To Build a Home

At what point does “home” stop being one place and start being another?

Is it when you can offer better travel advice and more up-to-date restaurant recommendations in one place than another? Is it when you feel you have closer ties to friends in that newer place, because you’ve done a horrible job keeping in touch with people “back home”, or is it when you can speak fluently about the social ills of a country you once knew little about, but you don’t really know who is running in the next elections that you once would have followed closely, or is it simply when you give up the idea of a firm departure date?

It’s a slow, rather insidious process, this transferring of allegiances, and I don’t think it will ever be final or complete. Certainly I wouldn’t claim that a single year in Gaborone could alienate me from my family home (don’t worry, Mom) or make me a “real Motswana”, but as I settle comfortably into the notion that I don’t exactly know when I’m leaving here, I find myself more and more at ease in claiming Botswana as “home”, for now.

Perhaps the most significant moment in making Botswana home, more than finally buying a car or convincing my bosses that they should keep me on to coordinate a project I’d written a large grant for, was bringing my family here to see this magnificent country and the life I’ve built myself in it. Certainly it was the most meaningful moment.

It’s actually hard for me to express just how meaningful it was—my parents are very supportive of me, but now I’ve spent two and a half years wandering around 13 countries on this continent with an unforeseeably long time ahead and bringing them here felt like I was finally introducing them to this really important part of my life and of who I’m growing into, even though I had no expectations that I’d ever cross that barrier. Now they’ve been here and, even better, they had a good experience: they “get it” more. I’ve got this overwhelming feeling of love and gratitude that frankly I never anticipated.

From my first moments in Uganda five years ago, I knew with absolute certainty that my family would never come to Africa. We do forested, isolated, mild-summer Maine. An equatorial hut with no electricity or running water? Hm, nope. Even as I know that Africa is far more than the stereotypes and misperceptions common in Western media, the places I’d lived in and loved (in one way or another) were too hot, too loud, too crowded, too far away, too chaotic/dirty/vibrant/under-serviced/foreign/diarrhea-inducing/effusive, and simply too challenging to think of planning a family vacation in. But the idea took root that a safari might just provide a little something for everyone, that Botswana—the easiest, least “difficult” place I’d ever been to in Africa—might just suit them. After about four months of cajoling, I was thrilled to realize I’d talked my family into it.

I won’t lie: I started dropping hints about this wild, crazy idea a year in advance, and have spent an inordinate amount of the intervening time thinking through how to make their stay perfect (as all of my extended Gabs family knows). It took a lot of time and effort, and there’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe I pulled it off.

But believe it or not, my mom, dad and brother arrived at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport on a Friday afternoon in late June, mid-winter for the southern hemisphere. I picked them up in my new, cute little Toyota Vitz and brought them to the fancy central-Gaborone hotel whose executives I’ve befriended (for anyone reading this interested in traveling to Botswana: Lansmore hotel is the way to go). I won’t describe every moment of their stay, but I will highlight the following:

1. In Gabs, my family got a crash course on my life. First, they met some of my closest friends over a jet-lagged dinner. Then, I brought them to a session of the 100+-person peer support group I’ve been running at the clinic this year and while I suspect their lasting impression may be of me running around like a headless chicken (not an unfamiliar site, I’m afraid), I think it helped to put human faces to the work I’ve been doing. I know my dad appreciated the chance to engage with some of our “Young Adults” on business management tips. Then, I hosted a braai-turned-dance-party for 60-70 of the wonderful constellation—both foreign and Batswana—of wanderers, do-gooders, co-workers, hippies, hotel executives, Frisbee fanatics, academics, athletes, doctors and fellow adventurers that make up my social circle.

2. On our four-day safari (in the Linyanti region of northern Botswana and the Okavango delta), we saw how majestic elephants are, what messy eaters cheetahs can be, how powerful a male lion is, how many (indistinguishable) types of antelope there are, how striking a zebra’s patterns are, how elegant the stately giraffes are, how lush and peaceful the papyrus-lined waterways of the delta are, and how utterly stunning and difficult to find and quintessentially cat-like a leopard can be. The entire time, the feeling of how incredibly awesome it was to have my family on a trip that, under normal circumstances, I would have done on my own ebbed and flowed through me. It was indescribably exhilarating to share the thrill of new exploration and the beauty of the region, which normally I would be struggling to capture with words and photographs. Trust me, you’ll just have to come.

