Here I Go Again

Of all the people I have ever met who have been to Africa – who have spent any significant amount of time there, anyway – I have never met one who hasn’t wanted to go back. Maybe it’s because Africa is a mysterious, almost mythical, place; the stuff of legends. It is, after all, the Dark Continent, The Dark Star, The Place Where Time Began (or, at least, Man). Or maybe it’s because the whole place is such a surprising and unsettling paradox, like some exotic, black-eyed beauty that bears the jagged, angry scars of a scorned lover’s knife – you see her glory and her heartbreak both.

I imagine the reasons are as varied and as numerous as the visitors. For me, Africa is, quite simply, a place where I lived for seven months in 2007; a place to which I ran when my oft-broken heart, broken once more, could not (I believed) mend itself again.

I am asked frequently what the impetus was for my trip last year. And my answer, which some of you have heard me give a time or two, is roughly this: I needed Africa. I had struggled for some years with an often paralyzing depression and the attendant self-loathing that came when I couldn’t “snap out of it.” When I looked at my life objectively (er, as objectively as one can look at one’s own life), I felt that a person with a life as richly blessed as mine had no business feeling as sorry for herself as I did. Yet I couldn’t dispel the sorrow that had tamped its way into my chest; I couldn’t seem to move beyond my own self-indulgent misery – or maybe I just didn’t know how to. I don’t know. I just knew that I was stuck and I didn’t want to be anymore. So I ran. I thought that maybe if I went someplace where there was real need and real heartbreak, I wouldn’t focus so much on my own. I had grand expectations for how Africa would fix me, heal me, change me – and a very narrow idea of the ways in which I wanted it to.

For those of you that have kept up with this blog, you know that my trip last year was pretty much nothing like I expected it would be but that – in the end – it was exactly what it was supposed to be. And it did change me. I couldn’t say how different I was when I first came back, if at all, but I know that I am different now. But maybe that’s how change happens. Maybe the most significant and enduring shifts happen at the cellular level, unseen to the naked eye, and measured only by comparing the point at which you began to the point at which you are now. Whatever the case, I believe I am seeing the world with new eyes now and that I have Africa, at least in part, to thank (and Europe a little bit, too). So I want to go back. And, thanks to a fortuitous confluence of events, I am.

I’m going to Uganda first, to volunteer with an organization called Light Gives Heat (www.lightgivesheat.org). They run a project in Jinja, Uganda (about two and a half hours east of Kampala, the capital city) called Suubi. Suubi is a beading project, one of several in Uganda (you may have heard of Bead for Life or Thread of Life). Suubi women roll beads from long, thin slices of paper (posters, magazines, brochures), which they then varnish and string into necklaces. The LGH folks buy the necklaces from the women, sell them in the West, then use the proceeds to buy more necklaces. I’ll be doing, well, I don’t know, exactly. For sure I will help with the buying. But I’m told I should also expect to do anything from assisting with the weekly English and literacy classes LGH holds to boiling water for the women to playing with the children while the women roll the beads – in other words, whatever the need is. I’ll be in Uganda for just over two weeks. Then it’s off to Zambia to visit the fam.

I’ve been asked if I’m nervous this time. If I think about that bungee jump I plan on repeating when I get to Zambia, the answer is, um, YES (since, y’know, I actually know what there is to fear now). But mostly, I’m just excited. To see my niece, of course. And my brother and my sister-in-law. And to work with the Suubi and LGH folks. But to go, too, without the burden of my own need, without the weight of my impossibly narrow expectations, and just see what happens.

I’m not bringing my computer this time, so I don’t know how much I’ll get to blog. But if I do, it’ll be posted here. I hope you’ll check it out. And leave a comment, if you like. Those are nice. :-)