Zambia Mornings

I've been in Livingstone, Zambia, on a mission trip for the past week with a group of 45 students and adults connected with my school.  It's been an amazing experience to say the least.  Today is our last day of work before we conclude the trip with two excursion days--tomorrow to Botswana for a safari and Friday to Livingstone and Victoria Falls for various experiences (including bungee jumping for a few!).  My job on this trip has been to keep in touch with the parents.  I chose to do that via a blog--Into Africa (www.taamissiontrip2013.blogspot.com).  Because the internet is slow at night when everyone is here using their phones and such, I spend the days at the lodge writing while everyone else is out working.  It has been peaceful and quiet, these African mornings.  Quiet enough to write a poem :) 

In the morning

there is the table at the edge

of the Kaazmein Lodge patio.
In the morning

there is my computer, a pen,

my much-traveled journal,

the bottled water with its

hard-to-open caps.

And always there is

the blue African sky.

There are sometimes companions

(Robbie, Jacob, Christi one day;

Ahilyn, Adrian, Narce,

Alejandra on another).

There are brightly colored squares

on the black table cloths.

Workers are sweeping--

calling good morning to me

while tending to business and

listening to canned music.

There are zebras grazing

peacefully,

wildly.

And always there is

the cool-yet-warm African breeze.

My view looks across

the patio to a footbridge,

and an island.

Mornings, there are

African kingfishers,

African mockingbirds,

African herons.  Or bitterns.

Or some other kind of

long-legged African water bird.

My job on this trip is to write--

a thing I’ve often longed to do

in the quiet of the morning

at a table with a view,

a breeze,

and sometimes a companion

or two.

My job on this trip is to share—

to put into words an experience

that defies words.

My roommate asks how

we will be able to share

all we’ve experienced.

We can’t I say.

We can try, but words

—which I love—

cannot

do justice

to

Zambian Mornings.

~ Rondi Aastrup
   Kaazmein Lodge
   Livingstone, Zambia

West With the Night

"If a man [or woman] has any greatness in him, it comes to light not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work." ~ Beryl Markham in West with the Night

If you've never read Beryl's book, I highly recommend that you run to your nearest book vender (whatever that might mean...library, bookstore, internet, kindle) and get it. It is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. But then I love to fly, and Beryl Markham was a flyer, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, making the trip on September 4-5, 1936.

Born in England, Beryl grew up in Kenya where she was the first woman to earn a commercial pilot's license. She was also well-known as a bush pilot and often flew with Denys Finch-Hatton, beloved friend of my other favorite Kenyan writer Karen Blixon. West With the Night is her memoirs of her life in Kenya and the Atlantic flight, published in 1942 to great acclaim.

I think about her often when I am flying. I would so love to have flown back in those early days, when there was nothing between you and the clouds but the wind rushing through your hair. Flying the way she did in Africa, skimming the grasslands, with herds of zebra, antelope, giraffe, elephants grazing and running below you...I can think of nothing better.

Photos from Wikipedia and Encylopedia Britanica

Does Africa know a song of me?

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"

I've been watching one of my all-time favorite movies, Out of Africa. I know it will haunt me for days, now that I've watched it again. The music, the amazing flying scenes, the tender relationship between Denys Finch-Hatton and Karen Blixen, the incredible beauty of Africa, the Ngong Hills...it all gets into my sub-conscious and doesn't let me go long after the credits roll. That, to me is powerful story-telling. The kind I aspire to write some day...

I love the quote above which comes very close to the end of the movie. Whenever I hear it, I wonder the same kind of thing for myself. Will the places I've loved remember me? Will I have done enough to be remembered at all? I don't mean it in an egotistical way, only that I want to fill my life with enough meaning that it will have meant something that I lived. Perhaps, in the long run it's the living well, not the remembering afterwards...