3. I finally got to visit Planet Baobab and have a deep, compelling gut feeling that I’ll be back more than once before I leave this country. There’s something about being out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by these ancient plants. As I lay in a hammock under the camp’s biggest baobab tree, reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fantastic book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, I thought about the number of people that had passed by that tree, the heartrending romance that at least one young couple has surely felt at its roots, the arguments that may have been held in its presence, the longevity that has held it here longer than I can comprehend. The salt pans, where we camped under the open, star-filled sky, are one of my favourite parts of the country and they are even more striking following a visit to the Okavango delta: how could there be such lush abundance of water and life, on the one hand, and such an expanse of bone-dry emptiness, on the other hand, in such close proximity?

4. My family was more attentive to the livestock wandering the streets of Maun town and to the stark differences between urban and rural than I was. I guess I’ve been desensitized. We drove by cattle posts and village homes and football (soccer) pitches of packed dirt with makeshift goal posts, and the gleaming malls of Gaborone seem a world away. I suspect I’ve been comparing rural Botswana with rural elsewhere-in-Africa, rather than with urban Botswana. It was good to be reminded not to miss the forest for the trees.

The moments of greatest cognitive dissonance at my “US life” being present in my “Botswana life” were the most mundane: waiting at the small, rather dreary Maun airport, where I’d previously been stranded for hours thanks to (utterly typical) Air Botswana delays on my way back from a business trip to visit our local satellite site, or admiring a sunset in the fragrant, scrubby bush (African sunset #826, give or take). Because these little, day-to-day moments are the bread and butter of life, the things that add up to make our understandings of what a place really feels like, for lack of a better phrase.

Much of our safari time felt like another dimension—not so much because the luxury safari is out of reach for the vast majority of local people (which it is), but more because I just didn’t connect it with my everyday life in Botswana or other parts of the continent. It was a wonderful vacation adventure of great beauty that had only circumstantial connection to normal life. Which is perhaps why I felt almost comically off balance when serial safari-goers at the lodges would tell me, with a sincerity that I am by no means trying to mock, that they “just love Africa” and ask conspiratorially whether I’d “caught the Africa bug.”

Oh yes, it’s wonderful, I’d say, unsure if “it” meant the specific and highly diverse towns/people/hassles/miscommunications/smells/delights that come to mind when I think of my times here, or if “it” meant the world of safari adventure. Then I’d find myself giving mini-lectures over the dinner table about Botswana’s health system relative to neighbouring countries, the latest national HIV/AIDS statistics and the social context behind them, and day-to-day life wouldn’t seem so far away after all.

My plan for the coming year is to stay in Botswana to work at the same clinic and with a new organization of passionate Batswana youth, on a project that we hope will reduce teen pregnancy and new HIV infections. If successful, we’ll expand through the Southern Africa region. I’m near the bottom of the bureaucratic food chain at the clinic I’ve been working at and, simultaneously, running the Finance and Development division of a start-up NGO in my spare time. My job(s) are fulfilling and frustrating and challenging and exciting and, in many ways, perfect.

Meanwhile, my collection of quiet, breathtaking moments of exquisite contentment is growing: a potluck Thanksgiving-Hanukkah with a few dozen Americans and foreigners, massive braais and smoky campfires in the bush, all-day wine tastings in the sun, clambering around on thousand-year-old baobab trees looking out on the vast expanse of the salt pans, swimming on the ledge of one of the world's biggest waterfalls, lazy Sunday breakfasts, driving along stunning mountain passes in Lesotho, and—now—setting off in a safari vehicle to see some of Africa’s most incredible animals with my family around me.

So even as I miss Mom’s cooking and the feel of walking alone in the evening through the streets of New York, I've built myself a home here in Botswana. And it's pretty darn great.