Like nothing I'd known before, until I knew it better

People ask me now, 'What was Africa like?'  I tell them that the place I came to know is laughing yet troubled, strong yet crippled, and dancing.  Africa was like nothing I had known before, until I knew it better.  But to really explain it, I have to start from the beginning. -Sarah Erdman

In flipping my calendar this morning to the bright and shiny month of July, several things happened. 

One:  I relished in the fact that June was over.  Normally I don’t feel this way about June—such a sweet, warm, school-ending month.  But this June was an exception; a terrible month of car accidents, driving rental cars, and bad feelings in the pit of my stomach over stupid things like money and material possessions. 

Two: I sighed that my one week of vacation had come and gone so quickly and that although I am tan, and relaxed, it never seems to be enough time to do all the things I think about when I’m drafting those “things I’ll do on vacation” mental lists. 

Three:  I glanced down at the bright purple note on July 28th that I depart from Dulles Airport at 11 pm for Accra, Ghana.  My fifth (FIFTH) trip to West Africa since 2002.

Four:  I crapped my pants because I haven’t even started thinking about my 10 day site visit to the motherland.  Or the malaria pills I’ll need.  Or located my yellow fever vaccination card.

(Sidenote:  However, I do use my annual trip to West Africa as a year-round excuse to buy cool, light-weight, earthy/artsy looking clothing, insisting, "…this will be just PERFECT for Benin!” and then promptly losing said clothing to the great abyss that is my closet and dirty laundry pile and going to Target three days before my trip and cursing why Target doesn’t sell short skirts and tank tops during December.)

For those of you who don’t know me, perhaps you’ll find this fascination of mine with West Africa charming.  Or perhaps even kitsch.  You’ll probably assume I’m way cooler than I really am and that I’m so well-traveled and probably really smart.  You’d, for the most part, be pretty wrong on all fronts.  You probably also think I’m the luckiest girl on the planet that I get to travel so much for work—and well, I can’t argue you on that one.  Working in higher education has its perks.  This is definitely one of them.

For those of you who do know me, however, you’ve probably already stopped reading because you just can’t stand to hear me talk about it anymore.  And that’s okay.  I understand.  I’d hate me too.  But I can’t help but talk about it.  And think about it.  And find ways to weave it into stories.  I’m starting to understand how the fundamental religion-nuts feel.

I remember in middle school, so sick and tired of being asked had I been “saved” and did I go to church—saying, yes, I was baptized as a baby and, yes, I go to the Presbyterian church on Main Street, and being met with “well have you considered OUR church?”—I finally cracked and blew up.  WHY THE HELL IS IT SO IMPORTANT THAT I BE SAVED IF I PRAY AND TALK TO GOD AND GO TO SUNDAY SCHOOL ALL ON MY OWN!?  I was met with a response: “I just want to make sure you make it to heaven, that’s all.  It’s like I know how to get free passes to DisneyWorld and I want to make sure you get ‘em too.”  Jesus.  I’m starting to perhaps make connections on why I hate DisneyWorld, too. 

I’m like this with West Africa: “Have you been?  Wanna hear a story? You should go…maybe your trip to Europe wasn’t enough…ever considered West Africa?”

And since blogs are entirely self-indulgent, this is my time to do just that.  And even though they’re pretty much like diaries that are read by anyone with an intrawebs browser, something about my blog feels cozy.  Like if you’re taking the time to read this stuff every few weeks, you might actually like me.  Or enjoy my ranting and raving about the world.  Or think I have something intelligent to say.  Or you’re just someone who accidentally stumbled across it and is now obsessed (this is my secret hope that you’re all strangers out there building a cult following of me.  In reality, I know it’s just you guys).

I decided to start blogging last fall because I was sad.  My grandmother was dying and I was filled with sleepless angst.  I’d sit in my living room at three in the morning wondering how I’d make it through my 8 hour work day (9, let’s be honest) and my grad class, and still manage to be the bubbly, happy Lindsay that my friends and colleagues know me to be.  I started writing.  Tons of it.  Ever since I learned how to write sentences this has been my coping mechanism.  When shit hits the fan, I start writing about the shit.  And the fan.  And the people who get hit with the shit from the fan. 

When my parents divorced.  I wrote.
When my siblings got married.  I wrote.
When I graduated high school.  I wrote.
When I had my heart broken.  I wrote.
When I lost myself.  I wrote.
When I found myself.  I wrote.
When I lost myself, again.  I wrote.

You get the picture.  So I thought I’d give this “sharing it” thing a go, as I’m pretty sure my friends were tired of waking up to word documents in their inboxes with headlines like “couldn’t sleep…read this and tell me what you think.”

So when I studied abroad for the first time in Ghana, I wrote.  I wrote things that were appallingly self-righteous and myopic; things that now, frankly, embarrass me to read (even in my head, where things are safe).  But I was doing what we all do as humans—I was shifting from one place to another.  From a smaller circle to a bigger one; one with bigger ideas, harder realities, and steeper consequences.  We learn.  We grow.  We change.  Amen, hallelujah.  

