Ten Years Later

This week's topic is a broad one. I am to write about a memory. I thought of a lot of memories over the passed few days but none of them had any real story or meaning to them. Just passing moments of my childhood that have stuck in my mind. I did come up with something tho. I'll see where it takes us.

I was a few days shy of 11 when we arrived home from our home in Central Africa. We had spent almost 5 of the previous 6 or 7 years there and I had it in my head that that was home. I wondered what Canada was like and I was eager to come back but that walled, red dirt compound was my home. My friends were all dark skinned. My life was simple. Sometimes I had to help unload groceries after a long day in town when all I wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep but that was about the extent of my worries. I attended school a few mornings a week and the rest of my days were spent playing ball outside our compoud gate, or driving for hours to spend what felt like a few minutes visiting some friend or friends of friends in distant villages, or drinking tea with and eating brown sugared rice with the night watchman. Oh those blissful evenings sitting out under the stars with our friends or sticking our head out the window to feel the cool evening breeze, singing those Chichewa songs by memory. That's what I remember.

And then we came home. I don't remember much of the coming home prep but suddenly we were home and eventually the newness wore off and I had to learn a new life here is Canada. Where nobody waved because vehicles and white skin weren't a novelty. Where I had to find a place in the group of a few white girls and moany white boys who had spent the last few years of their lives together instead of in far off distant lands where any number of dark skinned children wanted to be your friend. Where second hand clothes were perhaps scorned and a lot of money was spent on new clothes. I remember crying myself to sleep many nights because this just did not feel like home. I wanted to go back to my easy, sunbleached life in the Warm Heart of Africa. I remember waiting for my sisters outside of some stores in the mall, wishing instead for piles of clothes on plastic tarps on the ground to sift through.

Slowly those feelings wore off and I became used to my new life. It's been 10 years since I left one home for the other. I have had more people come into my life and then leave again, taking more pieces of my heart away from me. I have passed those stores that I used to scorn and refuse to go in to and now I wouldn't dain to enter those stores for the opposite reason. I now live a life where there's things go wrong all the time and I realize that I will have had bad days in my childhood days in Malawi, those just aren't the times I remember. Instead I've got the good memories. Giggling with friends with whom I shared only a few common words, singing the starlit evenings away, living my life to its fullest.