Sunday, June 19, 2011

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Goodbye to Africa

Douala airport smothered under the heat of a hot and stormy summer night. The earth outside was sliding with mud under the stamping of the hot rain, which clapped against the windows. The storm wore on into the night, as we contorted in our seats in a pathetic attempt to stay awake and monitor our nearby bags through the night. The rows were speckled with sleeping forms but no sound came from them that could whisper above the storm. The whine of rabid mosquitos would graze our ears intermittently, but swatting is of little use when sleep is tugging you numbly away from your body. No concern for our bags or malaria could keep me fully awake now. Hours and more hours waned on toward early morning. This was our last night in Africa.

Right around 1pm, as expected underfoot of the rain, the power cut and the airport terminal swam instantly in darkness. The Africans around us didn’t stir or exclaim, so usual and everyday was this occurrence to us now. In the sweltering darkness, under the overture of lightning bursts, we recounted our past months on the continent and waited for a slow-drip departure back to a world that so few here would ever see. The fatigue of those many months made my teeth chatter in the wet-hot heat of the buzzing room. The figures of those I had met and the moments we had spent together made me question myself - my origins, my former life, my reality and that of the world over. The seen and the unseen. The known and the very, very unknown. And still. I slept.

The yellow sands of Bagamoyo with its sticky coconut breeze and smooth, oily, delicious bread. Tanzania’s oasis of friends, western and African, who made room in their sun-baked lives for us. Saved us from naivete, from boredom, from disease when we might not have saved ourselves. The empty school room full of our 30 primary school kids holding hands in a circle, who, led quietly by the lovely voice of their new Tanzanian teacher, erupted into a full chorus of giggles and song. Each one lit-up and big in the eyes and bobbing their heads in ecstatic enjoyment. It may have been a little out of key sung by six-year-old voices, but it was an Aria to me. I could hear them still now, in my half awake state of sleep. And remember the weight of my Josephine’s soft little head in my lap during storytime. It had been months since I had seen her and it would be a whole lifetime before I did again, which meant most likely never. And even if I did, she might not remember. All she might see of me then would be old and white and unfamiliar. But in this lucid dream in a dark airport under the watch of another tropical storm, I can grasp that eye-welling spark of what I imagine it might be like to be a mother.

The crunching snows of Kilimanjaro came to me next, of which I have yet to write down in words. The high moon in its clear, dark doorway watching over us as we crawled toward the summit. My small breath that came less and less, my lungs that were filled with the fluid of illness, my head that was afraid for where on the ascent I would give out, and my heart that liquefied in sheer desire to reach the top. Now we are on our way back from the frozen and lifeless eyelid of the summit, skirting the black and icy rim of the crater. We are beginning our descent just as we watch the thin lip of the horizon spread slightly with pink and then split with orange as the sun begins to rise. When I saw the crest of its red-orange head break over Kenya, I knew I had really made it. Just in time to be sick behind a rock.

Late night laughter with friends in Uganda. The grating voices of the roosters and the children playing in their bucket baths outside. A night dancing feverishly and foolishly until the early morning hours in Kampala. Dust rising around our boda boda motorcycle as it winds around the dirt roads and through the rambling bush on our way to the next town - an unruly and freeing experience worth smiling about. Cold baths from a bucket, crouched in a lutrine whenever there was water. The bright expressive faces, unhearing cries and loving arms of the deaf children at the little school a few miles down the red road, their eyes clinging to every detail. The unknown little patch of sandy earth where they live under the sun, a place that I was both honored and aghast to visit. They run through my dream just as they did in life, springing with joy on bare feet during a silent but happy game. They have defined for me the barest, most essential meaning of life - and proved that it can be lived without words, without things or without means. But hardly without friends. Gargoyle storm clouds out over the open hills of Uganda, ready to fall.

Relief and rest in Rwanda. Silent towns gathered in annual mourning over the remembering blooms of a 17th spring. The glittering pool of Hotel Rwanda, Kigali city lights reflected in its smooth and uninterrupted visage. A long journey through the green hills that never stop growing.

Cameroon at last. Rows and rows of sweet palms and great green plantains. Grey, rocky foot paths down to school and taxis stuffed with strangers whipping through the rain toward the coast. The bath-warm water of the sea, rolling over your ears as you lay under its gentle tides, black sand rolling up to the mainland. Classrooms of faces - if only I could remember each one. Malaria. Cold, sweaty malaria. Nights awake listening to the dogs fight and waiting for dawn. Cold drinks with friends in town on a hot and humid school night. Bus rides galore, watching the wooden market shacks pass. More storms in the night - the growling trumpets of the coming rainy season. And now, the end.

The power clicked back on and dim lights flooded Douala airport, chasing darkness and memory from the wire bench that had riddled me with wiry red sleep marks. Slowly, people began to line up in wait for the opening of check-in. This morning, our plane would inch out into the world in darkness and turn its nose toward our own world, that world glittering in lights, loves and small cruelties that were waiting to receive us. Would we follow it without thinking and never turn back to our current selves, these phantoms in transit between what we used to believe we were and what we aren’t so sure about now? Will we run, tired and thin, into its freeway arms under its skyscraper gaze and go right back to the way we were before? Warm showers, ready food, clean bed sheets, fine wine, new jobs - would these newfound delights soon become just daily assumptions for the unthinkingly privileged? What would we say to the friends we missed for so many months - or would words desert us? What would it feel like to belong again?

We walk side by side down the long, half-dark and empty hall to the Gate. Unsteady and unsure but full of new inquiries. Throwing ourselves on our futures and hoping for the best.