At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  “Abu, show your guests how we show respect for elders in Ethiopia,” Atkelt suggests. Abubeker pulls off a piece of injera, dips it in the red sauce, walks over to the other side to feed his mother. He kisses her on the cheek, and his siblings applaud.

  We’re invited to feast on more injera, made by Tigist and her daughters, and it is infinitely better than the hostel restaurant’s. After lunch, we’re served more coffee and more popcorn. I’m stuffed.

  Kyle nudges Reed and Finn, and they pull out gifts from Australia. Abubeker has never before seen Play-Doh or Matchbox cars, and he’s never had crayons or a coloring book of his own. His eyes sparkle with magic and he shouts with glee, happier than Christmas morning. He giggles with delight at the squishy feel of Play-Doh, and the whole family oohs over its Technicolor shade of green.

  Afterward, Reed and Finn run outside with Abubeker to play soccer. Tigist shows the rest of us her home, including the communal kitchen across the courtyard, a cavernous hut about twenty feet away that is shared by the other nearby households. A fire pit sits in the center of the stick-built room, and a few bowls, a pot, and some spoons are stacked in shadowy corners. Everything is tidy and ready for the kitchen’s next user. I spot a hole in the ground in one of the corners, with a small, twig-made stool fastened over the opening.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  Atkelt translates my question and Tigist blushes, then squats on the stool to pantomime its purpose. She lifts up her skirt to just below her knees, and I understand. This is a birthing stool. Incense burns at the bottom of the hole following a birth, she says, to purify the air and to waft a welcoming scent as new life is brought into the world. The new mother would remain on the stool the rest of the day, clean her body and get a few hours’ rest before the work of mothering begins. I stand speechless, in awe.

  A few minutes later, and it’s time to leave. Tigist and I hug, and I whisper in her ear, “I will pray for you.” I don’t know what else to say. I’m exhausted and elated.

  Kyle lifts up Abubeker and the five of us hug him; we tell him we love him and his family, and to obey his big brothers and sisters, to keep loving on his mother. We thank his siblings for the food and the afternoon, and for letting us be a tiny part of their family life, their community.

  We drive back to the hotel, an hour away, and sleep soundly before waking early the next morning for another arduous, eight-hour drive back to Addis Ababa. We remember to bring plenty of water. The kids drift in and out of sleep. Kyle and Atkelt chat politics, science, movies. I scroll my phone and find an audiobook on Abraham Lincoln I never finished. I plug in my earbuds, slip on my eye mask, and stretch out over our pile of bags. He runs for senator against Stephen Douglas as I watch camels scroll past my window.

  Tonight in Addis Ababa, before we wake for an early flight to Johannesburg, I don’t mind sharing a bed with two other people in the freezing hotel.

  12

  ZIMBABWE

  There’s a bridge over Victoria Falls that connects Zambia to Zimbabwe, the two countries that share a border with the largest curtain of free-fall water in the world. The bridge’s original purpose was to attract tourists—to transport them across the bridge via train, specifically—but it’s now home to a 111-meter bungee jump. Tourists come visit from around the world to zip line by the falls, or take a sundowner (hiring a boat and skipper to cruise the Zambezi River at sunset), or white-water raft the rapids. I don’t think all this is what David Livingstone originally imagined back in 1855 when he named Victoria Falls after the reigning British monarch.

  The only real purpose behind the town of Victoria Falls is to serve as the gateway to the famous natural landmark, and as such, it is the epitome of a tourist town. Clive, our guesthouse host, picks us up at an airport so small, there are no Jetways, gates, or even baggage carousels. It’s a large one-room house with a counter for checking in and a pub while you wait. It feels like a café with an adjoining parking lot for airplanes.

  “Welcome to Zimbabwe!” Clive says cheerfully as we climb into his SUV. He wears khaki shorts and a khaki button-down short-sleeved shirt, khaki socks, and khaki hiking boots. “Here—have some champagne.” He passes back two stemmed glasses and offers the kids grape juice. Outdoor a capella singers in native garb welcome tourists at the parking lot exit. It’s hard to believe we were in Abubeker’s village two days ago.

