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.