feelings about the bottles remaining from the products I’ve received from America. I’ve really begun to lose it when I see the plastic burning in the trash pile out on the compound. So thus I’ve become really creative.

Being that Febreeze has become a necessary substance in my time in Seronga (Thank you thank you thank you Keith for the influx of the stuff you brought when you came in November!) I had many empty bottles just hanging around behind my bathroom door, where I also have several million bottles of disturbingly colored water in case of emergency. There was also other spray or pump bottles that I had cleaned and saved, and the time had come to get rid of them. Remembering the Supersoaker water gun or hose fights we used to have around the neighborhood growing up, I decided to create little village militias and see what happened.

I put all the cleaned bottles in some plastic bags and set out to arm the neighborhood children with the next best thing I could think of to squirt guns. Anything that could pump out water. I walked to the first standpipe I saw near my compound and a gang of children came running at me top speed as expected. I had filled one of the bottles and sprayed the front line. They were a bit shocked and certainly confused.



Many of my little soldiers didn't have the fine motor skills or manual dexterity to operate any of the weapons that I gave them. But they sorted it out eventually..

Although not really on each other... but we had fun. Or at least I did.