I remember the day I left Makuyu. I remember crying the loss with a sunk face in the pillow, as in love films but with mucus and disheveled. Today I have returned; I write from the Little Salante bar where I used to eat a plate of lentils with bugs. It's a blue bar, with wooden banks occupied by gentlemen who do the same as me in another language: Pass the drink, Pass life. Five years ago it seemed to me the best place in the world to be young. Today I remove the lentils and chewing-diastatic-mástica-trago being aware that I fell in love with the evil.
He lived in haste and with open eyes, traveled the roads without fear; the red dust stained my clothes and I adorned lashes. Gobbled new words, engulfing the pain of others, gobbled gobbled injustice and hunger. View spectacular sunrises and sunsets disappointing it became routine, I learned a lot about illegal drugs, prostitution and murder. I thought that life was. I thought that was enough.
But then the nights and silence. And loneliness. And diarrhea. Fever. Be aware of ego's limitations and pain. The inability to understand those days when nothing happened and then I had to happen.
Makuyu was a malquerer who made a book to take it into the suitcase, To take me to your patients, to remember those days in which a constant principle lived: The principle of adult life, The beginning of a love, The principle of knowing what I don't want more, The principle of understanding that we do not matter, that we are only and okay.
When I was a child, I ate butter sandwiches in tariff. Before my life was wrong, Before hormone secretion, Before the blade shaking my legs, hurting these knees accustomed to falling into the schools of the school.
Then floated in the sea, that for me was just water, salt, algae, colored fish.
Not drowned.
Not the patera.
Not cold death.
Africa was just a horizon that appeared in cloudless days.
Africa was an image that it was from guilt.
And I wanted to see it. I wanted to see it.
I went to Makuyu to help and discovered that nobody needed my help. I went to Makuyu to teach and I had to swallow my words, one by one, A thousand times, While I learned to know nothing. I met women who work from sun to sun, With their children behind the back, and they took an entire family with twenty dollars a month. I met men who toured kilometers in silence to help a family that had no medicines. I learned to milking cows. I learned to be ugly. I learned to get dirty. I learned to be very happy every time they gave me half a dozen eggs, or someone shared a rice plate with me.
I learned from women who did not know how to read the best remedies to cure a broken heart: go ahead, Keep working, Keep growing, Do not need anyone. That was: Makuyu did not need anyone, They didn't need me; They need corruption to disappear, They need their lands, They need their rights back.
Now I live in Nairobi, leaving behind the Malquerer who clouded my eyes, believing that love to land, To a person, It consists of letting and understanding, And not to look away when the sunsets are ugly. I return by Makuyu from time to time. I come to say hello and say thanks. Caresses cows. They tell me good news. Sometimes someone dies. Life, only that, as anywhere.
Tierra de Brujas (Viajesalpasado Editorial).
