Can everything be the same but different at the same time?
My body knows this Kenyan heat, this constant Equatorial sweat, the sound of mosquitoes swarming near, the feel of the village children’s handshakes as they greet my return with big smiles and warm hearts…
And everything is also different. I am here with Wendy Mandy, the project coordinator, who walks round with me in the village like a sort of human shield and makes sure I have three home-cooked meals a day. There is a locum clinical officer (physician’s assistant) at the Dispensary who is seeing the patients there now. He sees the villagers first, and then he refers the ones that I might be able to assist to me. Layers of “protection” between my heart -still a bit raw and frayed around the edges from my last stay here- and the villagers’ enormous needs.
Kahlil Gibran wrote: “How shall my heart be unsealed unless it be broken?”
I feel how my heart was cracked open in India in January when Özge passed away, then how it was rolled in gritty sands here in Kenya in June and July, and how it now sits, beating in my chest, with the visceral memories of what it is like to live wide-open with love that is spiritual, human, messy, painful, imperfect, tainted and beautiful.
I feel the difference between that and this moment, where layers are gently protecting it, giving my whole body a different experience of what offering service can also be like. I have stepped back into the same village, and everything is also different.
In the months following Özge’s passing, I went to as many of the places in London as possible that we used to go together. I did not want them to become places that I would avoid because of the memories. Instead, I went there to build new memories of what it was like to be there on my own, as well as remembering what it was like to be there with her. A world with her, and a world without her in physical form.
Returning to Lamu is having a similar effect on me: a place of raw heart and body, and a place of… well, let us see how these next few weeks unfold!
