TARANGIRE NATIONAL PARK, Tanzania — Our first day in East Africa is everything I envisioned. My 17-year-old daughter, Rachel, and I rise just after the sun, clamber into our guide’s vehicle and track game.
We’re here for the great migration, when wildebeests, zebras and other animals venture from the southern Serengeti to the Masai Mara in Kenya. As we jounce over rutted roads, our guide steers us to clusters of elephants and zebras.
He points at a warthog and says the Kiswahili word “pumbaa” — “Like ‘The Lion King’!” Rachel says — and we see that some zebras appear to have dark brown stripes while the stripes on others look inky black.
We return to our safari camp in time for dinner, which is served in an open-air tent. As we finish our dessert of bananas and watermelon, I sigh.
“Refreshing,” I say.
“Just like this trip,” she answers.
She and I need this adventure. I’m sad she’s about to graduate from high school and that this phase of parenting is coming to an end. She’s a ball of stress as she tries to keep up her grades while waiting to hear where she’ll go to school this fall. Every day, it seems, I think of some life lesson I need to teach her, some discussion we need to have before she’s no longer under my roof.
When Rachel was young, I promised her that one day Mommy would take her to Africa. The continent has been a part of my life since my mid-20s, when I left the States to teach school in Namibia two years after it won independence from South Africa. It was one of the world’s youngest democracies at the time, and I arrived with a wave of Americans to help the country transition to English as the sole official language. I volunteered with a nongovernmental organization based in Boston, and almost no one in my group was a professional teacher. But we all were required to have four-year university degrees.
We got three weeks of cultural and teacher training, then were let loose in our villages to structure lessons as we saw fit. I set up English conversation classes for adults; started a school library for students; helped design a nationwide secondary-school curriculum; and co-taught classes in several subjects. During the holiday break I hitchhiked all over southern Africa, spending Christmas with a Zimbabwean family and skinny-dipping on New Year’s Day in Lake Malawi. I rode a steam train from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls and climbed to the top of Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town.
Back in Namibia, I taught my students folk songs from the 1960s. A teacher I worked with named his daughter after me.
I staggered through a hike across the Fish River Canyon after most of my group took off, leaving me with only dried fruit and two packets of soup. I took photos of the sand dunes at Sossusvlei and drove with other volunteers through Etosha National Park in a beat-up Land Rover, gaping at the zebras and giraffes close enough to touch.
After Rachel was born, I sang her African lullabies and dressed her in brightly colored outfits a friend of mine had brought back from Kenya. As she grew older, I told her about Namibia in bits and pieces, trying to give her a glimpse of what Mom was like when all she needed was a backpack and a passport to explore Africa. I wanted to teach her to embrace adventure, to keep her mind open to new experiences and possibilities.
I wasn’t worried about her ability to handle herself. We travel well together, and she’s never been one to shrink from a challenge. This is a kid who wouldn’t wear dresses in elementary school because, she said, it was too hard to climb trees. Who refused my offer to end a hike on a searingly hot day the summer she turned 5. Who hopped a plane to visit her boyfriend in Milan last year without a second thought.
She’s a teenager. She’s a young woman. She’s exasperating. She’s the best of me.
I could have taken her to Namibia, but I wanted to explore a different part of Africa and I thought we’d be on more equal footing if we were both in unfamiliar territory rather than back to a place I’d been, with me constantly plying her with memories. Despite our limited time — 12 days, with two days of travel on either end — I hoped to show her how I felt when I lived there: joy, frustration, acceptance, contentment.
As it turns out, we experience everything I experienced in southern Africa: Power outages. Short showers, because the hot water would run out. British expressions. Persistent flies. Night skies bright enough to read by.
The life lessons begin before we leave the States. I forget my raincoat, essential for Tanzania’s seasonal downpours. Rachel forgets her malaria pills, even after the dire warnings I gave about volunteers who had died of the disease. As usual, she doesn’t tell me she left them behind until she’s figured out a solution: We’ll divide my pill supply, then take hers when we get back.
Once we land in Tanzania, our days fall into a predictable pattern: Up at sunrise or shortly after; breakfasts of fruit, pastries, bacon and sausage; then hours of looking for game, passing acacia trees whose tops look like they’ve been leveled with an offset spatula. We take a walking safari, accompanied by Maasai guides with rifles who teach us the difference between elephant dung (big and scone-shaped) and giraffe poop (round and small, like marbles).
On the drive back to camp, we watch kilometer after kilometer of khaki-colored sand roll by, spotted with shredded branches that elephants had torn out of the earth to eat the leaves.
Memories of Namibia flood through me as I tell Rachel about the baby named after me. “She’d be grown by now,” I say, “with children of her own.”
The days are not without hiccups. On the first night we try to plug our phones in and discover that we don’t have the right converters. We’d been told the camp has WiFi, but the network is down — something about a faulty satellite.
“I get antsy when I can’t communicate with people,” Rachel says. “My friends will think I’ve dropped off.”
“That is exactly the point,” I feel like hissing, but I restrain myself. “A lot of Africa is about waiting,” I say.
After three days in Tarangire National Park, our guide drives us to the Ngorongoro Crater, an otherworldly volcanic caldera located in a UNESCO World Heritage site. We cross the Great Rift Valley and Rachel remarks that the scenery reminds her of the road she took to the Turkish coast during a trip with her best friends almost two years ago.
Listen to yourself, I say. Pretty soon you’ll start comparing every new place to someplace you’ve been before.
We pose for photos at the top, then descend into the crater itself where we see hippos, a line of flamingos, a cluster of guinea fowl, blacksmith plovers and gray crowned cranes. We agree that from a distance, the trees hard against the north rim look like broccoli florets. Rachel says the crater is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
“I’d rather do something like this instead of staying at a five-star resort in the Bahamas,” she says.
I silently cheer.
Our last stop is the Serengeti. We take a prop plane to an airstrip, where our new guide greets us with cashews, cookies and champagne.
Over the next few days, I point out to her how different the ground looks: Some sections are covered in velvety grass with shallow pools here and there. Mountains — tall hills, really — frame the landscape. Our hot-air balloon ride is canceled, which dismays Rachel, then gets rescheduled after the all-day rain stops. Aloft, we drift past a lake, safari tents and dirt roads carved out by tire tracks. For the third time on this trip, she thanks me for bringing her here.
I’m the one who should be thanking her. She’s impressed me with her poise and resilience: Her ankles are covered by mosquito bites and the flies won’t leave her alone, but she doesn’t complain — even after she finds a roach in her bed one night.
And I notice something else: She — not me — is the one people focus on. On Christmas Eve, the staff at our first migration camp bake a cake and bring it to our table. She blows out the candles, and the other guests think it’s her birthday. Then she goes around to each table and offers them the remaining pieces. At the end of our stay there, one of the staff members insists on taking her photo, saying that everyone is sad Rachel is leaving.
Throughout the trip, she avoids Americans and chats up families from Denmark, Italy and Germany. She tells me she’s happy to be with me but loves traveling alone because it’s less stressful when she has only herself to worry about.
On our last night in Tanzania, she asks the migration camp manager how to say “cheers!” in Kiswahili.
“Gonga,” he replies. “Maisha marefu.” He says the second part means that you wish someone a long life.
We clink our glasses. I urge her to get a job in her 20s that will take her all over the world.
“I’ll miss you,” I say.
“You can visit me,” she answers.
I want her to squeeze every last bit out of life, even if it takes her far away from home. I want her to come right back to Virginia after college and live near me forever.
Years ago, when she was a toddler, we took a walk down our street in Portland, Oregon. All of a sudden she started racing ahead, without so much as a glance backward.
“Look,” I said to my husband as I started to cry. “She’s already running away from us.”
“If we play our cards right, she’ll come back,” he replied.
I’ve given you your wings, my girl. Now, go fly.
The post What I learned about my daughter, and myself, on a trip to East Africa appeared first on Washington Post.
