Unboxed

On my way to Africa. Though I’m in business class, in my own little sleep pod, and it is the most comfortable travel I’ve ever had, I’m still in a box. My biggest anticipation about 10 days in Africa is to get out of the box.

Two days before going to Africa, I’m in my house: Box 1.

Sleeping in my bed: Box 2.

I wake up and go into the bathroom: Box 3.

To the kitchen, taking coffee, bread, and butter out of the fridge: Box 4.

To the kids’ bedrooms to wake them up: Boxes 5 and 6.

Get in the car: Box 7.

Drive them to school: Box 8.

Drive myself to work: Box 9.

Then on this particular day, two days before going to Africa on safari with 24 family members, including my two children whose father is African and became their father ten years after I met him in Cameroon though we are now divorced and he is not on this trip of course and I am the only single parent among the 5 families, . . . two days before going back to the continent I lived on for three short but fateful years, I am driving my box to the Hyatt in Chicago for a sales conference.

In the bowels of the mega hotel (Box 10) in one of the many nondescript, windowless conference rooms, I sit watching a speaker who is behind a podium and between two mammoth video screens. I note just how boxed in we are—how every thing is angular—podium, screens, tables, books, papers, patterns on the carpets, and walls, walls, walls. And I remember 20 years ago feeling the same boxed-in feeling in the same kind of conference room deep in the interior maze of a mega hotel in Cameroon.

I was one year into my three years in the Peace Corps. I was posted to a village called Yagoua in the Extreme North Province of Cameroon. It had been a year of no boxes. Almost every structure in Yagoua was perfectly imperfect, made of mud and grasses and twigs, with bits of sunlight peaking through little holes here and there, the walls never meeting the dirt floors exactly, only semi-privacy created by thatch weavings called seikos, everything lumpy, frayed, wood, mud, plant matter. 

Not even the new school and the few government buildings could resist the lusty growth, brown dryness, sand, dust, decay of being organic. Everything was alive or very recently living or recently touched by the living. Bricks and brick structures seeming to grow straight out of the giving ground. 

Even paper was soft from many uses. I was a teacher. I would use my fresh, new paper to write assignments and then find it a couple days later shaped as a cone and full of roasted peanuts being sold off a tin tray on a woman’s head to the very students who wrote on the paper. Then days later, it’s toilet paper in a stack with other found bits of paper at a friend’s hole-in-the-ground, seiko-surrounded outhouse. 

I pondered this as I sat in the Chicago conference room, two floors underground in the sterile room, sadly free of fresh air, gazing at the stacks of thick, pristine Hyatt notepads on every table. And again I thought back to the hotel in Cameroon at which I found myself after one year in my dusty, earthy, delightfully decaying village. For some reason I was watching a bad, amateur ballet recital in this tres chic, luxe de luxe hotel in the capital city of Cameroon—days of travel from my new village home. In the windowless conference room, young Cameroonian women stumbled on stage, half-heartedly trying to dance a ballet that they seemed bored with. This is my Box 11.

In Box 11, I felt powerless, small inside, deep inside. I couldn’t see earth, sunlight, dirt, decay. I couldn’t feel my connections to people I live with like I could with the piece of paper/homework/peanut wrapper/toilet paper in my village. I couldn’t sense the circle of life like I could in the growth of plants cut down woven into walls and then quickly disintegrating and collapsing back into the earth.

My time in Cameroon was profound and I spent years and years afterward trying to figure why Africa was so compelling to me. Why did I want to be there, to marry an African man, to go back, to always choose books about Africa, to listen to African music, to hang out with Africans, to eat African food, to work with Africans, to have half African children? What is the pull for me? I think it was the life I lived in Cameroon. It was the power of living close to nature and so mindfully experiencing connections to my surroundings without distractions.

So 11 boxes later, I know what I most look forward to in going back to Africa. Please let there be connections. Let there be unprocessed food; unmuffled sounds; unedited conversations; unstructured homes; undefined sights; unboxed travel, sleep, and lounging in open air nights near lulling magical fires. In place of boxes, surround me with shapeless, free, amorphous life. Let there be no box between me and life.