On the Savagery of the Mating Game.

I had spotted the guy from across Hampstead Heath, that idyllic little park in London that conjures up scenes of all those great (if not tortured) British romances. I believe I had read on a signpost that the Heath had once been some nobleperson's hunting grounds. From the number of people sunning themselves on the lawns this day, it was clear it still is...

From a distance he had the look about him I was looking for. He appeared to be one of these Southern African bush dudes with tanned leathery skin, hair bleached from time outside (where they naturally always were- life in Africa is lived in full and constant view of the sun) and a face full of thick scruff from not bothering with the ritual of shaving for the general lack of a mirror. They usually had muscles on their muscles developed from a life of toiling in the manual labor that must be exerted in creating a home in harmony with (in spite of) the elements of the bush. A worthy trophy for a girl who was used to bush meat.

Around his neck he had an object that appeared to compliment what currently encircled mine- a bone shard necklace, made from the remains of a zebra or a giraffe, dangling from a think black rope likely made of some sort of animal skin. My wrist bore a bracelet of hair from an elephant’s tail. On my ankle was a band of ostrich eggshell beads held together by the skin of some other animal. I have to admit I thought I was giving off the proper vibe.

In my head it couldn’t have been more obvious than if I’d stood before him with Sunday’s edition of the want ads printed upon my (more than adequate) forehead: “Adventurous, rather rough around the edges and well traveled (especially outside of resorts and tourist traps) bush chick seeks male with same. I can’t cook but you can (over a campfire you made yourself out of the wood that you chopped down to prepare the fish you just caught and cleaned and steamed in the wild banana leaves you just found like your grandmother taught you how to do), but I’ll be more than willing to join you for adventures and push the Landrover out of the mud and help you fix flat tires during the rainy season. And I have my own Leatherman. Call me on your sat phone, I have signal one day per week if it’s not raining!” Seems reasonable enough, right?

Perhaps I should have known from the Abercrombie perfection in the “messiness” of his straw hat, or the subtle lack of frayed edges on his “vintage” plaid shirt. I definitely should have noticed the put on lameness of the way he limped around on his ace bandaged foot (that had clearly not been broken to the point where the bone stuck out and his friend had to drive him 150k down an unpaved bush road in the dark during elephant mating season after stitching the majority of the wound closed using only a camel thorn and some fishing line he just happened to find under the seat.)

It was confirmed for me when I complimented him on his necklace by purring “I like that bone around your neck,” to which he responded… “Oh don’t worry, I think it’s plastic.”

I started and instinctively shook my head in disbelief. What was this? How could he not know I had been expecting him to accept the compliment with a shrug and a story about how he had killed and cleaned the animal whose bone this once was and carved his necklace and one for his little brother out of the bones?

Plastic? Seriously?

This guy was an animal I no longer recognized, or at least it wasn't what I was hunting. I could only guess that this was clearly a decoy of some sort, a shimmery mirage in the desert. I forgot to take into consideration that they breed them differently off the continent, and there may not be as many "big game" as there were there.

Huh.

I let a slow smile creep over my face and backed away cautiously. I guess you never know what kind of savages are out there.

;-p

Where. it's. at....

Tonight I sit in another empty room. I've been living here, but it's not really my space. The boredom evoked by having anything truly interesting besides this computer packed away in preparation to leave again does a slow tango with the inevitable anxiety that comes with the unknown future. I act like such a hard ass as though it's all very flippant and easy. Maybe if I fake it long enough, it will be.

For the past 6 months I have been leaving, arriving, leaving-always leaving. Ticket booked, always a new destination on the horizon. Another plane ride, zip code, country code, time zone, currency, here there here there, this side, that side, which is which? Hello, Goodbye.

If I were to dip my finger into paint and trace the routes on maps it becomes a swirl of colours and shapes, one indistinguishable from the next. If you never stop moving you never have to worry about where you really are. If you’re never going to be somewhere very long, nothing has to be permanent. Without the illusion of permanence, there can be little pain.

