Missing my Home...

      ...away from Home <3

I found a story, explaining, through the eyes of an American woman, what Africa is like. She put it in words that I could never have written. Here is her story, along with my pictures.

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"There’s this space. This big spilling space that stretches and leans and reaches so that a spreading sky can cast itself huge and blue overhead. Blue calico strung tight, with the tiniest horsetail of white, so that it’s out of piercing range of sharp landmarks, so that it’s pulled high and doesn't dip and sag and steal those landmarks thunder. And when the rain comes its generous, for the show is always spectacular as it muddies the blueness and steeps it in charcoal clouds which it rips apart with jagged swords of hot light. You can see for miles in Africa, miles and miles: put your flattened palm to your brow and screw up your eyes and see the furthest away horizons, where the earth touches outspread fingers with darkening sky in a reassuring gesture as night falls, as if to say, ‘it’s okay, it’ll all be here in the morning’... Before it plunges itself into mad psychedelic dusk, a son et lumiere, a disco in the sky, the moon a high-strung orb.

And it’s the peculiar way the dust hangs, clouds of it kicked up by the hooves of cattle or the tires of boda and car, it smudge the picture to a soft-edged texture. The way it back lights late afternoon.

And it’s the broadwhitetoothed smiles in black and mocha faces, the hopeful way a woman will sit patiently roadside with three piles of six tomatoes each. Waiting for a buyer. It’s the scent of roasted corn she turns on a small fire. It’s the children that gather at her skirts and laugh and point and wave. It’s the cheerfulness with which a girl will hold a banana leaf aloft as an umbrella in torrential rain. Getting wet doesn't matter: not when she has cultivated a field of maize. It’s the determined way Africa’s little people live valiantly on in the face of adversity and corruption. The way everybody says hello. Even, and especially, when they don’t know you.

It’s sitting by a river and watching the gentle, slow-tempo movement of chocolate brown water, noticing the ants scurry and dig and home-build in the sand at your feet. Watching and thinking about everything and nothing.

And it’s the noises you don’t hear until they’re not there. The click and hiss and high-heel kicking of cicadas. The way the noonday bush broils as if a hundred tiny pressure cookers were on an invisible hob. The muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. The shrikes and doves which become white noise until you can no longer hear their squabbling and songs and mourning calls. Roosters who haven’t learned the rules: you’re not supposed to announce the dawn again at ten to three in the afternoon. Who cares? This is Africa!" 

- Unknown

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I never stopped miss Uganda since the day I left. It has been 1 year and 5 months, and each month that goes by only adds on to my longing to be there again. But my heart is torn..... My home is here, and my family is here, but, its also there. How can one be in two places at one time? How can one's heart be split in half, one 10,000 miles away from the other. <3



Blessings always