From Gulu Gal to Global Citizen: Home is Where the Consciousness Is
As an African American woman who has spent the past 8 years living in Eastern Africa, I’m trying to remember how many times I’ve formally celebrated Thanksgiving since I moved to sub-Saharan Africa.
During my first November in the region, after I had returned to Gulu, Uganda from my sister Julie’s October 2007 funeral, the guards and the housekeeper at my cozy little compound had pooled their funds and bought me a chicken as a welcome back/condolence gift. Their solemn poultry presentation was touching, but I remember staring at the scrawny bird in a daze. The 7-hour ride over bumpy roads from Entebbe Airport near Kampala to Gulu had left me exhausted and sore. Besides, grief had all but killed my appetite anyway.
I thanked them sincerely — -but then realized they would expect me to actually eat that hapless hen. Having never actually consumed a gift I had looked in the eye before, I told them they could keep it. In hindsight, I probably deeply offended them by not eating their present, which I regret. And I never found out what happened to the chicken. But I’m pretty sure I spent all of Thanksgiving 2007 working in the Internews Gulu radio reporter training center, and then I went home and poured myself a tumbler of Scotch, and then I probably climbed under my dingy mosquito net, curled up on my astonishingly hard and uncomfortable mattress and cried my eyes out.
But since that very first Thanksgiving on the African continent, I have embraced a startling reality I would never have dreamed possible 10 years ago:
More than being American, more even than being a woman of African descent, I am a Global Citizen. I’m not the “American to the Bone,” red, white and blue-blooded maverick I’d considered myself before I wound up living in a far-away land with people who kind of looked like me, but to whom I was as alien as a bug-eyed creature from Venus.
Prior to Gulu, I had conducted a half dozen short-term journalism workshops in Ghana, Ethiopia and Nigeria. But my real journey toward global connectedness began during my first trip to a Northern Uganda Internally Displaced Persons Camp on July 7th, 2007. On that day, which many people considered universally “lucky” (7/7/07), I was helping a group of radio reporters bear witness to the depths of despair, the most brutal evidence of how human beings are capable of degrading and destroying each other. As I have written before, the only thing that kept me from fleeing Uganda and never returning to the African continent was the sight of children playing atop freshly dug graves, or balancing plastic water containers that weighed as much or more than they did atop their heads. Those children taught me that in this life, in this grievously troubled world, you must simply get on with it, and you must still find a way to feel joy.
And here’s the thing about watching kids play…you can be in Kenya or Kentucky, Sao Paolo or Siem Reap, Canada or Canberra, and you will see kids play like it’s their contractual obligation. Like each breath depends on laughing, having fun, pushing the envelopes of imagination and physical endurance. Their shrieks and shoves and sprints simply don’t have an ethnic flavor. Oh, they may play games that are unique to their cultures, using differently shaped “tools” or cards or boards, but the basic principles are the same…draw a picture, using an iPad or a crayon or a stick in dirt, hit something round-ish with something long and thin or broad and wide, jump over something, splash around in something else.
Come to think of it, KIDS are the real global citizens. Before the insanely fear-filled structure of adulthood sets in, before they’ve had enough time to emulate the prejudices and stubborn quirks of their parents, a child will kick a ball toward anything that is shaped like them and can kick it back. They might notice that its skin color is different, or they might want to feel the texture of hair that isn’t like theirs. But if the Party of the 2nd Part wants to play as much as the Party of the 1st Part, it is on and poppin’.
Anyway, back to my Thanksgiving musings…if memory serves, my second and third Thanksgivings in Kenya were spent at one of the many tables belonging to Carole and George Jones, two vivacious, well-traveled African American expats who opened their sprawling, gorgeous home and their hospitality to friends Kenyan/African, American, European and otherwise. George was a former USAID Mission Director who had shifted careers and was working as an administrator at United States International University in Nairobi. He had contacted me after reading my emotional Daily Nation column about President Barack Obama’s election in November 2008. That first year, he was just inviting me to come and speak at USIU ‘s 2009 Black History Month celebration. After that event, George called me his “cousin” because of our shared last name, and I was guaranteed an invite to their sumptuous Thanksgiving feasts and even to several of their Christmas Eve brunches.