Is this sustainable?

I suspect it re-entry hasn’t been that bad because I haven’t really done it. I’ve made this time in the Twin Cities a vacation in the place that is home, an administrative break between adventures, and one I haven’t taken seriously as the cessation of one life to transition back to another. Sometimes it sneaks up on me, but that’s another story altogether.

I will be honest and admit that I haven’t even tried in many ways to readjust. I avoid buying things it seems easier to do without rather than taking on Target. I’ve been using my mother’s hotel shampoos and happily accepted friend’s old make-up and clothes so as to resist having to spend time in an actual store. If it’s not going to fit into a few suitcases I’m not even going to consider owning it. The less possessions I acquire the less space I take up, the less evidence there is that I was there, the less of an asshole I am for leaving again. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it all comes to mind. It all plays in.

I refused to take steps that would put myself in position to make this place any more of a home than it once was. I run from one coffee to lunch to happy hour to dinner to walk around the lake to meeting up as though my social life is my career. I simultaneously perform for the masses whilst feeling a bit like a ghost. A one woman traveling circus. It’s weird but it’s been my choice. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

One can only keep something like this up so long?

So again the bags are packed on the leaving end of a one way ticket. Hello is goodbye, is “come visit” or “I’ll call you”, reality: unknown. Caution has been fed-exed to the wind. Certainty was abandoned as something to strive for or even really expect a long time ago and hoping for the best strikes me as a most solid game plan.

Here I go again.

Reach

It happens sometimes, that I find myself in Africa. Not literally of course, but on occasion I will find myself faced with an overwhelming sense of the life I left, the place, the people, the essence.

Sometimes it’s an email from one of the multiply named Africans I had met at some point while I was there and half heartedly gave my email address to, certain the stars (and the generators, and the internets) would probably never actually align for them to contact me. I’ll see an email in my inbox with a name I can’t even recognize and I know it’s one of them, the fact that I can’t really figure out which one matters not. I appreciate in a way many cannot what it takes for them to send me a message and it fills my heart to the point of aching.

The other day one of the police officers from Seronga skyped me, and it took everything in me to hide my tears of joy at the sound of an African saying my name, because although he found jenniferkatchmark he was speaking to Lorato, and it would have never occurred to him to address me by anything else. I quickly lapsed into my African English accent, the way we all came to speak when speaking English to an African because it seemed they could understand us better that way. When the video picked up and I could SEE him, and hear the generators in the background, I found myself even loving the delay that made conversation difficult because it meant it was real, I was able to speak to that life I knew, I could see it. It meant that that piece of my life indeed had happened. Because being here, it’s easy for me to sometimes doubt it.

Sometimes it’s seeing someone I served in the Peace Corps with that takes me back. Whenever one of them is within about a hundred mile radius of me, I swear to you I would crawl over glass to be with them, to be in their space, to breathe in their air. This sounds a little dramatic, perhaps, but I’ve come to feel about them the way I feel about my village. Through being with them I can indulge the love I feel but keep locked away, I can speak Setswinglish, I can say the things my heart feels so often but I cannot say because I am incapable of making someone truly understand. Being with those who knew the palce, who shared the experience allows me to go back a little bit, for a little while. Because there’s so much of that other life that in living here, I’ve had to leave behind. I can open those doors I usually keep closed so as to try to live in the present, where I am now, so as not to suffer from the actual physical pain of missing where I’ve been.

Seronga, my Seronga, the real version I hold of the village, lives in the secret rooms I’ve created for it in my heart. I don’t welcome anyone into those chambers any more than I would offer up my underwear drawer for a stranger to rifle through. Although I probably speak about Botswana, and Africa and the Peace Corps a lot, and people think I’m speaking about my village, when I talk to other people, I’m actually giving them a Wikipedia version I’ve developed in my head. Although it seems otherwise, I’m usually speaking about as it matter-of-factly as if I were giving a book review, rather than from the perspective of the author who lived the story.

