First thing the next morning, I head to HBC in Century City to work. As I near my office, Madison leaps up from her desk and launches herself into my arms with a squeal. “You’re back!”
She walks with me into my office, and I give it a curious once-over. It looks different. There’s an orchid on the corner of the desk and some crystal writing accessories that aren’t mine. “Has somebody been using my office?”
Madison flushes. “Shelby.”
Good old Shelby. “Have they given it to her, or was it just on loan?”
“It’s your office. She was just using your desk and phone.”
Such a Shelby move, I think, but I say nothing aloud, not wanting to be antagonistic my first day back after several weeks away.
Instead I update Madison on my plans as I turn on my laptop, letting her know Glenn has asked me to develop a series of show segments for sweeps month and that I’ve decided to head to Zambia to do a series on Rx Smile as well as several features on inspiring women in Africa.
I tell her I hope to fly out in less than two weeks’ time, but I have to organize my ideas, outline some stories, contact my subjects, and get this info together in such a way that the company’s travel agency can handle my hotels and flights.
“I’ll help,” Madison volunteers. “Give me a list of people and places and I’ll get to work. I don’t care what you need me to do— research, set up interviews, look into visas or required vaccines. You name it, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you,” I say, pausing in my setup to look at her. “I appreciate it.”
“My pleasure.”
She holds my gaze a moment longer, then smiles and walks out.
I sit and stare off into space for several moments after she’s gone.
Madison hunted down a huge map of Africa at the UCLA bookstore, and by Tuesday afternoon it’s pinned on my office wall and I’m covering it with little stickie notes on areas where I have potential stories.
Nairobi, Kenya. Kenya again. Tanzania. The Congo. Malawi. Zimbabwe. Zambia. Chad. Somalia. Ethiopia. South Africa.
The stories and causes are huge. I’ve done my research these past few months, too, reading and watching everything I can from Jay-Z’s documentary, Water for Life, to extensive Wall Street Journal interviews with Melinda Gates (I’ve interviewed her as well, but not necessarily on Africa), Kenya’s First Lady Lucy Kibaki, and actress Terry Pheto of South Africa.
Poring over the story ideas brings my South Africa childhood vividly alive. I haven’t been back to South Africa since I left at sixteen for St. Pious. I didn’t even go back for Grandmother’s funeral, but that was her wish, not mine, although truthfully I was relieved I didn’t have to return.
Studying my story ideas, I make the decision not to go to South Africa this trip. I lift the stickie note off South Africa with a silent apology to Terry Pheto. But even removing one stickie doesn’t reduce the size of the project. Africa is a vast continent, and traveling from one country to another isn’t like traveling in Europe. The distances are huge and the travel options limited.
There is also the matter of my budget. And safety.
In the interest of safety, I limit my stories to countries that are currently stable. I don’t want to take a cameraman with a family at home into an area that’s unpredictable.
One by one, I pluck off the stickies until I have narrowed the continent to Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania.
Libby stops by my office late Tuesday afternoon as Madison and I go through the remaining stories, trying to see if we can’t narrow them further or at the very least create a value system and assign them each a priority.
“Can I listen in?” she asks.
“Sure,” I answer, and Madison and I continue discussing the various possibilities.
Madison wants happy stories, but stories with heart.
I’ve been leaning toward deeper stories, hoping to educate as well as entertain, although I’m mindful of Glenn’s caustic comment a month or so ago that “we’re not PBS.”
We both agree that we should offer hope.
Libby stands before the map and reads each of the stickies. I can tell she’s forming opinions, but she doesn’t interject her point of view. After ten minutes, she picks up some of the folders on my desk to review my notes.
With a list of tentative subjects in hand, Madison returns to her desk to begin attempting to contact the various people, including Sveva, whom I still haven’t managed to reach. I’ve sent her several e-mails in the past two weeks but haven’t gotten a reply yet.
Now Libby’s gaze travels across the map. “I know you have quite a few stories in Kenya, but are you sure you want to go there?”
“I’m avoiding the Great Rift Valley. My interviews are down near the Masai Mara National Reserve, and there hasn’t been any trouble in the region for years.”
“Just be careful.”
“I am.”
