From Political Unrest in Africa to a Bitter Winter in England

The extremes in life through an eight-year-old’s eyes

My sister, a teddy, a tortoise and me, Kenya. All photos are property of the author.

“Guess how old I am!” I screamed as I exited the airport to where my dad was waiting to greet us. He’d travelled out to Ghana a couple of weeks earlier, in order to get things ready for our arrival.

The day my mother, my sister and I left England was my eighth birthday, and it was a day later when we landed. My dad had missed my birthday itself but that didn’t detract from the excitement it brought me. To reunite with him was the best birthday gift in the world!

My dad’s career in economic development had secured a semi-nomadic childhood for me, and this would be the start of our last stint of living in Africa. Previously we’d spent 18 months in Tanzania, on a project that was intended to last for a good chunk of my childhood, until Maggie Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, had a fallout with the president of Tanzania and cancelled all development funding for the region. For the then tiny four-year-old me arriving in Tanzania, my world expanded overnight; learning to swim in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, zipping around the coast in a dinghy at the weekends, exploring the dry Tanzanian plains, and being part of a broad international community.