Om

Calming my mind at Yoga Source a few times a week pre-Africa...

Fill your bowl to the brim, and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife, and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security, and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval, and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back... the only path to serenity.
- Lao-Tzu

Thursday Inspiration...

32 days pre-departure, I found myself walking through my neighbourhood with my mp3 player listening to Pimsleur's Swahili 1... repeating the phrases to myself aloud, giving the landscaping teams good reason to think I'm completely crazy. I find it hilarious that the first phrases they teach you are "I don't understand Swahili" (Sifahamu kiswahili) and "Do you speak English?" (Unasema kiingereza?). Not necessarily the most encouraging sequence of vocabulary lessons, but I can imagine I'll be grateful for those default phrases once I arrive on the ground in Tanzania and realize I'm wildly unprepared and desperate for someone who can give me directions/advice in English!

On my way home, I stopped by my Opa & Oma's house to visit & show off my skills and the conversation turned to my Oma's trip to Malawi in the 1990s to visit my aunt and uncle, who were living there at the time. She started telling me a story about how the three of them travelled out to a relatively remote village where my aunt & uncle's housekeeper was from... night was falling quickly and the road wasn't very clear, so the housekeeper and my aunt went back to escort my uncle into the village (he had sprained his ankle and was on crutches), leaving my Oma in the village alone for about an hour. She recalls that the villagers had told them that this was only the second time that anyone remembered Caucasian people visiting their community. Soon enough, she found herself sitting in a chair with a large group of children sitting at her feet and adults close by.

"They were all just looking at me," she said... "I thought to myself, now what am I going to do?".

"So," she said, "I just started speaking to them in English. Look at the moon! THE MOON! MOON! Now, chitongo? (referring to their ethnic group, hoping they'd tell her their word for moon) ... but they didn't really get it. So, I started singing to them:

"Le soleil a rendez-vous avec la lune,
Mais la lune n'est pas là et le soleil l'attend
Ici-bas souvent chacun pour sa chacune
Chacun doit en faire autant
La lune est là, la lune est là
La lune est là, mais le soleil ne la voit pas... now, chitongo!"

My aunt and uncle arrived at the village to find all of the villagers in song with my little dutch Oma sitting on a chair in the middle of the crowd. That's the kind of Africa I want to experience... here's hoping I have some of the same strength and ingenuity of my amazing family.