Libby heads for the door and turns partway out. “Oh, and I totally forgot. I came by to tell you that you have a cameraman for your trip. Howard’s volunteered to go.”
“Howard Schnell?” My jaw drops. Howard has the most sensitive stomach of anyone in our office. He lives with Imodium tablets in his pocket. “Does he know he has to get all the vaccinations and take the malaria medicine and everything?”
“Says he’s looking forward to the adventure.”
“Great.”
Libby cracks a smile as she turns again to leave. “You’re going to have an adventure, too,” she says on her way out.
She knows Howard’s going to get sick before our flight even touches down.
* * *
That night, I wake up around three and can’t fall back asleep.
It’s been years— twenty-two years— since I’ve been home. Not that Africa’s home, but I was born and raised in South Africa, and South Africa’s heritage is my heritage.
I leave bed and go to the kitchen to make a cup of chamomile tea, and as the water boils I stare out the window at the lights of Los Angeles. Africa’s countryside will be dark, very dark. I’ve heard that even in the big cities there are frequent power outages.
Tea in hand, I return to my room, but I can’t make myself sit down. I pace the floor.
I’m nervous. Anxious. Excited. Mostly excited. I just want the trip to start. I just want to go. Now.
Hell, I’ll just start packing.
In the end, I have to pass on interviewing Sveva, as Sveva e-mails me to say she’ll be in Italy for the next several weeks. So I focus my story ideas in and around Zambia.
Harper is wonderful at nailing down the final details and logistics. She’s the one who locates a pilot and guide for me. His name is Chance van Osten, and he’s apparently one of the best pilots in southern Africa. His family goes back five generations, and he calls himself African, although he’s blond and blue-eyed. He’s thirty-something, speaks eleven languages, has been flying commercially since he was seventeen, and knows Africa intimately. “He’s your guide and a great story all in one,” she says.
I’d be impressed if it weren’t for the young, blond, and blue-eyed part. “Can’t you get me an old guy? I don’t want to have to deal with a thirty-something-year-old who speaks eleven languages and has been flying since he was in diapers.”
Harper grins. “The fact is, Chance is the best, and he speaks so many African dialects— and apparently there are hundreds— you’d be fine no matter where you are.”
Familiar with the Bantu language complexities in South Africa, I think this is the time to tell Harper I have ties to sub-Saharan Africa. Now is when I confess that my grandmother owned a huge sugar plantation in the provinc
e of Natal and that growing up, I learned Afrikaans as well as a smattering of Zulu. But I don’t. I find sharing that part of my life almost impossible because it always leads to other questions, like “Why did you leave South Africa?” and “Where are your parents now?”
That night, I get a voice mail from Michael: “Looking forward to seeing you in Lusaka. We usually stay at the same hotel. Give me a call once you land.”
I tell myself the goose bumps have nothing to do with Michael.
Nothing at all.
We fly out a week later to Lusaka— first on American Airlines to Washington, D.C., and then on a South African Airways jet for Johannesburg. During the flight, I flip through the travel guides and the binder of articles and essays instead of sleep, arriving in Lusaka just after ten at night. We’ve been traveling for over thirty hours now, and I’m dead on my feet. We deplane by stairs at the Lusaka airport, since there’s no jet-way here. The air is heavy and thick, and the sky is dark with clouds. Puddles cover the tarmac, and the night’s so humid that you know it’ll rain again soon.
The hot, moist air smells achingly familiar— earth and night and Africa. I’m suddenly aware that South Africa isn’t far. My home outside Stellenbosch isn’t far.
I’ve come back.
I’m back, and it only took twenty-two years.
But what I’m feeling isn’t the number of years, but the changes in me, the person I’ve become. I left the continent a repressed, depressed sixteen-year-old, but now I’m back as an accomplished adult, a successful woman. Only my parents will never know what I’ve done with my life. They’ll never know how hard I’ve worked to become who I am.
The need to reach them, the need to connect and make amends rushes through me, hot, heavy, insistent. I wish I could go back. I wish I could do it over again. I’d be a different daughter. I’d be more open, more accessible, more everything.
The longing for the life I lost fills me. My eyes burn and my throat swells closed.
I wonder if people, after they’re dead, know how much they’re loved and missed. I wonder if the people we’ve lost know how we think of them, and long for them, even years after they are gone.