Some part of me has always desired to become a famous writer.  I have a fantasy that someone will discover me—think I’m brilliant—and offer me a lot of money to sit at small café tables and write what I think about the world.  That I’ll be given travel allowances and take off for weeks at a time with a laptop in my leather satchel (you know, the one I'll buy when I can afford it?) and a big fat expense account.  What a dream—to be someone who gets paid to be a person with things to say; someone who others look to for advice and support.  Someone who can churn out words that carry meaning and weight and power in the most challenging of moments.  Someone who can sense silent words, too. 

But this fantasy also carries a fear—a fear about what this kind of writing can do to you.  Does it lose its cathartic value when it’s being demanded by an editor or a greater public?  Would I ever really want to ruin what I've got here for myself?  I’m thinking about all the times I’ve used my insomnia to process the things I see and hear into short stories or pieces of poetry; all the times I’ve taken my deepest fears and insecurities into a leather-bound journal and written sentences that make no sense and follow no rules of grammar but translate everything I need to say into letters and words and spaces on paper so that I can feel better about tomorrow. 

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the journals and journals of angst-ridden writing, processing my own adolescent and post-adolescent struggles with racism and classism and “finding myself” are quite worth the read.  It’s mostly a lot of garbled words struggling to describe this feeling I’ve had for most of my life—this desire to do more, learn more, and understand.  To embed myself in really hard places and think my way out of them.  Crying and cursing all the way out.

And this thing with West Africa was in me from day one (I feel sure of it).  It’s not that I just woke up one day, watched the Lion King, and decided to become obsessed with Africa.  No.  In typical Lindsay fashion, it was a much more long-winded, complicated story.  With a lot more dips and bends and uncanny coincidences.  I didn’t dream of going on safari as a child or hold onto some colonized vision of traveling to an uncultured, uneducated land and teaching the masses of my great knowledge and heritage.  No.  It was more a whisper.  A thread that seems to have woven itself into parts of my life that I’m just now beginning to recognize.  A rhythm in my day-to-day that I can’t ignore.

An opportunity to go for the first time and three weeks of walking around with my mouth hanging wide open.  And seven years of processing and going back again and again and learning more and growing.  And finding deeper roots. 

And it isn’t really Africa itself, so much as how life is enacted there.  The way people live.  The culture.  Which I suppose is inescapably connected to “being African”. But from my limited scope, it’s about music.  And struggle.  And community.  And pain.  And beauty.  How communities celebrate together and mourn together.  How people find ways to sustain despite access to critical resources like clean water and nutritious food.  How people can learn about things like astronomy and mathematics and biology from working fields and harvesting crops and raising livestock.  How family means everything and how much corruption can damage a person’s sense of themselves.  How powerful wealth is and just how dangerous power can be.  How little we know about the rest of the world.  How intolerant we’ve all become to darkness and anything “other”.  And what this all means to me.  In my heart.  In my life here in Baltimore.  In my work with urban youth.  In my work with college students who are just beginning to lose themselves and find themselves again.   

Mostly I think it’s been about how me going to Africa doesn’t mean anything to the universe at all.  This journey is mostly about me and me learning how to strike the balance between “this is what I can do” and “that’s bigger than I am”.  Learning to bite my tongue as much I love using it.  Learning how to just watch and observe before offering suggestions for change.  Learning how to be uncomfortable.  Learning how to be faithful, honest, and humble.  Or perhaps just learning how to do those things better than I did before.

Feeling heat in places you didn’t think you could feel it.  The sound of drums reverberating up your spine and around your heart, coupled with the exquisite preservation of tradition lingering in formal ceremonies.  The hair on your arms standing up straight because you’ve never seen something so beautiful—something so simple and so pure.  Witnessing poverty in a staggeringly real way but in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling empty like it does here in Baltimore.  Feeling scared and unsure, stripped of all my usual defenses.  The adventure of it all.  The realness.        

In flipping that calendar, I’m allowing my brain to go places I don’t normally allow it to go on a workday.  And even though I’m working while I’m traveling, I can’t help but take it somewhere deeper, somewhere more powerful.  Seven years ago I woke something up inside of me and I can’t get her to sit down and shut up.  Something inside of me that make me feel anxious and excited and scared and thrilled all at the same time.  Something that I can’t seem to quit.  

I started this entry with a quote that I love because I was feeling reminiscent, but I realize now that maybe I only love it because I get what she means.  I’ve felt it.  I read this book by Sarah Erdman in between my first two visits to West Africa.  She spent a year in Mali with the Peace Corps, came back and wrote a book about it.  Her book, along with several others in the same genre, have been enormously useful in helping me frame what I think about what I’ve seen and felt and experienced.  She’s no New York Times bestseller, but she wrote this book as she was going from a smaller circle to a larger one; as she was growing and processing and starting to understand better who she really was in the wake of feeling all these things you feel when you spend a lot of time in what the big fancy sociologists call a “collective society”. 

She summarized all the things I’ve been trying to say for years about my time in West Africa in just a few succinct sentences. 

People ask me now, 'What was Africa like?'  I tell them that the place I came to know is laughing yet troubled, strong yet crippled, and dancing.  Africa was like nothing I had known before, until I knew it better.  But to really explain it, I have to start from the beginning. 

I’d make one quick change to this statement.  I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to explain it.  And I'm not sure anyone else really cares as much as we do.  And I’m pretty sure that’s okay.