From Zimbabwe to Kenya: A 20-year odyssey that begins and ends in Africa

Exactly twenty years ago from this Monday, on my 16th birthday, I set foot in Africa for the first time. I arrived in Harare after two long plane rides from Seattle, set to spend the rest of 1989 as a Rotary International exchange student. One could say it’s ironic that I’m living in Africa again two decades later, but I say it’s exactly because I went to Zimbabwe and lived there during my formative teenage years that I returned to live here as an adult.

Unlike most American teenagers, I did not get my driver’s license on that day of my 16th birthday, but I did get official permission that I was old enough to travel alone to the other side of the world, to a continent that none of my family had been to before, and to explore the world on my own. I began my own Odyssey that day, and it has continued for two decades.

I was a modern-day explorer of Southern Africa and saw much of the country and the region, including parts of Malawi, South Africa and Botswana. I visited Victoria Falls and saw South Africa under apartheid, while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. I flew in a glider and took part in sailboat races. I also saw my first part of Europe on my way home. With a Kenyan from Mombasa, who had never set foot off his continent, we left Heathrow Airport on our layover and took the Tube into central London and saw Buckingham Palace. That was it. I was hooked on travel. I had started to see the world’s famous and exotic places.

Those were the good years in Zimbabwe. It was only nine years after it had gained independence. The memories of the revolution were still fresh in its citizens’ minds, but there was hope and optimism that it was a new country, and everyone - black and white, British citizens, former loyalists, freedom fighters, Mugabe loyalists (imagine!) - was willing to build a new, prosperous nation together. And it was an interesting point in Kenya’s history to be here in the past year, when it toyed with a civil war, when it threatened to break apart internally along tribal lines. Ironically Kenya’s recent conflict was triggered by a president – a presidential election – while Zimbabwe’s current woes 20 years later can be blamed on the same thing. I have one story from my time in Zimbabwe of living 11 months there under prosperity, and I have one (near) war story from my time in Kenya. At least I gained that while in Africa this time. So many of the expatriate friends we know have many literal war stories from living in places like Cambodia and Liberia. It’s the war stories that give life stories the real substance and texture.

So today, 20 years later, I sit poised to return to the U.S. from Africa, satisfied that I came back to live here, satisfied with a little over a year spent in Africa again. I’m obviously at a different point in my life now, with a wife and daughter, and she will have spent her first year or so of life here, although she won’t remember any of it. But when she gets older, together we can talk about our times in Africa. I will have to talk for her and fill in her memories for her of this place. I hope she, too, feels that Africa holds a special place in her heart. And I hope that she, too, will hold those memories dear enough that they will compel her to return and perhaps live somewhere here again for a year…or two…or more. Or at least that she knows she has permission – and encouragement - to be a 21st century explorer of the entire world and that it is traveling and visiting and being and living in different places that adds richness to one’s life.

So, I wonder where I’ll be living 20 years from now, on my 56th birthday…?