Dear Family: Meet Africa

I returned this weekend from my two-week holiday with my family. We had a wonderful, adventurous, fantastic time and I have a bunch of stories and some gorgeous photos (mostly courtesy of my dad and his super new camera!) to share, as well as some of my sketches; however, I'm going to take this entry to be a bit more personal than usual.

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Africa

I love Botswana. I love Africa. The first time I went to Africa, I started this blog – I went to Kenya with the Princeton University Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, and I fell in love. I couldn't tell you exactly why – or I could tell you so many reasons, but they wouldn't add up. I love the open space. I love the tropical light, the sunsets and sunrises, the passionate rainstorms. I love the people – all of them, from the wise, resilient villagers, to the un-politically-correct, adventurous, independent white farmers, to the sassy urban youth with their big dreams and fantastic outfits. I love the animals. I love goats running around town all day, and I love crossing paths with elephants in the middle of the bush. I love the heat and the sense of the frontier.

There are many things I can list that I love about Botswana. Yet, if I were to talk about India, I could compile as attractive a list. I loved many things about India; there were many things that I loved far more in India than in Botswana. (Food, for example. I could write a thousand paeans to Indian food, and just one word about Botswana's: BORING.) In India, I loved the heat and the light and the people, along with the architecture and the mysterious depths of spirituality, and the hectic, energizing press of the population. So many things were easier there, and many things were more interesting. On the whole, I was happier in India than I've been in Botswana. But I didn't love India.

I left India with no desire to live there, no fierce yearning to make my way, to find a way back there, to intertwine my life with the people I'd met. I loved Kodaikanal and I have a fierce yearning to visit, of course, but it wasn't at all the same feeling I have about Africa. I suppose it's an irrational feeling, as many loves are. It can't be easily explained, and it's not the most logical choice. It's certainly not convenient, and perhaps not what someone who knows me would predict. And there are many places I've never been; this may just be the warm-up for my upcoming mad love affair with Peru, say, or Mongolia. I doubt it, though. Africa has my heart.

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Family

I love my parents. I love my family. I would say that I am closer to my family than the vast majority of my generation; that we keep in closer touch, enjoy each other's company more, and find the idea of living with each other to be much more appealing. I feel extremely lucky to have such a close relationship with my family. It is a combination - like many things - of genes, love, luck, and effort. On both sides, I come from families who value family enormously, who have used their families as an anchor through difficult times, and an inspiration. As a comfort and as a source of friends and fun. I come from a family whose members are not afraid to show their affection for each other.

My parents and my brother are the best roommates I could have. I recognize, of course, that living at home forever is not a good option – and like any roommates, we have our disagreements. But I love splitting dinner duty with my family. I love talking and cooking and watching television, and just being in the same room. I love being free of the need to perform some kind of expected persona; I am not any of the various characters I've built up or grown into over the years. I do not have to produce any sort of special knowledge or demonstrate any sort of special skill; I do not have to look hot, or offbeat, or professional; I do not have to reel off travel tales or dish gossip or try to sound smart. I am just myself, whatever sort of self I was from the beginning and will always be.

My family is my heart, my root, my anchor. The shore to which I will always return. The reason I am able to do everything that I do. The nest I took flight from, and the ocean in which to scatter my ashes at the very end.

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Dear Family: Meet Africa

This visit, for me, was a chance to try and introduce two of the great loves in my life: my family, and Africa. How could my family understand my love for a continent they've never been to, when I can hardly explain it myself? I am certain, as I am certain of very few things in my life, that I will return to Africa. Yet it was a place totally unknown to the most important people in my life, and deeply misunderstood by the rest of the world.

Two weeks is a brief visit, but it was full. It was not a particularly carefree holiday. I hadn't realized just how important it was to me to have my parents visit – to have them, for the first time, understand a piece of me that was never accessible at home in Victoria. They came at a time when I am preparing to leave Botswana, preparing to desert my love with the promise of return. They came at a time when I am trying to map out the next five years, knowing that this place will be part of it. They came to a place and a time that I hadn't shared with them very much, or indeed shared with anyone from home.

I suppose that as children grow up and move away, their parents inevitably know them less. Any employee of Kuru understands my day-to-day life better than my mother and father. Yet no people will ever know my essential self better than my parents; no matter how long I leave for or how far I go, nobody will know me more honestly or more completely. This, I think, is also difficult for me. I don't think my parents treat me like a child; yet the person they got to know the best was the young me. I am the same person, but I've added layers, I've changed. It is always difficult for parents and children to really know each other as adults and allow their relationship to adapt, particularly as it will always remain a balance of parent/child and adult/adult.

For some, the relationship swayed towards adult/adult far too early; children who had to counsel or escape their parents. I was lucky enough to stay firmly a child (now and forever!) for a long time, and it therefore means a lot to me for my parents to see me in a working, “adult” environment. On the other hand, I find it difficult to interact with them as a responsible adult, perhaps because I have so little practice doing it. Somehow I revert to a more dependent self, while feeling resentful that I must become a child again, and crushed by the pressure to prove that I am a functioning adult with a meaningful life. I imagine that, in a way, my parents have the same conflict; the desire to behave towards me as though I were a responsible and independent adult, and the desire to have their little daughter back. The trick for us all is to accept that I can be independent without losing my connection to them.

After a time apart, you must re-learn each other, particularly if it is in a new context. The same dance is performed every time you reconnect with friends that you haven't seen in a long time; you have to work for a little while to reconcile the old image with the image built up from the emails and phone calls that were exchanged in the interval, and with the new reality in front of you. After awhile, the three images blur together. If you really were friends, you'll be happy with what you see.

This visit was necessary, wonderful, difficult, a learning experience. It was also a fabulous holiday involving all manner of wild creatures, the most luxurious camping on the planet, and a five-star resort... As well as atrocious service, bush camping with no water or amenities, and too much driving on dusty gravel roads. I feel that my parents know me better after this crash course in Jenn's Life in Africa, and that is hugely important to me. Perhaps Africa, having met my parents, understands me better as well - to know me, you must know where I come from.

Enough of the emotion! Tales from the bush coming later this week.

To my family (including my brother Albert, who couldn't make it – but we watch Survivor online together, so that's kind of like being in the bush, right?): I love you very much.