I had the time of my life
Fighting dragons with you."
-T. Swift, Long Live
I wrote this blog a couple of weeks ago after my trip to Austin. I'm just realizing now that I never posted it.
As I was sitting in the airport on Thursday, waiting for my connecting flight to Austin, I noticed that my heart was beating faster than usual; my palms were sweaty, and I couldn't stop biting the inside of my mouth. Sure, flying is not my favorite thing to do, but those kind of nerves never seem to envelope me like this. I kept thinking about meeting Lindsay at the airport. I was nervous, mixed with excitement, of course, to see two friends I hadn't seen in over a year. I wasn't too nervous to see Zach, probably because we had been friends for years and I wouldn't be seeing him until later in the weekend. But mine and Lindsay's relationship is very different than others. We went through an experience that most only dream of, for some a dream come true and others, a nightmare. I wasn't sure how it would feel to be together in a different country, among others like ourselves. I was afraid that out of context, our friendship would seem distant or make little sense outside of Boma N'gombe. Because besides that summer, and before my visit to Austin, our entire friendship had been based on a pile of letters stacked-up on my night stand.
For the last year and a half I've had so much trouble talking about my experience in Africa in a way that makes sense to others. I feel like no matter what I say, how descriptively I tell my stories, or the countless pictures I show, no one will ever fully understand my experience.
I had waited so long to actually be in the presence of someone who understood; who could relate to the students I taught in the second story barn, what it was like to see a male lion walk across the Ngorongora Crater, or the story of having no water to drink in Zanzibar after a night of boozing with the Rastafarians. Sure, I can tell these stories. I can widen your eyes and run chills up and down your spine with tales of starving children and war-torn villages. But no one can actually see the dust being kicked up by our caravan of jeeps, the packed dala dalas with limbs hanging out the windows, or the way the hungry children with flies living in the crevices of their eyes looked up at me, begging me to take them home, like Lindsay can.
It turned out that Lindsay and I began right where we left off. We didn't have very much catching up to do because we make sure that gets covered in the countless number of letters we write back and forth to one another. We call them love letters. It's not that we are in love with each other, but we are so much in love with Africa, that we find solace and comfort in one another's writing. When one of us starts to forget a memory we shared, a student's name, or a place we visited, we remind each other. We admit that we are afraid of forgetting but promise to keep the memories alive through our letters. "Reading your letter about Tanzania made my heart race. Maybe that's why I equate it with love," Lindsay writes in a letter she sent before our visit. "I still feel like I could close my eyes and be there. We may never see that place again, though. Somewhere that we both can write so passionately about, fill up journals with and be so taken with...We may never see again."
We hope with all of our hearts that this will not be the case. That one day our lives will bring us back to Boma, that little village just miles from the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. A village that formed a friendship so strong, that not even 1300 miles of American soil can break it apart. Thanks to our experiences, I know that we will be friends for life.
