There are things we can only fully understand when we experience them for ourselves, like raising a child, watching your newborn sleep, and your five-year-old run down hills, flailing limbs carelessly. Seeing that same child driving, waving to you as they sit at the steering wheel of their first car. There are lessons we only learn when knee-deep in life. Leaving home to explore a foreign land and culture will do it too. The more unlike your home, the better. But returning home, that is the final step that truly shows you who you are at your core, your needs, and your way forward.
The world is large and the possibilities endless, the call to explore is often too loud to ignore. Often, those who grow up always on the move or with a shaky ground beneath them, long for one home, stability. While those whose childhoods were secure and constant, rooted in one place, they tend to ache for motion. Not always, but often. Growing up in Zambia or elsewhere in Africa, stories of other worlds found us, and tempted us with their strange animals, haughty accents and glittering lights. But even as we travelled, Africa always remained inside us, tethered to our bones, waiting to put down roots in familiar soil.
Very often we learned to live with less, here. We learned to save, reuse, hold onto. We couldn’t watch water falling from a tap carelessly without leaping to turn it off. We couldn’t not eat all the sandwiches in our lunchboxes, because we knew what went into making them. But still, we couldn’t help but be entranced by the airplanes overhead, heading West, heading East.
We come back home for Christmas, for weekends, for birthdays, for funerals, for tea, for dinner, to rest, cry, laugh. We come home, because home is who we are, even as we branch out into the world and become part of new stories. And when we come home, we see how beautiful our mothers, grandmothers and aunts are, how deep their hugs, how strong our fathers, uncles and brothers are, able to do anything. We see our sisters and brothers and know when the time comes to raise our own families, we will want it to be with them close by.
From time to time, the winds change and take you with them. You find yourself somewhere new. Maybe, as someone new. For a while, your dance is a little different, the dress and shoes too. But ultimately, there is a time when you turn around and start on the road back home. To and fro we go, collecting identities, experiences, stories, clarity and confusion.
Some places and people become a home, even if you weren’t born there, born to them. Some places and people make you feel so seen, and vice versa that when you leave, to stretch your wings, those places, people, rest in waiting. Somewhere between hope and faith, they trust you will return to fill the hole you left. And you, on your return, see it… the hole, filled, in your spirit.
There’s more to see, too. You see yourself clearly, when back with your people. “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered,” said Nelson Mandela, who spent many years away from home, while imprisoned, who spent decades fighting for his home, and his right to it.
When travellers find their way to us at Royal Chundu, we seek to be a home to them, one they will return to and always find those deep hugs, and trustworthy family members in. Food with distinct flavours and sounds of fish eagles calling to remind them that they are home. To and fro they go, between their first and second home, discovering on the journey all the ways they’re growing, seeing clearly the life they want to lead and the person they want to be.