Nowadays, George and Carole spend most of their time in their Colorado home, but they return to Kenya occasionally during the harshest winter months. Their choice to spend decades working and traveling throughout sub-Saharan Africa, even raising their children there, was a powerful example for me about limitless living. I didn’t have to set boundaries. I didn’t have to stick a toe in the water of expat life, but always be prepared to return/retreat to the comfort of “home” if things got too real.
There have been a few other memorable Thanksgivings in Nairobi, like the one with my friend Binti, another African American who has lived in Kenya for almost 30 years. Binti had purchased a goose from a Kenyan friend who raised them, and I still laugh when I remember how tough that danged bird was. Binti is an excellent cook, but even her culinary wizardry couldn’t beat it into submission. But the other food we enjoyed that night, including one of Binti’s decadent sweet potato pies, made up for the gristly goose.
Other Thanksgivings in Kenya have been spent alone, because the holiday isn’t celebrated here and expat friends or acquaintances who I might have marked the day with weren’t around. Ironically, this year Kenya has declared November 26th a national holiday because Pope Francis is in Nairobi. Talk about your Global Citizens! While I have my own boxed-set of issues about the Catholic Church, I am definitely on board with the Pontiff’s messages about reclaiming our humanity when it comes to those among us who have the least. And because this year I am equal parts mesmerized and haunted by the Syrian/African refugee crisis, I spend far too much time lamenting the cruelty and demonization that is spreading like a pandemic worldwide.
Anyway, my own time in Kenya may be coming to an end soon. Though there is enough training and media outreach work to do on the African continent for the foreseeable future, I sometimes feel like I’ve already done as much as I can here, and that it’s time to move on to fresh pastures.
That feeling is especially strong following my recent 3-week journey to Cambodia and Thailand, where I immediately fell in love with the culture and majesty of my 5th continent. While I enjoyed a broad range of tourist-y activities (Hindu and Buddhist temples in Siem Reap, the beach in Phuket, insanely cosmopolitan Bangkok), the strongest images I retain are from rural Cambodia, or beyond Siem Reap’s tourist- oriented avenues. As I told my travel companion, my dear friend Loulou (who is an Ethiopian woman raised primarily in France, married to an American and whose children where born in Kenya, but who now lives in Bangkok), the bikes and motorcycles and dusty roads of Siem Reap were fueling some intense South Sudan flashbacks for me.
My Asian Adventure occurred about a month after my 1 year Voice of America contract, editing and mentoring reporters based in South Sudan during the country’s latest civil war, had ended. The Cambodia/Thailand trip was part leisure, part exorcism. What I had witnessed and heard about happening in Juba and throughout the world’s youngest country during my tenure had wounded my psyche, burdened my heart, left me vulnerable and vastly more cynical. I needed to forget.
A month later, there I was in yet another developing nation which still recovering from unspeakable horror and for the most part managing to get on with it. Color the people brown, and rural Cambodia was throwing off some serious South Sudan realness.
It was one of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever had in what fuels poverty and hinders development worldwide — the turbulent battle for economic parity — aka Social Justice. Those who have the most are OBSESSED with keeping things that way, and if it means 2/3rds or 3/4ths of the populace must go without clean water or electricity or health care, then that’s just collateral damage. Or maybe they just didn’t work hard enough. Or maybe some of that gravy will spill over the edge of the bowl someday and those poor folks will benefit. If it doesn’t…oh, well.
This may just be stunning hubris, but I’ve decided that when you reach the conclusion I embraced on the back roads of Cambodia, you become an authentic, certifiably gold standard Global Citizen. Quite often, that awareness comes with some solemn responsibilities. For example, I’ll be spending this Thanksgiving alone, and though I’ve grown eerily comfortable with NOT celebrating American holidays during my time in Eastern Africa, I’ll spend the day considering how lucky I’ve been in my life and career as I’m planning the next chapter. Wherever it takes me, I know that I carry “home” in my mind and heart, and that too often, it really doesn’t even exist within a postal code. It exists in your consciousness, and if you fail to elevate it, you risk falling off the end of a world that might as well be just as flat as your personal horizons.
