My place
“Do you ask your parents before you come home?” George and I
sat alone on a living room couch, passing an auxiliary cord back and forth to
show each other our favorite songs.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When you visit home after being away at school, what do you
say when you call? Do you just tell them ‘See you on Friday’ or do you ask
whether you can come?”
I thought about it. I wasn’t expecting the question. “I
guess I usually ask”
George fidgeted with the bookmark of the novel between us. “Some
parents here get mad if you ask. Because its home. You don’t need permission to
come to your own place.”
The night before we left for Livingstone, Karl and I asked
Auntie Sharon whether we could come back to spend the night before we began our
August trip to Botswana. “Don’t ask.” She said. I knew what she meant.
I know I run the risk of sounding stale and cliché as I
write that my homestay has become my home. But I don’t care. I’ve come to love
the Wamalume family like my own and though the group bonding at abundant life
is well-needed, I’m sad to go.
It doesn’t take a very extensive knowledge of world affairs
to know that a country is more than a patch of land inside a few lines. It’s a
set of people – people who, to some extent, agree on values and dreams and
interpretations of history. To know a country but not its people is to not know
a country.
For a month, I took the interminable Lilayi minibus to a
house just beyond the reach of the daily Lusaka hubbub not just so I could get
to know this country’s people, but so I could find a home with them. So I
could, even if only in my mind, call these people my own. And the Wamalume’s
made this an easy endeavor.
When I think of Zambia, I’ll recall my moments in Lilayi,
play them over and over again in my head like the 5 songs on my elementary school
MP3 player.
I’ll remember that first ride home when I sat in the back of
the Mitsubishi, waiting for my turn to answer the small talk questions and
hoping for a chance to crack a joke or prove I’m personable. And I’ll remember
forgetting all about myself and who I made myself out to be when I watched Mr.
Wam jump around at the mall after receiving a notification that he’d sold one
of his chickens.
I’ll remember all the football games with Ntemba and the
four or five batches of brownies and learning the Lungu reverse and the fact
that Mr. Wam would always come home at night and ask for his “Legal Consultant”
when he wanted to find and greet me.
I’ll remember riding to work with Mrs. Wam, listening to “Stuck
on You” from the CD player as we passed rows of cement sellers and coal makers,
all the while discussing the skills she’d teach the women Karl and I marry one
day (anyone who pays attention at the Wamalume house knows by now that if I’m
worth my weight in ground nuts, I’ll be sure to one day take my wife to Lusaka
and tell – not ask – the family accommodate us).
The memories are vivid, and even now I hope to go back to my
new home and create a few more. Within the next few days I plan to do just
that, to visit while I can. But regardless of how often I see the Wamalume’s
before I return to America, I’ll look back on my time in Zambia not as a trip
to an unfamiliar land, but as an abbreviated stay at a place where I am loved
and cared for and made comfortable. I’ll look back on Zambia and call it my own
place – call it home.
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