A door unzips. There is a scratch on the door, a low voice
calling us to wake. Smiling black faces, red cloth, white teeth. The day
extends in senses. Songs vibrate, linger, and fade. Sand, stone,brick, cement –
carefully quartered. Tires rumble, cement rooms stand black against the sun,
black like the faces, and just as full. We are quiched for lunch.
Then
there is a zebra. Striped pearl against a green ocean, uncut yards away. We
close the gap, like the Masai boy who chased our tires. Corn stalks bleed gold
into the breeze, swept against our skin. Sun settles, skin sweats. Seventeen
pilgrims cross the Mara, record the zebra in film and mind and heart. Soon, beyond
the fence there are many zebras, protected. Among them is a donkey, adopted,
accepted, and bred into the tribe. And suddenly we realize we are that donkey,
newly dull and plain against the wild, rough stripes of the animal world around
us. We return breeded, melded, a new creature affected by the unbridled Beauty
we absorb. We are affected – we are the effect. We sit cotton on nylon, boot on
boot in a truck that’s not meant to fit but does. These are the safari steps of
life: taking the judgments, the prejudices we pack and realizing there is Room.
Then we
shower. Mouths filled with salty water, we let the grime of misconceptions wash
off, shed the skin of what we thought yesterday. The kids we visited, the
Primary and Secondary Emarti schools, sent us down lines of singing and
clapping, excited that we had come to visit. But we who are smart, taught, we
are educated again, as our skin swells with goosebumps at songs we do not know,
of foreign places that without a pen or a book, teach.
Feet
sieve grass as we skip toward our tents. And as we sleep, nature moves again. A
hippo bumbles up the highway to our campground, letting out a moan that leaves
us bedridden and sheet-twisted. The hippo that makes us fear, question, remain.
But in
Kenya, the sun arrives early. We wake in the chilly morning air, ready to unzip
the doors again, to open that which makes us change. From schools with young,
smiling faces to Mara hikes to zesty lunches, we adventurers rumble on toward
the zebra in the wilderness, the experiences that compel us to change. And in
absorbing by film and mind and heart, we realize that it is Beauty that
scratches the tent flap, Beauty that invites on the ride. Beauty we find in
smiles and meals and nature and human connections. The tires rumble, the road
twists, and we see.
