Into Africa - an imaginary walk

    What in the world could possibly run through a Massachusetts country girl’s mind that would urge her to throw herself into the heart of the blazing African summer with only a backpack, a camera, and a notebook, where nothing, not even water and air, are anything like home? Everything spoke against it - my safe-seeking heritage, the language barrier, my status as an unaccompanied young female, the extreme foreignness of the several customs and cultures, my parents, everything. And still the hollow call of wild Africa drew me from my native shores. It was the power of curiosity, so irresistible, that drove Pandora to unfasten the forbidden box of unknowns. The gift from her lover Zeus was too tempting to let be.  In the same way, the earth lies before me, ominously staked out by politics and war. But it seems a sin to choose ignorance and hide in the comfort of my small New England existence, never to know what it is to be 4 in Namibia, 40 in Chad, rich in Ethiopia, poor in Ghana, educated in Egypt, illiterate in Burkina Faso – to be in someone else’s shoes, or sandals, or bare feet, or what have you. The true and selfish reason that I answered that call was because I wanted to know; I wanted to know what it was like to walk at least a mile in someone else’s shoes. To never advance beyond one’s region or country is to hear only half the story. It is equal to reading one chapter of a book somewhere in the middle with no concept of what came before or what follows after. It is only part of the song, a few frames from a film, a picture torn in two. Left incomplete nothing makes sense; the image is fuzzy, the melody, the poem, the plot all lack completion.
    I like to say I am all about the experience. I do not want to carry much baggage; I refuse to carry a cavernous purse; I thwart the desire to own every material thing I think I want in life, because what I truly want are experiences, more than clothes, more than shoes, more than money or multitudes of books even. I want the only thing I can wrap up tight and slip into my pocket, the only thing that counts in the span of a lifetime, that which will not evaporate as other things do. Experience internalizes everything you may have heard about a place, a situation, or a concept. Think of reading about racism versus experiencing first hand what it is to be rejected for who you are; imagine climbing the fierce peak of Everest instead of watching the documentary from a comfortable fireside chair; picture what it is to be welcomed, though a stranger, into the heart of the village as I was. Life is about experience!
    Before embarking on this journey my French consisted of two phrases learned from our social worker upon the occasion of my youngest brother’s adoption from Burkina Faso six years ago: “C’est le temps pour dormir” and  C’est le temps pour manger” which translate as “it is time to sleep” and “it is time to eat.” It is enough to get around a city I suppose, the countryside, however, is a whole other potbrood (South African pot bread). Armed with these phrases, an English-French dictionary, some knowledge of romantic language grammar, and much determination, I acquired enough vocabulary that summer to keep up with the conversations around me and even developed a decent accent to boot. I traveled from village to village, city to city, and even from country to country, taking in what it means to be a part of this arid continent. Every week was spent in a new location, staying with a family, working alongside them, documenting each step of the way how they carry out an ordinary life.
    I worked fields, ground grain, learned to bake bread, herded cattle, cleaned up trash from city gutters, hawked fruit in open-air markets, accompanied statesmen on business, dug wells, dug graves, built homes, and sang and pounded in the occasional drumming circles. But the most universal of these acts through out all the countries I walked through was the dance. Not every region of any culture shares the same dances, but the style of their continent is undeniably recognizable from a thousand kilometers away. No civilized westerner in his right mind ever dances like that. He would be laughed out of New York and all the way to Idaho with no afterthought as to how a human being could possibly perform such impossible feats of endurance and elasticity. The semester of West African dance that I had taken my first year at Mount Holyoke is what brought me initial acceptance in almost every village I went. Not that I was incredibly good at it mind you, but I did dance with heart, losing myself in the music, flailing just as vigorously as the rest of them.
    The dance provided a means of communication that compensated for my initial lack of French. A language barrier is an isolating handicap; it prevents the outsider from feeling completely welcomed in to a new environment no matter how hospitable the host may be purely by the fact that one cannot easily communicate even so much as a simply thought. When we danced, however, it did not matter that I was a little WASPY girl from blue Massachusetts who sounded like a speech-impaired frog attempting to croak out discombobulated French. What mattered was that dance was a language we shared in common and could throw ourselves into together, understanding fully and completely what emotion each movements came from. That was how close I came to touching the heart of Africa.
    I know it seems I speak of Africa as casually as though she is one larger country, but from her northernmost tip unto her far south tail, no one village is the same. I walked  across Africa because it is nothing like what I know. It was like living in another dimension: no ipod, no laptop, no cell phone, no billboards screaming hideous ads - just miles of desert, mountains, crushing poverty, shameless wealth. Continued tensions between many tribes, as well as the remnants of genocide in countries like Darfur and Rwanda haunt abandoned villages and thicken the air. It is not exactly the kind of place nice New Jersey families go to on holiday.
    I will always retain a lasting impression, several lasting impressions in fact, of moments I spent with my hands in the bread dough along side them, the peoples of the nations, kneading out the problems of that less comfortable life one vigorous thump at a time. I went desiring to know how other people lived in the everyday, hoping that I could better understand them and maybe even better understand myself; and, perhaps use that knowledge to relate to all people that I encounter, to let them know they are understood. Opening my Pandora’s box may mean finding some, if not much, pain and suffering as is to be expected of reality. But I also hope to find other more hopeful things as well to nurture the ties, not so much between nations, but between people. Because of this desire, I cannot leave it all to someone else - a newspaper, a reporter - to tell me what in the world is going on. I want to go and see for myself: experience it, live it, not just hear about it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this experience is worth at least a hundred thousand.

Though the above events have not actually taken place (since I have never been outside the continental United States), they are a representation, a glimpse, of what I hope to experience.