good morning

It starts with a hot sun ray oozing languidly over my face.

I open my eyes, an awakening, and take note of my failure last night to pull the heavy blue curtains all the way across the windows which occupy an entire wall of my room. I view my alarm clock; the face is partially obscured by a black digital liquid which follows the cracks that appeared last week when I dropped it violently (and accidentally) on the hard wooden tile floor. I see that the hour is 7, and the minute begins with something that has an L-shaped bottom left corner.

I have time, all of it. This alarm clock situation is freeing, my new-agey self thinks philosophically. A broken alarm clock reminds me that clocks do not embody time, but merely describe it; time does not, in fact, exist. The clock is useful because it tells me the hour but refrains from impolitely troubling me with the minute.

I won't fix it.

I can hear, from my bed, the street five stories below: the heavy out-of-breath diesel busses which pass my res (dorm) en route to downtown from the townships, the private cars which I cannot see from here but which I know are small and European- and Asian-made, and the minibus taxis honking at potential customers on the sidewalk as their front-seat passengers screech destinations: Mowbray, Wynberg, Waterfront. I hear also people, and I know that the teenagers are walking to (public) school in blue or green uniforms: sensible shoes, button-down shirts, vests, blazers, sweaters, berets, knee-length skirts for girls and crisply ironed pants for boys.

A month ago this cacophony would have been merely that, an indistinguishable wall of African city sound. Now, though, it is navigable, identifiable, almost friendly and familiar.

I want to tell you every detail, but I don't know how.

I don't know how to tell you that I dress in cotton skirts because in this heat denim sticks to your skin like a sweaty hand, and yet by evening I am shivering for want of a sweater. I don't know how to tell you that I haven't seen my whole body all at once in weeks, since the mirror in our bathroom shows only my face and part of my shoulders, with rust spots obscuring my chin. I don't know how to tell you outside my bedroom window I see only the balcony with stained tile and paint-chipped metal rails, and beyond that the sky, which at seven a.m. is already thoroughly ablaze with sun.

I don't know how to tell you about the people. I never know how to tell you about the people who are able to view my skin from the red underside. But the others: the professor whose father died before he found the cure for an illness no one's ever heard of, the township secondary schoolkid who knows more about American politics than most Americans, the girl you sit next to on the bus who tells you about her struggles with religion versus spirituality.

These people, too, are seeping through to wherever it is inside of me that good people go.

And then there is everything else.

There is the beige institutional metal condom dispenser in every thinkable and unthinkable location inside campus buildings, especially res: on stair landings, in bathrooms, in the laundry room. There is the anonymous government HIV test in class with accompanying survey, testing the prevalence and knowledge of the disease in universities. There is the rumor that somewhere in rural places there is cholera, TB, sick poor people I have never seen.

There is Zimbabwe.

There is the broken alarm clock which is like the broken elevator and the cracked tile and the missing bricks and the gate that needs oil. Things do not get fixed, and people seem unperturbed. Meals last hours, and people seem unperturbed. When the elevator is broken you take the stairs, two at a time. When the bricks are missing you skip over them. When the gate creaks you know the bus is here. When the food is slow in coming you drink wine and you talk about souls.

When your alarm clock breaks you don't fix it because if you did, the elevator might work and the bricks might return and the gate might go silent and the food might come quickly. Then your legs would be weak and your agility would be compromised and you would miss the bus and you would never talk about souls.

There is life and there is Africa, all on the same plane, and there at their intersection is a broken clock.

they shrug and say, TIA. this is Africa

Africa is a new car and a hot paved road and fluorescent painted lines and people who have no cars using the highway also to walk.

Africa is exhilaration.

Africa is supposedly racist and really racist and people who talk up to you because you're white and people who talk down to you because you're white and people who look at you with a half-quashed idealistic glint in their eye because you're American and people who spit half-heartedly in your presence because you're American.

Africa is a soccer game with no score.

Africa is English and Afrikaans and Xhosa and Zulu and others and others and others, is English, is a whole set of languages which in my ignorance I do not understand why do they speak English if they speak this language or why do they speak this language if they speak English?

Africa is a plant with leaves and cactus-like thorns. Africa is an enormous black beetle. Africa is the dormant fear that swimming leads to great white sharks and walking leads to cobras.

