Smell the Onion

An online acquantience has recently returned from some weeks working
with orphans and children in Ethiopia.  Reading her blog is like
reliving a little bit of my returning.  There is nothing else like
it.  Something she wrote reminded me of a poem-like thing I wrote
after I had been back awhile.  Here it is:

Before I left Africa,
I tried to wash the mud off of my shoes
(I was going home, you know, and it wouldn’t do to have such filthy shoes at home)
I accumulated quite a bit, my six weeks on Kilimanjaro.

Some of it was everyday mud–from the to and fro of everyday walking over mud-filled potholes and patches:
Past the temple–
the beggar with the blue umbrella,
the “house of music”–
the Golden Leaf Bazaar
and the Masai Medicine man.

Some of it came from Kili herself–
from hiking up and down the mud-slicked arteries that criscross her slopes:
from the roads between the banana coffee fields,
the log bridge over the river,
the steep path to Soun Orphanage,
the trail to the base of the Merangu waterfalls.

My shoes are covered in my African life:

Saturated with sounds of Arabic prayers,
Pentecostal church choirs,
Diesel engines,
Asking and giving,
    buying and selling,
        shouting and laughing
in the jumbled song of Swahili.

Saturated wtih images of green and blue horizons
little boys and girls in castoff clothes,
locusts the size of my hand,
laughing pink tongues on brown lips,
and vibrant cloths in Chui’s shop window.

Before I left Africa, I tried to wash Africa off of my shoes.
I scrubbed and scraped,
and washed brown rivers of memories
down the open drain.  I never found the blue of my shoes again.
Africa, it seems, is more stubborn than running water,
and I still walk on memory soaked feet.