To my beloved, beautiful, hurting Africa… I am leaving you soon. I am closing many personal life’s chapters after 20 years of a tremendously meaningful relationship with you. From Egypt to Zimbabwe, Senegal to Somalia, Sudan to South Africa, Eritrea to the Congo, Sao Tome and Principe to Namibia, and more countries in between, I have loved you, abhorred you, laughed with you and wept because of you. I have been enthralled by your beauty, your fragrances, mysteries, cultures, oceans, lakes and rivers, deserts and tropical rainforests, savannahs and mountains. I have climbed and summited both your tallest mountains, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, and scuba dived your tropical reefs on the west and east and southern coasts. I have whitewater rafted your incredibly powerful Nile, suffered your awful, deadly malaria, and been drunk on your perfectly symphonic South African red wines. I have listened to the beat of your drums and the harmonies of your beautiful songs and danced under the “Crux”, the Southern Cross, a most magical constellation in your skies. I have relished in your nature, and seen all creatures great and small in your vast and beautiful Rift Valley, Olduvai Gorge, the Afar, the mighty Serengeti, the Masai Mara, the Virungas, the Drakensberg, Andasibe-Mantadia, and so many places in between I can’t count. I have sat with your magnificent elephants and played them the music of lovely Brahms, and Bach and the Barber Adagio for Strings to give them peace and calm, and have explored your forests and jungles to see the great silver back mountain gorillas of Rwanda and Uganda, and the beautiful lemurs and sifakas of Madagascar. I have seen your ineffable beauty and your worst, most egregious suffering in genocide, war, blood diamonds, conflict and post-conflict, poverty, greed and terrible disease. I have survived a plane crash and a high-speed head on car crash in places of war and of remote, tribal territories and have survived attacks and shootings and sniper fire in places I am too afraid to recall. I have seen too many beautiful people suffer, grieve and die here and have even buried your people. I have also buried my own mother’s ashes under the shadows of Kilimanjaro and Meru and given her a place of beauty for eternity. I have sat with innumerable children in countless villages and tickled and rubbed their tummies and talked to their mothers and fathers who exhibited African dignity and pride. They all made me smile! But most important, I have done my best to try to help your poorest of the poor, to alleviate your suffering and make your people just a little more hopeful, a little less afraid. I built you a clinic, took care of your orphaned children and stood up many many programs with the help of great minds and teams that I hope have taken care of and improved livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people on your soil. I have guzzled your beer and local brews, relished your customs and your art… and learned about your animism and a thousand powerful beliefs and tales that enhanced my life. And I have sat in the slums of countless cities, and walked on dirt roads through countless of your villages and greeted your people in all of those places. I have done what I could to help bridge cultural divides, black and white and brown and gray, and loved so many for the greatness of your culture, language and expression and art. I learned to speak your Swahili and to comprehend your Bantu dialects, sing-songyest of all! But in some days from now, it will be time for me to say goodbye and leave your home, perhaps forever. I will keep you permanently close to my heart, and recall with joy the joys I’ve seen, the assistance I’ve given, and the beauty I’ve tried to always embrace all over your continent. But now it’s time for other things in my life… a time for me to let go, process and heal. Thank you from the depth of my heart for all you’ve given to me, both great and horrific. I am a changed and honored man because of you. Peace.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:15:23 +0000
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