Essay: Woman in the Savanna

On returning home

Kingdom Girldom

In central Africa, everything sprawled. The sky itself, a universe. A republic of wings, thick hum of termites congregating. Snakes, birds, monkeys in the acacia trees, all keening with green. Later, twilight’s early silk. 

As far as childhoods go, mine was pretty weird. My dad was a missionary doctor who bounced around internationally until he finally took a head of surgery position in the Central African Republic (C.A.R). There my memory begins—or at least where the lights switch on and the music begins to play.

I was a strange creature in that world. Blonde, blue-eyed with stubby legs and a knack for sunburns. Under the dubious and problematic circumstances of being a missionary kid, I was caught in a country I had no right to love. In many ways, I wish I’d been born there. Maybe then I’d have some excuse for the relentless bond I felt with the land.

Initially, I was reluctant to make the move. We’d lived in Haiti prior and I was loath to relocate. I never meant to love C.A.R. But landing there was like being cast from a boat into an ocean. No choice but to swim. 

We stayed for nearly 4 years. My sisters and I immersed in a childhood of color and singularity. Long hours with Emily of New Moon, Anne of Green Gables, and A Wrinkle in Time. Wildly isolated from media, the days globbed together like honey. It was a fantastically lonely but deeply imaginative childhood. We were educated by a classical homeschool curriculum, but we learned by watching our father on medical rounds, by playing with friends in the river, climbing trees, raising wild baby animals, and baking elaborate birthday cakes topped by gardenias. In the afternoons, we’d wade so deep into the savanna, the tall grass would swallow us whole. 

Rapture Rupture

When my family was evacuated from C.A.R, we weren’t in our village of Ippy. We were hundreds of miles away visiting the capital city of Bangui gathering supplies. When the warfare broke out, the roads closed and we were trapped with only our overnight bags. When we were finally helicoptered out by Marines, we left behind all our belongings, our friends, my father’s hospital, our house beneath the frangipani trees, my dog, the cats, the parrot, and antelope. We fled amidst gunfire, snipers in the hills, the yellow sun spinning in her sky. We never saw Ippy again. 

In the chaos that followed, we knew little of what happened to our home. We understood that several of the animals had likely starved (though we hoped for miracles). But the truth is always uglier. Eventually, we learned the dog in her madness had broken the cat’s neck. That the house was looted. Before that, a missionary neighbor went through our home quickly and retrieved a few items—a wooden figurine, a silk scarf, my Bible. When they sent us the box with the last of the remnants of our life, I wept wordlessly. I had never been so disappointed in a gift.

Every therapist I’ve ever had has diagnosed me with PTSD from the experience. Not only from the evacuation and the subsequent reentry into an American childhood, but from the sense of helplessness. A world dissolved in a fist. Weight of a million tiny things collapsing.

When we landed in Ohio, I found it a pale country. Gray skies, sidewalks, highways. Everywhere: accents, Walmarts, Happy Meals, car horns, and white children who talked incessantly about Tamagotchis.

For years, the longing to return pulsed inside me like a moth trapped. I began to have a recurring dream that I returned to the savanna alone. In the dream, I’d sink to my knees in the red dirt and say: I’m finally back. I can’t believe I’m not dreaming. And then, of course, I’d wake.

Resurrection Return

Last month, nearly 30 years since the evacuation, I did, in fact, take myself back to the continent. C.A.R never recovered from the instability of 1996, so I couldn’t return precisely to my childhood home, but I got as close as I could—traveling into Tanzania. Tanzania is obviously very different from C.A.R but the red roads are similar. And the heat still stings. And walking along buggy paths that look so much like my childhood haunts, I talked a lot to the little girl who got stranded all those years ago. 

I’ve long been fascinated by the concept in Chinese medicine known as earthing or grounding—defined as earth's intrinsic energy or Qi that can stabilize the body’s own. So, just like in the dream, I knelt and put my palms to the red belly of the road. I felt stupid but I did it anyway. 

And reader, I kid you not, for a split second, I felt time shift. For a moment, I was ten again in my checkered dress, running back to the house before it collapsed with time. I was rewinding, releasing my dog and burying the broken cat. Shutting the door to my childhood bedroom. Slow goodbying. Covering what’s gone in the good red dirt.

It wasn’t joy I felt in that instant—more relief, like a rib being pushed back in place. In those 30 seconds, I got something it’s taken 30 years and countless therapists to achieve. In an instant, I caught the lost girl, the one that lives suspended between my heart and throat and I pulled her into the now. When I finally opened my eyes, I swear to god, a child’s voice inside me said: the dream is awake.

Aftermath Aftermap

I’ll always be haunted by the question—where is home? How is healing found? I wish there was a formula for it, a map to all your abandoned places, a road that always leads to your heart’s door.

But here’s what I know: in lieu of a map, the body is a charter of old wisdom, rich in instinct. Every desire, pulse of longing, all those shapeless dreams that tug you awake at 3 am—these, too, are ancient symbols. You are plume and bone—same as the graylag goose who lifts her head at autumn’s first twinge. How she gives her breast to the wind. Healing, I think, is mostly just the body not abandoning the body. To make good on the promises you once made. To listen to the skin’s spined senses, nosing you in a new direction.

In the end, the questions of our lives are simple. How will you answer the wounded child inside you? Whose grief will you bury in the dirt? On what road will you kneel down and touch your forehead, three times, to the earth?

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