A Touch of Africa

I have foregone my earlier bedtime tonight in favor of visiting an old friend and professor Linda’s house to see a slide show & videos from her recent trip to Zambia.  Several years ago she lost her daughter in an accident there, and in response she and her husband did one of the most selfless things I have ever heard–they formed a scholarship for girls in the village where their daughter lived to be able to go to school, all the way through college.  It’s not just a few girls, either.  It has grown to something like 65 girls as of right now…How amazing.

So, they recently went there to retrace the footsteps of their daughter and do some of the things she hoped to do while she lived there.  They saw termite mounds that look like small hills, stayed in their daughter’s hut, and were welcomed by the village in loving, dancing, singing style.  It was amazing for me to see even just a piece of the experience they had there.

Besides that, tonight was a special night for them because they met friends that they made five years ago with a girl who trained in the same Peace Corp group as their daughter but whom they had never met in person until today.  Kai, who trained with their daughter, was able tonight as we looked at the pictures and videos to share stories from her own experience and explain things that none of us knew and that Linda hadn’t been able to learn herself.  The whole evening was very moving, especially when my professor’s other daughter walked in to join the party and Kai got tears in her eyes and shook with emotion from just how strongly she was reminded of the friend she lost.  Not everyone noticed that in the bustle of new people arriving.  I liked Kai very much.  We talked about our experiences abroad and asked a lot of questions of one another, and I thought that if she lived in this area instead of halfway across America, I could easily become friends with her.

As part of the evening, she taught us all how to wear the skirts that you see us wearing in the pictures.  They aren’t called sari, obviously, but I can’t remember the proper name for them.  She and I talked about how to wear them properly and compared that to the Japanese way of putting on a kimono.  It was so good to be able to talk about that sort of little thing that normally wouldn’t come up in another conversation, you know?  Those are the sorts of things you forget about your experience until suddenly something recalls it to you.