I can sometimes be good at compartmentalizing.

For if I lived for there still, I couldn’t really be here.

From day to day I can’t maintain that kind of love for the village, because over time it would wreck me. I learned a lot about yearning for the things that aren’t here in front of you, and the phases of misery that it can put you through. Just like when I was there I had to lock away so much of life here in America to be fully present there, now I have to keep Botswana hidden away. I have to protect it to preserve its purest form, the one I knew, lest it become some sort of caricature through my efforts to make it real for everyone else.

So sometimes I find myself there. Like a shadow or a mirage or a dream it's there. And I reach my fingers out to touch it as gently as a raindrop, or a snowflake or a ray of sun being chased by the shadow of a cloud. I marvel at the moment's beauty and I feel it deeply and it hurts a little. For it's always accompanied by the painful knowledge that this moment in which I've been lucky enough to go back is only that, a moment, a fleeting wrinkle in time and space for which I'm grateful and yet I dread. It feels so real.

"A Room of One's Own"

It only seems fitting that I begin this little chat by divulging the fact that I have indeed never read Virginia Woolf’s classic lecture. I actually haven’t read anything by her, but I know that her words encapsulate a feeling I have come to feel quite familiar with. The phrase again came to mind as I was driving as-I do, in my mom’s car-in silence (again as I do, as the radio doesn’t work and usually trying to drive, navigate and fiddle with my ipod is a recipe for disaster for my newly consistently driving in America self), when I began to think of how I wanted to spend my birthday. It’ll be 29 this year, and although I spent the last two years celebrating in various exotic locations (and always with great friends) it occurred to me that this one feels profoundly different.

It’s the dawn of the last year of my twenties, a decade filled with false certainty and certain ambiguity. I’ve loved, I’ve lost, I’ve traveled to three continents, I’ve worked, I’ve played, I’ve lost and found myself countless times. I’ve taken epic risks, and missed out on opportunities due to fear (more of the former than the latter, I feel proud to report) and I can say with confident hesitation that I feel closer to the path that my heart leads me to travel than I began the decade.

Thirty will inevitably again be a big hairy deal, if I know myself and my proclivity to love a great party (or week or two of them, as is common for the Katchmark women’s birthdays). But I want to take a minute to drink in 29. As I’ve learned about time, everything comes soon enough.

People back here in America have sort of missed out on celebrating my birthday with me for a few years. And I can understand the joy that comes from giving someone the “perfect gift”-one that brings a huge smile to the recipient’s face and shining happiness to the giver’s heart. And so as I thought of what I would like to be recieve for my birthday, what item or experience I would want? I pondered for a moment in that silent car gliding into the Minneapolis skyline.

Drinks? Bowling? Fortune teller? Massage? Spa? Movie? Theatre? Baseball game? Lions and tigers and bears? In the land of plenty, anything is possible. I ache for the simplicity, the hilarity, the "wait and see, we'll make a plan" of the bush in Botswana. Imported smarties on a homemade cake, a boat ride with crocs underneath. Pink duct tape and a broken disco ball rigged to the ceiling.

This year again my birthday falls, as it historically has-around Labor Day weekend in America, when everyone is getting ready to go back to school, celebrate the end of summer, get out to the State fair, Renaissance Festival or any number of great MN end of summer activities. I know that getting any big group of people together would likely be a stressful challenge for any involved and people would end up compromising something in their plans to make it work. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen all my friends pretty recently, and I didn’t want to add something else to people’s schedules, knowing how Americans tend to do things out of obligation. I wanted my birthday to be significant in an important way to the one (the only?) person that it really should matter to: me.

