It's been almost two years since my last post and again, a lot has happened. My stepchildren are now in the United States and living here in Berkeley with my husband and me. So I have a lot of ground to cover and will have to do some retrospective writing.
But first, here's a short story that I wrote in my amazing and inspirational friend Marisa Handler's writing course two years ago.
Lost in the Bush
We were sitting at a fork in the road,
deep in the West African bush.
Before I could stop him, my stepson, who is always ready to
problem-solve, jumped out of the truck to get closer to the faded
hand-painted sign with a badly rendered elephant on it, illuminated
only by our headlights in the dense darkness. My first trip to Africa
had involved an expensive safari, yet I never got out of a vehicle in
the bush. And now my stepson was standing at the
crossroads in the
middle of the night, prime nocturnal animal feeding time, trying to
navigate. So I jumped out after him, realizing that, despite a
lifetime of doubt, I had done what parents instinctually do: try to
protect their children. My husband and his two daughters stayed put,
peering out at us from behind the safety of glass and metal with a
mixture of anxiety and excitement. This was an adventure, after all.
The excursion had been my idea. I was trying to make the most of the
meager six days I had to spend with my new family, which I was meeting
in Niger and had not seen in the seven months since the exceptionally
cross-cultural marriage that bound us together. I am an inveterate
planner, an intention that found itself at odds with the improvisatory
chaos that is West Africa. But this trip was loaded, and special. How
could I build a parental relationship with three children whose first
eight, ten and twelve years of life experience were lived in a
different world? My husband and I had married in Niger with the
intention of having him immigrate to the United States and then, once
he had gotten settled, bring his children. So, as my therapist told
me, I had to start “building the bridge” between their universe and my
own. This was a responsibility only I could fully shoulder. And to
shoulder it, I had to give them an entry point into the world beyond
what they knew, which in my mind translated into experiences that they
would love, that would in turn encourage them to love me.
I found the answer in my guide book: African animals. My experience in
Niger had shown me that where basic infrastructure and resources are
so lacking, there is a significant dearth of children’s activities.
But one thing that Niger had that California didn’t was elephants, and
antelope, and crocodiles. And, despite having lived in close
proximity to these animals, the children had never seen them. So here
was my opportunity: an overnight trip to a game preserve where we were
guaranteed to see animals, could stay at a rustic bush
camp, and bond
over it all.
In an attempt to organize this trip in a way that only a nasara like
me would do, we paid a visit to the National Tourism Office, a small
unmarked room in a crumbling mid-century concrete building that not
even the people who sold fruit or leather shoes or packets of Kleenex
or flashlights for the inevitable power outages right in the shadow of
said office could help us locate. After traipsing around for almost an
hour in 110-degree heat with three grumpy children, we found it and
the effusive young man inside, smiling broadly at the chance to
actually serve some tourists, gave us a road map and detailed
directions to the game preserve. When the multiple phone calls he
placed to the bush camp went unanswered we decided to
head out anyway.
One of my husband’s most admirable qualities is a patience so
unfathomable that sometimes I believe him to not be human. But the
time I have spent in West Africa has at led me to understand that this
trait is born out of necessity. When nothing happens the way one
expects, and when this constant shifting of plans and expectations
always involves interminable amounts of waiting, one must develop
patience. In the five years I have known my husband, I have tried to
parlay my admiration for him in this regard into an effort to increase
my own capacities. Although I have made progress, the results are
still mixed. And West Africa always provides me with tests of my
newfound, half-baked serenity in the form of unexpected diversions
from my carefully-laid plans.
In other words, the Tourism Office visit, which took three times as
long as it should have in what I consider normal circumstances, meant
a two-hour delay in our departure. We were leaving mid-day and
therefore had less time to reach our destination before dark. But I
was determined, so we headed out of town. The endless rows of clothing
boutiques (several named after our half-African president), roadside
peanut stands, grimy motorcycle repair shops, makeshift brochette
poulet frites restaurants with all varieties of charred meat smoking
on the grill, the bustle of unregulated traffic and non-stop commerce
and children carrying baskets of food on their heads, quickly ceded to
the bush. Squat, low-lying trees spread their branches
wide over dusty
expanses of bright red earth, punctuated by scrubby clusters of bushes
and a young man astride a donkey cart or a woman carrying a load of
firewood on a rickety old bicycle. Now and again a village popped up
on the landscape, a close grouping of adobe and cinder block houses
alongside teardrop shaped granaries sitting precariously on stilts.
