Goodbye New York

The day seems to be going well save for the stress of not knowing what to pack, buy or whom to exclude on my shopping list. It is a warm Thursday afternoon on August 28, 2008. After moving from dollar stores to stores that wiped out my dollars, I am finally ready to go to my house in Brooklyn to complete the old travel ritual- packing. The clock hits 1pm and I am off to take a nap before munching on the Sadza I need to carry me through the night. Packing done and Sadza gone, off I go to the airport. A few minutes later and two suitcases in hand, doors at JFK open.

I check in my bags all the way to Victoria Falls so that I do not have to carry them through Johannesburg. Time seems to be on my side, no rushes and this time the security is friendly so I did not have to take off my shoes. Did they find Osama? Through the gates and into the crowd of what seems to be college kids going for a semester abroad in Cape Town. I sit for a few minutes and soon enough I start making my last phone calls before I depart for the motherland. Now, it is all coming to me in a sudden rush of adrenaline- I AM GOING HOME TO SEE MY FAMILY! When they announce that our flight is boarding I am pregnant with anxiety and soon enough, the hostess takes my ticket and into the tunnel I go. 15, 20, perhaps 30 minutes go by and we are on our way to Jozi.

I am carrying books to read and I am not so sure which one of the two to start with- Dreams of my father or My Life. Well, I respect elders, so I start off with Bill Clinton’s bio. Uncle Bobby is cool, but with all due respect to President Clinton I have got to sleep, so I pass out. You would do the same if you were reading this thick book! The trip is as long as it is boring so I try to spice it up with movies. Sleep, movie, Clinton, sleep, food, sleep, sleep, movie, sleep; that becomes my routine until I am woken up by the Senegalese guy next to me, to help him watch movies. Brief polite chat, Clinton, then slumber. Dakar Senegal comes and my new Senegalese friend living in Puerto Rico bids farewell. I must confess, I never thought I could ever find a Senegalese carpenter living in Puerto Rico! Well, then, I will sleep off the amazement.

Friends

Friends,

I will be travelling to the land where it means nothing to be a millionaire, a land where, if inflation was a dollar figure, you would be rich. In the next few weeks, I will be updating you on the daily life in Zimbabwe.

But before I even depart, strange things are beginning to happen. As is the norm, when people know I am coming home, they send in their requests for me to bring them all kinds of things from shoes, base ball hats, to perfumes. Never mind the fact that I do not have the money to buy everyone these things; people at home think American streets are littered with greenbacks and everyone who sets foot on this soil becomes rich. So, supposedly, I am a very rich man! Being the rich man that I am, requests for this and that, even from long lost friends, are flooding my inbox. But, the strange thing is that a good number of these requests are things I would have never dreamt that people would ask me to bring them from the land of the free. I can handle requests for perfumes, but believe me, I got a request for toothpaste the other day. Someone even asked me for that precious grain-sugar!

So, in the next few weeks, a rich man will be writting his diary and if you have time, read it.

Wish me luck