  Clive grew up as a farmer’s son in Zimbabwe, but he turned his vocation to tourism when his father had to sell the family farm. “Once Robert Mugabe came to power, the Zimbabwean dollar became more valuable as kindling for the fire than for actual currency,” he explains. The country currently uses the US dollar, and Clive uses his own thatched-roof home as a house for tourists when they come to Victoria Falls. He makes a profitable living doing so.

  Initially, we hesitated making the effort to come here. It’s appallingly expensive to get here, for one, and it’s not cheap once you’re on the ground, either. Only a few airlines fly here, and they all come via Johannesburg, South Africa, which is, for us, an incredible distance from where we already were in East Africa. Going to the falls for the weekend from Ethiopia is like going from Washington, DC, to Caracas, Venezuela, for a little three-day foray.

  But we have no idea if we’ll be back on the continent with our children; so we booked a flight and guesthouse. We can only be here four days. It’s all we can afford.

  Clive’s house is Colonial-style Africa: thatched roof, wood beams, plastered walls, a bank of windows facing the backyard. Sleeping porches dot the upstairs veranda, and every room has ceiling fans. This is the largest kitchen in all the guesthouses we’ve had, and it includes a dining table for eight. The living room has one wall of books, the other wall a collection of local wines and coffee, free for us to sample. I already mourn our fleeting three-night stay.

  We meander out to the backyard. “Hear that?” asks Clive. “That’s the falls. When the birds aren’t chirping, you can hear them from here. During the wet season, it’s so loud it rattles the windows.”

  It’s a faint white noise; I barely noticed it until Clive pointed it out. But now, I can’t ignore it. It’s hard to fathom we’re this close to another one of the world’s natural wonders.

  We have no time to waste, so Clive drives us to the falls the next morning. At the entrance to the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, a rhythmic song of continual rain reverberates as background music. Water mists our cheeks and shoulders, and the temperature is ten degrees cooler than at Clive’s house three miles away. We walk through the entrance, past the stands where waterproof ponchos are sold, and head downward to the trail.

  The air radiates a cool, damp humidity and our legs are freckled with water; we tread gingerly to avoid slick puddles and sloping slants. The water pounds louder with every inch closer we step; it mimics a ba-bump, ba-bump heartbeat as the Zambezi River pulses over the edge, 355 feet down to the basin. We still can’t see it yet, but its rhythmic call is deafening.

  Here I am, seeing Victoria Falls for the first time.

  It begins as a simple mist in the air, like a stroll on a rain-drizzling day. But I look up, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun penetrates its heat and light through baobab leaves, but it’s still sprinkling. If I were wearing glasses, like Tate is right now, I’d continually have to wipe off my lenses, fruitlessly, until they were finally pocketed as useless. Everyone remarks on the non sequitur of cloudless sky with the thundering boom, growing louder and louder as we wind down the slick walkway, closer. Then, a bend in the path, and I see them—the falls.

  There’s nothing quite like standing on a part of the earth that feels like the edge of it. A gash in the planet’s skin has created an outpouring of water so big that it’s impossible to see when it lands—a swirling mix of clouds and fog, spray and foam. Kids scream with delight at the sight of it and the up-pour of water now in their hair and skin. I keep walking, gingerly. Parts of the path have guardrails, set back just enough to observe only the to
p of the falls, but there are many more parts of the path without a barrier. I inch slowly, slowly across the slippery stones and grip my offsprings’ hands as though their lives depend on it (because they do).

  And so I am witness to the top of the falls, where the Zambezi performs its downward kamikaze into a boiling pot, the name given to the foreign pool at its base, still so difficult to reach that researchers disagree on its true depth.

  The deeper I move toward the falls, the wetter I become, until I’m finally at the meat of it all, its widespread body open for witness, and I’m wholly doused. I wring out the hem of my shirt, though it’s pointless.

  Kyle turns, says, “I’m gonna run back to the entrance and buy some ponchos.” They’re of no use by now, but without them we feel like unseasoned travelers. The kids laugh at the hilarity of looking as if we all jumped in a pool fully dressed. I cover myself with cheap yellow plastic and don’t look any less ridiculous.