The more I thought about it all, the less I wanted. I knew that as my plane ticket to DC was purchased, with a departure date just a week after my birthday I didn’t under any circumstances want the burden of more stuff to pack in to what will inevitably be my already over-packed suitcases. I didn’t feel the need to have yet another drunken alcohol fueled celebration, generally ending in hangover and perhaps despair about getting one year older.

Upon failing to come up with anything that I wanted , or felt I needed, or could imagine great joy in receiving, I jokingly thought, “ok spoiled brat, what do you get the girl who has everything?”

Which is when the words I’ve never actually read came to mind as the answer.

What I want for my 29^th birthday is a room of my own. I would like to have access to a place, nothing fancy, preferably with electricity, where I can spend the night before and the day and night of my 29^th birthday on September 2. I want to spend the day alone, unplugged from the world, alone with my thoughts and my non-internets connected computer, to write. I want to retreat from all this for a moment so I can again appreciate it. Since I’ve been home I’m always running around to meet with people, nanny or housesit, or look for jobs or apartments in DC. So what I feel would make this a very happy birthday for me is to have time and space and silence with my thoughts so I can again indulge my African obsessions with reflection and mindfulness on the next step in my adventure.

So if you’re reading this, and you want to make a birthday wish come true send me a message. My only requirements are that the space is uninhabited for the time I’m there, and within a few hour’s drive of the Twin Cities. It can be someone’s cabin, house they;ll be away from for those nights, an apartment that’s between tenants, a guest house, converted garage, bush tent with generators, whatever. My desire is that it’s electrified so that I can run this laptop, and I’d like it to have a bathtub, but if there’s electricity and a couch that will suffice.

In my grand scheming plan this works out because someone reads about it and has a space they are willing to offer, or know someone who does. Perhaps someone likes the idea of the solitude, perhaps someone wants to fulfill a birthday wish. I’m confident the universe will grant this request through some avenue. I’ll probably use the time to write all about it. And perhaps to read some Virginia Woolf.

Cheers. Thanks. Gracias. Go siame.

Jen

Welcome!

Welcome friends, family, those who have followed my blog about my time in Botswana, and complete strangers who’ve stumbled upon me by some wrinkle in the interweb.

As I’m no longer in Botswana, I felt that perhaps I should move on, or move addresses at least, both to avoid confusion and to continue to write without the active oversight of the US gov’t (yup, they monitored our blogs.) So here we are at one.here.her.story.

WTF does the title mean, you ask? I’m not entirely sure, it just sortof came to me in a dream or a journal entry, strange punctuation and all. I found through writing jennyinbotswana that I really enjoy writing, the act of making sense through what I was living and witnessing through words and photos thrown a bit haphazardly into the interweb.

In Botswana, I happened to be writing about a (sortof) unique experience which also helped me keep in touch with those back home. Now that I’m done with the PC, I’ve found myself feeling a little lonesome for blogging. I still have thoughts and experiences that compose themselves into running blog entries in my head as I experience them, and writing and posting the stories I encounter often helps me put the whole thing to bed.

So for lack of a more interesting topic, I've decided to keep writing about my life.

I’m about to make another big transition, one that many people have commented is "brave" or "ballsy" (more on this in a later entry). I’ve decided to move (rather blindly) to Washington DC. I've been there once, when I was volunteering with the Red Cross on Hurricane Katrina relief. I don't have a real structure set up for doing this, and mainly plan on depending on my belief in the good in people, relying on the kindness of strangers and my own force of will that this choice will be the right one. The only goal is to create a fulfilling life for myself, and use the next span of undetermined time to jump off into whatever adventure is next.

So it is with this in mind that I begin again on the admittedly self indulgent practice of writing about my life as though it matters to such an extent that I should publicly post about it. Perhaps it will serve only as an eventual running journal of my life and events of this time. Perhaps I will come across and write about something that will inspire someone, perhaps I will gain inspiration. Perhaps it will help my family and the friends I have come to know in different parts of the world cyberstalk me. Who knows.

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

Christina Baldwin

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.

Lynn Hall

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus