37 years old tomorrow and I have not yet accomplished my lifelong dream of traveling to Africa and volunteering my services. Africa has tugged at my heart since I was 16 when I wanted to give up school and help end Apartheid. It was the book Kaffir Boy that lit my fire and it has never faded. In 1989 this was an impractical idea for a naive white girl from the suburbs of Baltimore. My mother laughed at me, the same woman who hyphenated our last names because she believed taking someone else's last name was an outdated practice from slavery showing ownership. The last 20 years have been marked for me by great literature, as an English teacher and a reading addict sometimes it consumes me. The Power of One; Things Fall Apart; Cry, the Beloved Country; and the Poisonwood Bible have taunted me! It takes money to volunteer. And so on the eve of my 37th birthday I can't help but feel down in the dumps -my mind running back to these ideas-my mother died at 45 (I was 21), although illogical, I feel like I have an expiration date. I thought I would be married with children by now. Not the case! I don't suffer from any great social or physical deformities. But I have love I need to give and receive. My friends believe that I am the ultimate independent woman-and I am! And proud of it! The bottom line is this-I willingly gave up the majority of my twenties and some of my thirties because I wanted to believe that my siblings absolutely needed me. In hindsight, they did pretty well on their own. I believed I was sacrificing my own life to ensure the vitality of theirs. It was a great distraction from dealing with my own motherless daughter feelings. I don't want for much-I mean school loans will plague me forever-but they can never take my degrees away. But Africa, with its haunted past, beauty, and fight for independence still has a story to tell me. My dream is to fulfill this calling in my soul and maybe even put it into a book of my very own.