  The late Lord Curzon of Kedleston, viceroy of India at the turn of the twentieth century, once said about the falls, “Such is the density and fury of the spray-storm rising into the air like the smoke of some vast cauldron, that the spectator within 100 yards of the cataract can see nothing at all, and gets little beyond a drenching for his pains.”1

  Our pains are happily drenched.

  We keep walking the path around the falls and discover a white, gleaming statue of David Livingstone, a monument to his “discovery” of the falls. Locals had already named the falls Mosi-oa-Tunya—“The Smoke Which Thunders”—generations before, but the British explorer romanticized the notion of exploring deepest, darkest Africa and finding a suitable route from west to east. Bumping into the falls was his happy accident. The Zambian town on the other side of the falls is named Livingstone, and the original 1904 Victoria Falls Hotel on the Zimbabwe side pays homage to his imperial Victorian British era. Livingstone wasn’t exactly a savior to the land. He loved it—or so they say—but he brought with him disease and a prejudiced perspective of God-ordained domination. Nonetheless, he is revered around here, at least by the booming tourist industry.

  Clive spoke of the falls this morning as if we would soon behold his religion. “There is something magical about them; I can’t explain it,” he said. “It’s the sound, the feel of the air, the sheer size of the falls compared to your body. I go there to meditate. I sit at one of the benches for hours at a time, just to think.”

  Victoria Falls was fashioned over time, after millennia of erosion smoothed away stones and the earth shook forth its gashes. God carved out of the earth yet another home for magnificence, a hidden repository. It’s just water falling, but Victoria Falls is the waterfall. It is the ultimate drink of the earth, kowtowing in obedience to the curvature of dirt and rock.

  Travel writers and explorers have long bemoaned difficulty in adequately describing Victoria Falls. Most toss in the towel, declaring with poetic license, “You just have to see them to really understand.” Words fail. Guidebooks move on after a paragraph’s description to list best nearby hotels to stay at and restaurants to try. Who am I to think I could do better? Tonight in my journal, sitting on the back porch of Clive’s thatched-roof home, listening to children snore upstairs in open-air rooms, I find myself able to do little else.

  During my sessions with Nora in Chiang Mai, I discovered a dependence on poetry. I knew its antidotal powers in my real life, when work via the Internet and hours staring at a screen required a forced clean break to something utterly different. I kept a book of poetry on my nightstand back home and would read a few pages every night before bed. I didn’t think there’d be much of a need on the road, however, and as I sit here in Clive’s backyard, having seen another of the seven natural wonders of the world this morning, I wonder why on earth I made such an assumption. Perhaps I thought our entire trip would be poetry in itself, that all the sights and smells and sounds would be enough beauty. Reading and writing poetry might break me.

  Turns out, poetry is becoming a lifeline on the road. I need to read it, and I need to write it. Reading it reminds me I’m not alone in my witness of the indescribable, the unprocessable; writing it forces me to slow down, to grasp what I’m really gathering on this journey. That lamentation I wrote at the monastery was ointment for an open wound. Reading and writing poetry afterward have been bandages. They’re protecting my soul from deeper infection as I heal.

  I scribble in my journal a terrible, ramshackle poem about the falls, but at least it gives substance to my being here. I close the journal, pad into the kitchen, and brew some rooibos tea I find in a drawer, then wander into the living room as I wait for it to steep. I peruse the dusty collection of books on the shelves and pull out a book of poetry, wipe off its spine, and settle back outside with my cup of tea. A trumpeter hornbill flies overhead, greets the purple evening sky. I sip my tea.

  I flip through pages and read a poem about the falls by a Scottish poet named Muriel Spark, published in 1948. In it, she writes that the sound of the falls begins as the hint of a sigh; then, “the cry becomes a shout, the shout a thunder.”

  That’s it, I think. That’s the sound of Victoria Falls, the drainage of water over rock into earth’s deep. They frame the resonance of the falls and do an adequate job at the impossible. But these words—the sigh, to a shout, to a thunder—that’s also my insides right now. We left to travel the world without a home, so we’re walking the earth’s paths without a safety net. In China, this was a sigh. I didn’t know where to call home, but I knew it wasn’t there. In Australia, currents gained speed, and my murmurs were cries; it felt good there, and I remembered that even this—the hum of that refrigerator, the chores of backyard chickens—this wasn’t really mine, either. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar. It felt like home, but it wasn’t.

