I Wish I Was...

(Apologies to the immediate Miller family – especially Mira – who have already read this. But I liked it, and wanted to expand).

Today, a grade 3 teacher walked into the school office and asked me to help her with something. “Awesome!” I thought to myself. “I would love to help you!” I said to her. She then explained that she was having some trouble disciplining her learners – “I’m too soft with them you see, they just think I’m their friend.” Could I maybe help her come up with some ways to improve discipline? Well sure. Let’s sit down and plan. But no wait – there’s more. “You see, whenever I leave my classroom – like now when I came to talk to you – they are just running up and down and making noise. How can I keep them quiet?” A year and a half ago, I would have been circumspect and non-confrontational about maybe, you know, just as a thought, things might be better if she was in her class instead of with me. (“well…lets go to your class and see what we can do.”) Six months ago I would have suggested, with a sense of abject and defeated cynicism, that she at least give them some work to do if she doesn’t ever plan on being there. Today, I have essentially 6 months of school to go, and I said. “Oh! I know! I have the perfect solution for you – its really easy! Do you want to hear it?!” “Yes, please.” “Stay in your class! Problem solved.” The teacher then began laughing at shaking her head at my ridiculous solution, and then left the room still laughing and has yet to ask me about it again – since obviously by giving such an absurd answer, I was just joking and never meant to help her in the first place. This response has not changed at all over the last 18 months, nor do I imagine it will in the next 6. It’s just one of many things that make me miss America – and be more than happy to be heading back in not too long.

Quite often, in fact, I find myself becoming a lot or a little homesick. What I never knew, before I came here, is that homesickness has its levels and degrees, and in the past year and a half I think I’ve experienced many (though probably not all) of them. There’s the raw, ripping, grief-like feeling of being 10,000 miles away from everyone you love and all those who love you; the sudden sucker-punch of dislocation just when you thought things were fine; the sense of isolation and frustration that comes from sitting in the middle of a conversation that you can’t understand – and probably wouldn’t even if it was in your own language. Most of all though, there is the constant and low-grade sense of alienation, of disconnect or misconnect. Its as if even while I sit and move in the middle of things – take the taxi, go to the store, walk down the street, chat with a friend – some part of something is not quite genuine, is not entirely supposed to be there, and I just can’t quite get to the heart of things, behind the scenery and the script to the reality. I am, constantly, out of place. That *is my place, to be the alien, the mascot, the obvious one. Its one of the reasons that going to Pretoria and walking through the campus is such an escape. I am escaping into the invisible, to a place where I am unseen, and therefore normal. To a place where -- to those around me even more than myself -- I could be at home.

Which of course is completely normal, I think. It is grinding, the constant process of being the alien, the mascot. Smiling and greeting, being stared at, and always always always standing out. To the point that on my worse days I can only hope that there will be enough of me left after all this grinding to last seven more months. Home, after all, isn’t the place where everybody knows your name (and that could probably be a mixed blessing in a bar, too) – because I’ve got that now, and Celebrity and Home are two very, very different things. Home, I think, is the place where you know everybody else’s name, and more than that you know that you belong to it, and it belongs to you more than any other place in the world. (“Its not so very difficult to own something.” in the words of Neil Gaiman, “You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to give it up.”).

Steenbok does not belong to me, and I do not belong to it. We are visitors to one another, brief – if powerful – moments in one another’s existence. That’s not ownership, or belonging, so its not home.

Will as many people ever know who I am in Davis, in Ventura, in wherever I end up eventually? Will I have as big an impact there, or will the place shape me in the same way, with the same sharp and fleeting collision? No, probably not. But they were, it will be, mine, in the same way and for the same reason that Africa never could and never will be. I have no right to claim a place here, that’s what it is. Just like you can see a place for the first time and think “Home.” “Mine.” I think in the same way you can know that a place, a person, whatever, isn’t meant to be yours.
I remember in one of my very first letters home I wrote something along the lines of, “I can feel myself falling in love with Africa, and that surprises me.” It’s still true, of course. I still love this place. I love the feeling of coming home (a place can of course be home, even if it’s not Home) through the bush, watching the sun set to my right. I love that the other day one of my teachers called me “skoni,” which means ‘sister-in-law’ (no I haven’t married anybody! It’s also a term of endearment). I love this place, but I don’t own it, and it doesn’t own me. We maintain our distance from each other, and on some level we both know that it will not last. The place where we are coming from is not the same – and neither is our destination, even if the road parallels for a bit. Which is why a suggestion as simple and obvious to me as a teacher staying in her classroom, instead seems to that teacher the funniest thing she’s heard all day.