Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
that seemed to have no end. It was liberating but unsettling. We were listless in the heat and the stillness. Mummy and Baba had no work and were with us day and night. There was no way to detach from them. No watchmen teasing and admonishing us when we strayed too far from the motel we found when we arrived.
No one, really, who was all that interested in us.
The days stretched from sunup at six to sundown at ten and each new day was as hot as the last so that you had to forgive everyone for wearing shorts. They had no choice: grannies with their veiny legs, old women with their sun-beaten wrinkled thighs, teenagers firm and lithe and pale in the humid torpor. We learnt not to stare. We learnt to hide our amused glances when a fatty bopped down the street in flip flops and denim shorts. No one batted an eyelid.
Everything was big – larger than it really should be, like the Slurpees at the 7-Eleven and the super-long cars that, for all their length, couldn’t carry any extra people. We marvelled at the parking lots. The cars were treated like gods. Unlike in Nairobi, where the roads were lumpy and you sometimes had to squint to see how a parking bay was marked out, here, the lines on the ground in parking lots were immaculate and each space was well lit and spotlessly clean. We arrived in the wheat belt of Canada, the Prairies, in June. At the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, Mummy and Baba had asked the portly middle-aged man behind the counter if he had any suggestions for where they should settle our family. He said Saskatoon was a great place to raise children and they took his advice. Upon arrival it was immediately evident that there were very few prospects for work or for making the kind of life they wanted in Saskatoon. So, Baba got busy applying for jobs in Toronto and Ottawa. He scoured the papers and got on the phone with recruiters. It didn’t take long. He found a job at a place called World University Service of Canada (WUSC) and, just six weeks after we had landed in Saskatoon, we packed up again and made our way east across the country. It took us a week to reach Ottawa in our tiny little brown Datsun that held most of our belongings.
Staying in the Prairies hadn’t been an option. In small, quiet towns where getting along is everything, Baba’s pride would have hampered our progress. We girls would have been fine in the way that one must be fine in the end, even if bruised and somewhat broken on the inside, but Baba would have been like a caged bull. He would have become angry and frustrated and not like our father at all, only a shadow of himself, crippled by rage. So, we forestalled the drama we might have endured and slipped out of that place that was too small for such a big man and his wife. We left as quietly as we had arrived.
Baba had been hired by the team that planned and delivered humanitarian assistance to some of the poorest places in Africa. In Lusaka, Baba had worked at the World Food Programme and knew the ins and outs of food distribution, and then, at the UN in Nairobi, he had spent a lot of time assisting with Ugandan refugees. So, his experience was tailor-made for the drought that hit Ethiopia in 1984.
There was no place as bad as Ethiopia in the terrible years that followed. The famine killed so many and in such heartbreaking ways that even pop singers noticed. ‘We Are the World’ was our anthem the following year. Whenever it played, we would think of Baba, far away feeding skeletal babies with vacant eyes and distended bellies.
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