  And now, Africa. Africa is a cry that’s become a thunderous shout. Here, people commune with the land and with their neighbors. Isaiah, Joy’s gardener in Uganda and their next-door neighbor, is her sons’ kindred spirit, their older brother; he watches over the kids as much as the flowers and grass in his custody. Joel considers it his honor to invite foreigners into the family of the Nile, to escort them up her glorious channels in his fishing boat. Abubeker’s siblings raise their little brother and watch after their mother; they invite us into their family for the day. Clive cherishes his beloved Victoria Falls, makes his home available so we can experience them. Africa is a community of strangers, but they extend hospitality like a family of humanity. Perhaps we will leave here more than just acquaintances of the continent.

  The next morning, we pack up to leave. Our flight isn’t until the afternoon, and Clive invites us to stay as long as we need. I assign schoolwork for the kids, and I sit with them on the back porch and work while they work on their math and writing. Kyle sips a beer out front with Clive, who’s waiting for a friend to arrive.

  “When he comes, he’ll have papers for me to sign. He’s selling me a house. Would you be willing to sign as our witness?”

  “Sure,” Kyle says.

  A few minutes later, Kyle signs official Zimbabwean documents as a third-party witness to a real estate transaction. Then they set aside the papers, and the three of them sit for several hours, sipping beer and discussing the merits of Buddha, Muhammad, and Jesus until it’s time for Clive to drive us to that café-pub with airplanes parked next door.

  13

  KENYA

  Frugality is our mission in Nairobi, since we’ll only be here one night. We just left Zimbabwe and are spending another small fortune and a sizable chunk of our travel budget here in Kenya, so the cheaper our quick, overnight stay in the capital, the better. Nairobi’s traffic is notoriously bad, so staying close to the airport to minimize our commute is also ideal. Pamela’s house is perfect.

  We don’t know her yet, but Pamela listed her house on a booking website, and it’s barely big enough for all of us while still cheap. John is our driver, a colossal man with a jovial belly laugh. He’s picked us u
p from the airport and has immediately won the kids’ affections by laughing at their terrible jokes.

  “What’s brown and sticky?” Reed asks him while we wait for Kyle to run back in the airport to search for, to no avail this time, Tate’s hat from the Johannesburg airport she’s just left on the plane.

  “What?” John replies, squinting into the noon sun and searching for Kyle outside the airport.

  “A stick,” Reed answers.

  “I don’t—oh. Ha! That’s funny. Yes, that’s a good one!” John says. He laughs for ten seconds, a high-pitched snicker the antithesis of his gargantuan frame. I instantly love anyone who appreciates my children’s quirks.

  Kyle returns and shakes his head, ruffles Tate’s hair and tells her she’ll find another hat somewhere. We climb into John’s vehicle. It’s another safari van, but this time it actually makes sense.

  We pass through Pamela’s neighborhood security gates, and John remarks, “I’ve never been in this neighborhood before. In fact, I don’t think I knew it existed.”

  This is because his typical clientele, whom he customarily transports from the airport to a five-star hotel and then on to their destination, probably travel on a slightly higher budget than we do. He turns off the ignition and hops out to help bring our bags inside.

  “Hello! Welcome to Nairobi!” Pamela waves and smiles, runs gaily out her front door as though she knows us.

  “How was your flight?” She shakes all our hands, including John’s. “Come in, come in. Hello, children!” she exclaims in a delightful singsong Kenyan cadence, hugging each of them.

  We walk into her home, and Pamela explains that she is an event planner, and as such, likes to make sure all details are just so.

  “Please, use all the food in my fridge,” she says, showing us a kitchen smaller than my bedroom closet in Oregon. “I just bought eggs and yogurt, and there is pasta over here in the cabinet.” She leads us to the bathroom and shows us how to finagle the quirky turn of the shower nozzle and where she keeps travel-sized soaps for guests.