Short distances always take so much longer to cover than one would
imagine, and as we travelled towards the preserve it became mid, then
late afternoon. We arrived at the point where our friendly Tourism
Office employee had indicated the turn off from the highway, yet, true
to form, there were no signs or markings of any kind. This lack of
clarity turned into a dispute between my husband and I, which I, being
behind the wheel, decided I needed to win.
So we continued south. Late afternoon headed towards sunset, and the
light became richer and deeper. As harsh as the climate in West Africa
is, the moment just before dusk is unspeakably beautiful. The sun
turns the landscape a deep orange and the heat, so unbearable during
the day, becomes soft and enveloping. The dust in the air holds the
changing light, a thick cushion closing in as night falls. After half
an hour a line of trucks, their loads wrapped with dusty canvas tarps
tied down with tangles of bungee cords, belching diesel, hulking black
and green, emerged along the side of the road, signaling that we had
most definitely gone too far. We had reached the northern border of
Benin. As the children craned their heads to see if Benin looked any
different than Niger (it didn’t), I admitted to myself that arriving
at the camp by sunset was most definitely not happening.
So we turned around and, after asking several people, none of whom had
the slightest idea where this major game preserve was, and as the sky
turned a deep blue and night fell, a lone man on the side of the road
confirmed that we were headed in the right direction—and only had
thirty kilometers to go. But as we started down the dirt road that
became increasingly narrow and bumpy (which often means a blown tire,
difficult and dangerous to fix), it became clear that thirty
kilometers was an estimate. After an hour, still no sign of the
preserve, and the deep blue had turned to black, with no intervening
lights to indicate a place for us to aim towards, or sleep.
Out of the blackness, the elephant sign emerged with the faded word
campement, and under it, an arrow. And ultimately, after taking the
left fork down the dusty road we saw a faintly glowing cluster of
multi-colored lights in the distance. Drawing nearer, the outlines of
a series of bungalows and an elephant outlined in neon perched
precariously on a nearby tree confirmed our hope.
The next morning we headed out into the bush with a guide
in tow. The
children were clearly exhausted and therefore not as visibly excited
about the excursion as I would have liked; but minutes later as an
elephant emerged from the brush, they craned their necks to see,
snapping pictures with my camera. After a couple of hours and several
more sightings, we drove back to the camp for lunch, and as we sat on
the dusty screened porch looking out at a lagoon an entire herd of
elephants made their way to the water and began to bathe. I had seen a
herd of elephants before, but it didn’t matter: I was transfixed by
the sight. But I apparently was the only one. The children were
certainly enjoying the view, but weren’t as captivated as I would have
imagined.
So we headed back, a makeshift assembly of younger and older, African
and American, brought together by marriage, on a road trip. The
children bounced around in their seats, playfully slapping and pushing
each other and singing at the top of their lungs to the songs I had
carefully assembled for my husband’s history of American hip hop CD. I
was thankful they weren't able to decipher the words of Jay Z or
Eminem or all of the other masters of rhyme of which I'd have to
facilitate their critical understanding once they learned English.
As our big blue truck barreled down the two-lane, potholed highway, it
hit me: the trip had been a success even though it didn’t transpire
at all as originally planned. The children knew their lives were
changing before them. That their family was going to be built around
new kinds of bonds, new experiences that they had never imagined, and
new opportunities to be loved and cared for in an expansive new world
where they were no longer hemmed in by geography or circumstance.
And so, despite the huge hurdles that our family faces in
reconstituting itself in a country and culture entirely new to
four-fifths of it, I have faith. In myself and in them. We’re used to
navigating poorly-marked routes.
