It’s cold. Like wearing socks all the time, sleeping with a sweatshirt on, wanting to stay under the covers all day cold. Windy too. The tall grasses on the reserve scream with every gust and the trees groan and creak. It sounds like God is telling the land to be quiet. Like the persistent hissing sound that schoolchildren make when standing in line before getting let out for recess.
I could be anywhere. I could be in valleys of Montana or the wine country of California. I could be in West Virginia or somewhere in Texas. Wyoming probably looks like this too. The only difference is the fact that sometimes, when I look out the windows, I can see the Wildebeests up on the hill or the Gazelle running through the flatlands. Everything in South Africa is brown on the color scale. The grass is beige. The trees are dark brown. The roads are tope. Everything is brown(ish) except for the buildings. They are purples and blues and pinks and oranges. Maybe it’s because everything else is so plain. They needed a little color in their lives. So why the hell not paint the house turquoise?
After a morning of soil erosion work I take a baby wipe and use it on my face and arms and neck. It turns black with the dirt that I couldn’t see when looking in the mirror. Kind of makes a person wonder how dirty they are when you can actually see it. All of the black stuff comes from the concrete dust and dirt that surround the rocks we have to dig up. We put the rocks into the back of the Ute (utility vehicle… or as I like to call them, trucks) and then drive it to the hole on the new property. The ride in the back of the truck with the dirt and dust probably doesn’t help matters much because it just makes it float around and get in your hair. Once at the hole, the truck backs up and we open the tailgate so that we can just push all of the rocks out. Using gravity to our advantage. The dirt gets imbedded in our every crevice, our eyes, our nose, our hair, our ears. The baby wipes only get off the surface debris but it’s the best we can do for the moment, because after lunch we get to do the same thing all over again. It’s better then grass cutting though, any day.
Homesickness is dramatic. It feels like someone has punched you in the gut. It makes you feel stupid and pitiful and weak. It’s the very first dull thud of grief, the initial thing you feel when you find out that someone you love has died or something tragic has happened. Take that first jolt of pain, the one that doesn’t last very long because it is overshadowed by the full onset of grief, and stretch it out into the first few days or weeks or months away from “home”. That’s homesickness. Now in comparison to a real tragedy, it’s nothing. But at that moment in time, it’s the entire world. It makes you cry, sobbing happens sometimes too. You feel lost, alone, and weak. But the thing about homesickness is that everyone gets it, no matter how strong or powerful. It can last for days or years. But it happens to the best of us. There is no remedy for it either, which makes it worse then others. You just have to barrel through the days, make yourself busy, be present. Choose to take a swing at it, this new life or this different place. Make the effort. Those are the best things even though at that moment, in the thick of it, they are the things you least want to do. Writing helps too, even if your just journaling, because it shows progress. You can look back and see the difference that a few days make and realize what has changed. Homesickness is brutal and makes even the strongest people look like pansies. The nice thing about it is that if you ask anyone, anyone you look up to if they have been homesick they will tell you that, yes they have. But take a good look at them, because they are still standing and they didn’t drop of the face of the planet or go into a horrible depression. Homesickness sucks, but it passes and that makes all the difference.
“Marrrtttiiinnnnn”
Imagine someone yelling that in a thick African accent at 8 am every morning.
“Marrrtiiinnnnnnnnn!”
Good morning.
“Yes Macy, what can I do for you Macy?”
Poor Martin.
Macy is the cook, the cleaner, the laundry doer, the every ebb and flow of this place. She keeps the volunteers at the reserve on a very right leash.
“Martin, they left the dishes in the dryer, they did not put them away, how can I get my work done if I have to do all of theirs for them, Martin?”
Macy’s head sits about a foot below mine, she is short and quite petite. Always wearing a headscarf and a sweater, she bustles around the house doing the odds and ends that keep this place going. But her one goal in life is to do the least amount of work possible. That’s where Martin comes in.
Martin is our “volunteer coordinator”. He keeps an eye on us and makes sure that we are doing our work correctly. Martin is a thirty something German man whose glasses tend to slip down his nose and when talking, rubs his balding head, quite possibly making the empty patch in the center worse. He has been traveling the world for some time now, most recently riding his motorbike from Germany to South Africa (which is where we are at this point). But although he has accomplished this large feat, he is still no match for Macy.
“Macy, we washed the dishes and let them dry, how were we supposed to know that you wanted us to put them away? I’m not psychic Macy!”
Pause.
“Well Martin, you should be! I have never yelled at any volunteer ever!”
“There’s always a first for everything!” Martin is not afraid of Macy, as I feel that he should be.
Another pause.
“Well your football team lost 1 to 3 in the cup last night…” Macy taunts.
“Is it?”
“It is… It is…”
Every morning it’s something different. We left the dishes out, we used all of the milk, we did not pick up our laundry, the sugar was left out, we used the wrong coffee.
Macy is very picky and very needy and she sighs a lot. John has decided that it is best to ignore her, close the door between the living room and the kitchen, and move on.
John is one of the other volunteers who is here with his girlfriend. He is a New Yorker, you can tell by looking at him. Also 30 something and 5”11 with a thick head of salt and pepper hair, more pepper than salt, he is the funny man of the group. His girlfriend, KB, is from Austin, Texas and looks it too. She is small, blond and full of energy. They look like quite an odd couple but it’s easy to see why they work. She is a middle school science teacher; he acts like a seventh grader. John and KB have taken a year out of their lives and decided to travel the world. Stories of Istanbul and Greece come flooding out at a moments notice, but they don’t seem to be aware of how much of a dream they are living. An entire year away from the things that they are used to. They aren’t just traveling, every place they go they do volunteer work. Building stonewalls in Turkey, taking care of children in China, painting houses in Italy.
“I think that Macy hates us”, John muses as he uses the wrong coffee and leaves the sugar on the counter.
“Is it?” smiles Martin, with a cigarette hanging out of his crooked mouth.
“It is Martin”, John replies trying to replicate the harsh German accent that accompanies the familiar remark.
And the day continues.
