So how did it happen that I find myself in a place where drivers must hit the brakes and wait for donkeys and cattle to cross the road? This beautiful, dry place where the human will is no match for the sun. This healing place with its many languages and dreams; nourishing place with its maguni and mutete; this wounded place: Namibia, where my young students tell stories about the time before independence, stories of sitting in classes where teachers had rifles in the corner and a wrong answer could mean being hit with one; where after independence, the diamond industry is still run by Germans and most of the stores are owned by the Portuguese and some of us have running water but many still walk the hot dusty roads to fetch buckets of it and gracefully carry ten pounds of it on their heads. How did I end up in Namibia?

What conscious, right-minded African-American doesn’t want to at least set foot on the African continent--even if it’s for a week in a city so modern you feel like you never left home? So I applied to IFESH, an NGO established back in the day by the late Reverend Leon Sullivan to promote self-help and an exchange of knowledge between Africans and African-Americans. Last year when I applied, I was placed on the alternate list to go to Ghana. This year I reapplied and got the invitation letter to teach in Namibia. When I got the letter, I tell you, I thanked God and rushed to the map on my bedroom wall. Namibia.

I have been assigned to teach English Communication Skills at a small teacher training college in a rural town on the border of Angola called Rundu. But before I could set eyes on Rundu, I had to travel for 36 hours-three flights, a two hour stop in Amsterdam and nine hours of being stared at in Munich Germany-then I spent four busy days in Namibia's capital, Windhoek, for IFESH orientation. Windhoek is a place where you can drink the tap water, go to a club, catch a movie, mall hop and skip the malaria pills. But just when I was getting used to having all the comforts of home, we piled in a car and began the seven-hour journey to Rundu.

Suddenly the landscape began to change. The mountains started disappearing, the temperature began to climb, the desert began to show its face again. By the time our journey was over, I had seen thatched houses, herds of animals, land that went on for days, women wearing faded fabric and carrying water and firewood on their heads, and the roads-lemme tell ya-the roads were no longer paved, they were dusty, full of gravel and very bumpy. When we got to the lodge where we were staying for the night, it was dark. There was no one on the road, there were no streetlights, almost everything was closed. We were not in Kansas anymore.

This was a journey I had wanted to make for a long time. Africa. But honestly, it was not easy getting ready for the trip. When people talk about their journeys to Africa, they don’t really talk about how many vaccinations you’ll need or how expensive it is to get malaria pills or the fact that anti-malaria pills are toxic and drive some people up the wall, folk don’t talk about what it feels like to contemplate life without running water or electricity or what it is to pack for an 11 month trip when you have no idea what you will be encountering. I started to wonder why I was doing this. What kind of lunatic was I to leave my family, friends, and work in New York to go thousands of miles away to a dusty place that I had never seen to work in a system I was totally unfamiliar with? What kind of person does that? Was I crazy? No, the preparation was not easy and I had doubts that surprised me, but eventually my faith over rode my insecurities. Once I got to Rundu however, some of those old doubts resurfaced. I had a very deep sleep that first night in Rundu. Maybe sleep was a way of brushing those fears aside by going to a quiet state, maybe it was just fatigue from all the movement and the orientation and all the new things I was seeing and hearing and feeling and tasting for the first time. Whatever it was, I slept. The next morning, the sun had put a new spin on everything; I was greeted by a new day and renewed faith. I was sure that although things might be very different from what I was used to, they were going to be okay. The ancestors had not brought me this far to drop me.