Trip to Gabs: Day 1

Yesterday, we arrived in Kang between 9:00 and 9:30. If you have read about my dad’s work you would know that the S.B.T.P. (SheKalagari bible translation project) office was kept on the same plot that we lived on for the last three years. However, with the fact that we had moved to Ghanzi, the office had to be moved as we were no longer renting that particular plot. So between 9:00 and 9:30am, we arrived at the plot to begin moving.

On the way there one of the songs that I’d listened to was SwitcFoot’s “This is Home”, a phrase that I’d often associated with Kang. Because it seemed that after every vacation, every work related trip, every retreat; I wanted something deeper than the comfort that hotels offer, something more meaningful than the volumes information I gathered from Animal Planet, NatGeo, and the like, something more satisfying than the entertainment that was so freely handed to me. In Kang I had found the place where any adventure could be found with a stick to act as a sword, bow, spear, etc- and a back door to walk through. This was a place where I indulged imagination for hours, going on quests, and in the words of a popular Disney kids show, “…having the best day ever!”

I looked around the yard upon arriving, perceiving every detail. Half of my favorite fort tree had fallen, a tree that had once supported the rubbish bin was missing completely , scores of weeds had grown in our absence and the tomb stones in the pet cemetery (I’ll explain this more later) were stacked a few feet from where they’d been planted.

If you head us speaking at your church last year, you would know that my bedroom was actually in the building that housed the S.B.T.P office. I walked in to my old room first thing. I looked around. There were scars in the wall where I’d nailed my posters to the concrete walls, scorch marks on the floor from where some of my experiments had gotten a little out of hand, scratch marks in the floor that were left from when I’d rearranged my room. I breathed in the smells that I knew so well, the odor that the rooms of teen age boys tend to have, the smells from when one of our first dogs- God rest her soul- had had puppies on thanks giving morning (which we never fully got rid of), and the other smells of the village which before furlough had seemed so calming and homely.

Beyond the fact that the room had been stripped bare to furnish my new bedroom in Ghanzi, I felt that there was something missing. We all went about taking down the office furnishings and loading them in to the van. And by the time we got the first load packed in the look of it reminded of an M.C. Escher painting. We took it about a mile by my calculation to the shopping center that is owned and run by the Marniwicks. The office space we’d gotten was fabulous and hugeish. There are some pictures of it at the end of this post. I loved it. Greatly to my surprise the office furnishings, given their tangled appearance, came unpacked with relative ease. And by the time we (my dad and I) got back to the office Uncle John and Pontsho had already put most of the furniture back together. We went on putting things together and helping, but my thought were elsewhere. 

When my dad and I finish helping with the office, we went to lunch at Ultra stop. While we waited for my meal my mind swam. How could it be that in the place that I knew the best, I knew the entire yard like the back of my hand, how is it that I feel like a stranger? Why do I not feel that refreshment of returning to home? And a list of other questions to numerous to write down. At the end of all of them, the only conclusion that I could come to was: This isn’t home any more. This hurt. How could this change so quickly? I had only been away for 8 months. I’d lived in that yard for three years and never did I dream that in less than one year, I could be so changed as to lose home.

At this point I have lost home again. The paradox that I keep finding myself at is that I never realize that somewhere is home until I lose that place to memories. But the first words of Switchfoot’s song offer me hope that maybe one day I’ll realize the value of home be for I lose it again.

I've got my memories
They're always
Inside of me
But I can't go back
Back to how it was
I believe it now
I've come too far
But I can't go back
Back to how it was
Created for a place
I've never known