It has now been quite a few years since the land of my birth was the place of my everyday home. When I am not there, I miss being able to walk down the street and have no one pay me any attention because I look like I belong. I miss being able to go for a walk in the bush without having to worry about snakes, scorpions or landmines. I miss hearing small talk and being able to understand the cultural references (okay, I was never particularly cool so there were always some cultural references I didn’t get, but those references about the rugby last weekend, or Whittaker’s latest chocolate flavour or that Mitre-10 ad). I miss the subconscious knowing how events and social occasions will work, the unconscious rhythms of life. I miss being able to walk through an airport and not have to justify why I should be allowed into the country.
Sometimes I long for home. For where I belong.
And yet when I get to this ‘home’ it is not home either. My siblings and friends have moved on with their lives. There are different shops, different cultural references and a new way to use an ATM card. I am very aware that this is not my life.
It is not just that it has changed – but that I too have changed. My old home, my old place of belonging can no longer fit like it used to, because my shape has changed. Not just the extra lines on my face and my decreased tolerance for cold and some new mannerisms. You cannot see what I have seen and be unchanged. Even though I am not completely immersed in this other culture, the prolonged contact with that which is other is shaping and changing me.
And so, I find myself longing for something that doesn’t exist.
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I have lived amongst refugees in a refugee camp just over the border from their homeland. To hear them talk about the Mountains, you would think it was Eden. It is cooler there, greener there, better there. The fruit there is abundant. There is no stealing. Children are well behaved. There they are not sitting waiting, dependent on other people for a handout.
And yet, though a ceasefire has been holding for quite a few years, some have chosen to remain in the dusty hot camp that is not their home. They have chosen, for various reasons, to not go home.
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I have lived near refugees in a large city in a nearby country. They are waiting, year upon year, in crowded apartment buildings where their kids cannot play on the street due to abuse from the locals. They are waiting for when their refugee papers might finally get to the front of the refugee reallocation queue so they will be assigned a new country. Some of them have been waiting for over 10 years. Some of the parents long to return to the Mountains, the land of their birth. But they have been pushing for so long to get to this “better future”. Their kids have grown up in cities with running water and electricity and internet and the ability to buy whatever they want (if they have the money) from the shops on the street corners. Could they take their kids back to houses made from mud bricks, where water must be carried from the local water point or river, and where unless they are one of the lucky few who get an NGO job, they will have to farm to have food to eat? Would their kids even know how to survive?
So, they wait for the country lottery, to find out where they will be assigned. To get to go to their new home: yet where they will not look like the locals, not speak like the locals, dress or act like the locals. There they will be the new refugees. The outsiders. Though maybe their children, if young enough, or grandchildren might come to call it home.
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Now I am in their homeland. This place where the land is their land (well that which isn’t still under the control of their ‘enemy’).
There is a noticeable difference. There is less crime, less insecurity and fear of people in uniform – because their own people are controlling this land. People do take time the time to plant and water fruit trees that will take several years until they produce their first crop. Some people take time to burn bricks for building their houses, rather than just using mud bricks, because these are their houses on their land (though decades of conflict do make people adverse to spending too much on what could easily be destroyed). It is cooler and greener than the refugee camp (though this is relative, for in the dry season it still is brown barrenness and the temperatures still do reach to the 40s), and the fruit is available for more months of the year.
But the roads are basically impassable for several months of the year. Many people still get water for drinking out of hand dug wells in the riverbeds (where cattle also drink). Health clinics are few and far between and often do not have medications or trained health staff.
One of the doctors I work with uses the phrase “Kakuma syndrome” to refer to various psychosomatic symptoms that present in young people who have returned to the Mountains. Many of them were sent away at 5 or 10 years of age to various refugee camps in the region so they could get an education. They spent 10 or 15 years there studying while hearing about the Mountains, the promised land, their home. Yet, on their return, they too have found that they do not quite belong. Now that their eyes have been opened to the world that is bigger than these mountains, they feel trapped in a place where many people have not travelled further than several villages away and for whom the outside world is still very much unknown. After studying for years, of feeling like they have gone ahead of the generations before them, they find they still must wield a hoe by hand under the burning sun if they want to survive.
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And so, we all find ourselves longing, longing for that which doesn’t exist, except in our nostalgic memories. We go through life, seeking to make place, to send out roots of belonging, while being aware that we are never fully home. We grow and change, sometimes with scars, sometimes with blossoming, and yet this necessary movement of life also takes us further away from being “at home”.
And we can’t go back.
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There was a garden. A garden with fruit trees and plenty of water. A place of beauty and joy and rest. It was gifted as a home, as a place for the man and his wife to grow and thrive and be.
And yet, for them it was not quite enough. They gave into the whisper of longing for something more and they found themselves on the hot, barren outside, looking with longing towards the home they were now barred from entering.
They died without getting to return ‘home’. So did their children and the generations and generations that have passed since that time. Still the whisper has remained, the longings threaded through the stories around the campfires, the steeples reaching towards the sky and the posed photos posted for the world to see.
And yet we can’t go back.
Not just because that garden has not yet been located on a map. Even if it was, its borders could not contain all those who continue to long for home.
But we can’t go back, because ‘our shape’ would no longer fit its sense of home. Yes, because of the brokenness that continues to scar our forms, but also because of our growth. The richness of the myriad cultures through the millennia have grown deeper and broader than a man with a hoe in a garden (though there is still a beauty and a good in that).
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He was born while his parents were on the road, away from the little backwoods village they called home. Then, while he was still young, they had to flee as refugees to a neighbouring country to escape the sword of a maniacal ruler. Eventually, they were able to return to their hometown and he grew up amongst the children of the village, so at least by the time he was an adult no one mocked him for a strange accent. As an adult he travelled from village to village, a few days here, a few weeks there, teaching and talking about a kingdom that was coming. But he warned those who wanted to follow him that even though the other animals had homes he didn’t.
But then, one night he told his closest friends that his returning home to his father. Returning to the place that was his, where he could be seen as he truly was. He told them he was preparing a place, a home for them and would come back to take them to that home.
How could they be at home in a place they did not know the way to, where they had never been, that was not theirs?
Ah, but he told them with joy, it will be yours, for I will make you my brothers and sisters. You will fit because I will make you like me.
Then he left. He has not yet come back.
So, for now, we are left with this longing, this longing for home. While we must live with the grief that we are not able to go back, we are given hope. This longing we have is not a longing for something that does not exist. This is not a longing that we can only meet by stagnating, refusing to change and grow.
Instead, it is as we grow, as we allow ourselves to be chipped away at here, moulded there and purified by the fires of sacrifice and love, that we are preparing ourselves and moving towards finally being at home.
And it will be home.
And we will be at home.
And it will be glorious.
Life Down the Rutted Red Road 