back at home

1. I am back in Canada.
2. I will continue writing in this blog.
3. I should write about What It All Meant, but that's very hard to do.

I've brought a lot back with me, and I've changed a lot. But it's all so overwhelmingly internal. Whatever I've learned, whatever I've experienced, has stunningly little impact on life in Canada, in North America. If you boil my two years down to a collection of abstract ideas, it's relevant: land issues, conservation, indigenous people, non-profit grassroots organizations, race, colonialism, poverty, disease. I'm back in Canada and I suppose I can talk about those things with people. The specifics, however, hold little meaning or relevance for anyone but me.

To be fair, many of my friends and family have been interested in hearing about my experiences. However, I am more aware than ever before that Africa as a whole, and particularly Botswana - small, overshadowed by South Africa, free of any front-page-worthy African Atrocities - registers as little more than a blip on the radar of the collective North American psyche. Africa is an uncomfortable topic. The questions I most commonly receive are, "Weren't you afraid you'd get AIDS?" "Was there a war going on?" and "Were you safe?" It makes sense; the overwhelming majority of media tends to cover Africa for three reasons: war, disease, and poverty. And pirates, but I suppose you can see the pirates as a consequence of the first three.

It is difficult for me to talk about my everyday life in Botswana. There are so few points of reference for someone living here. While I was there, I didn't do very much that contributes to the accepted life trajectory of a twenty-something. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have been to Botswana (not counting the ones I met in Botswana, of course). I don't think I've ever seen Botswana appear on television or in the newspaper in Victoria. And why should it, really? Two million people, a lot of desert. A local Canadian newspaper has other fish to fry.

I often have the unsettling feeling that the past two years didn't even happen.

I existed, for 24 months, in a strange alternate dimension known as Africa. I lived with a dwindling, semi-mythic people. I gave my blood, sweat and tears to a project that may never succeed.

I know it happened, I know I was there, and I can feel the changes within myself. The San are not myths or bizarre midgets, they are wise, wonderful, real people who became my closest friends. We email each other. Even if the campsite project doesn't succeed, the Huiku Trust now has an office, staff, funding, and the precedent and know-how to plan and implement their own ideas. I know these things. But sometimes I feel as though I must repeat them to myself, in my head, a private litany to remind myself that D'Kar was not a dream.