Africa is the fullest brightest moon you have ever seen.

I try sea kayaking for the first time.

I sit in the boat and paddle and ride waves straight-on, tensely, confidently, patiently, wearily. I sit in the boat and I paddle hard, it hurts, and I do not move and another wave comes and I crest it and it rolls on beneath me and I do not look round to watch it spread on the beach but paddle stationarily.

I paddle and I do not move and finally I look round and the small waves are gone and I look ahead and the big waves are gone and I am past and I am free and I hold up my paddle because I am home but I forget I am in Africa.

I look and there it is, bigger than me or anything I know, a wave I cannot imagine, and I lean back into it, point the bow of my vessel into its flank, skewer it ineffectively with my paddle, and it breaks over me, and I am alone and I open my eyes and I see white and I feel hard sand against my face against my stomach and my legs and neck and arms and everywhere, hard water, hard salt, hard sand, I swallow and I breathe salt salt water, and my boat is gone, shot gloriously into the air followed by the paddle, and I am alone in the only way you can be alone, when a wave you loved does not reciprocate.

I surface, a little big head in the indisputably big banging ocean, and someone has got my boat and I retrieve my paddle and I walk, sluggishly, stumbling like a drunk man on the elusive sand grains of the Indian Ocean, and I think, this is Africa.

I can't put my finger on Africa. I can't put my feet on it either, or any other part of my body, and yet here am I putting every part of me on Africa, and having very little idea what it is I am eating and walking on and and (inadvertently) swimming in and rubbing and wearing and listening to and watching and living.

I came because I wanted to touch Africa so I could know it existed.

It does.

I am bemused to find that I do not know what comes next.

Maybe Africa.

the beginning

I could tell you about how when you walk into the international terminal at D/FW, the windows are suddenly tall and glassy and slanted, the floors shiny, the art modern, the accents over the loudspeakers crisp and smooth and thoroughly foreign.

But you've been in an airport before.

I could tell you about the Scottish flight attendant, and my mild shock at finding that people other than Mel Gibson speak that way in real life, and moreover they are under the impression it's normal. I could tell you about the plane or the airports or the jet lag or, upon arrival, the hours of repetitive orientation lectures regarding culture shock and registration and dorms and details. I could tell you about the unacknowledged terror of being alone in an utterly unfamiliar country, about the attempt to rationalize the fear away, about the subsequent comfort at easily forging relationships with a gamut of people.

But you've moved before.

I'll tell you something you don't know.

I will tell you that when you fly over the coast of the UK before sunrise, the water glows ethereally with underneath tunnels. I will tell you that my first view of Cape Town was just after a hot sunrise, and as we landed I stared numbly below before I realized that what I was looking at was not a yard of junk metal, but was arranged symmetrically into tiny mismatched squares covered alternatively in tin or wood or black plastic.

A township. I'd heard about these. They are the incredibly poor neighborhoods on the edge of the city into which blacks were sent to live during Apartheid with very little or no help from the government, and in which the majority of Capetonians still live. Education opportunities, good health care, and solid infrastructure are nonexistent, while crime and HIV/AIDS abound. (Over 20% of South Africans are infected with HIV, more per capita than any other country in the world.) In a first world/third world nation, South African townships are the hot fetid sticky aching heart of the third world.

But there is more.

I will tell you about the baobab trees and the mountains and the sea, the unbelievable beauty, the open spaces that remind me of the best parts of the United States with an additional exotic allure. I will tell you that the accent is Australian, is Dutch, is British, is something else I don't recognize but which I suspect is wholly African. I will tell you about the 11 official languages of this country, and that on the street and in my dorm and aboard the bus I hear sharp syllables and rolling r's and clicks and long prickly words I can't break down to pronounce. I will tell you about the minibuses which honk as they careen by, the man in the front passenger seat leaning far out the window to holler an incomprehensible destination while passersby fear he will tumble out. I will tell you about my daily decreasing confusion regarding which way to look before crossing the street (right, then left).

I could tell you every detail.

But I won't.

I will tell you that I am venturing into the precarious vulnerability of falling hard in love with this country and maybe this continent and all the people in it.