The End!

Our last day! It’s hard to believe it’s over -- long tours like this seem like they’ll last an eternity near the beginning, start to feel endless as the mid-tour sickness sets in, and then -- zoom. The last week flies by and we find ourselves searching helplessly for words to describe the myriad experiences we’ve had in one short month.

I have to admit, I read this in a fashion magazine today -- but though it may not come from the most elevated of sources, it really resonated with our time here in Africa. The quotation was from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and was something to the effect that no one can be human in isolation; that humanity can only exist in our relationships with others. Africa has shown us great sorrows and great joys -- joys in the bonds we’ve had in shared song, in laughter and long bus rides and thrilling sights, and sorrows in the division we’ve witnessed, the scars of apartheid, the stunning poverty -- but these sorrows and joys have only really existed for us in our encounters with other people. There is nothing so vivid as spending twenty minutes hugging African schoolchildren and then reading a painted sign on their school fence, alongside other colourful childish drawings: ‘Do Not Rape Children’. It makes tragedy real, much in the same way that singing ‘It Takes a Village’ with all of Mascato, or singing ‘Sanctuary’ with Siyacula, makes our experience one of true connection through music.

As Tutu says, our chance to connect face to face with people in the countries we’ve visited has taken those sorrows and joys out of a purely intellectual arena into an indelible and visceral sense of resonance, of sameness. We tend to use the phrase ‘life-changing’ a lot when we talk about Africa, but the real life changes, we’re forced to admit, are those that will happen when we return to our comfortable familiar North American lives. The world’s circumference has shrunk for all of us, and though we are happy to feel closer to our African brothers and sisters, it’s not enough to vaguely understand the troubles of Africa anymore -- we must start living our far away lives with a new consciousness of how small our planet is, and how interconnected we are, all people. One of our tour songs sums it up more concisely than I could:

Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us,
All men and women living on the earth,
Ties of hope and love, of sister and brotherhood.
And we are bound together by the path that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead.
We are bound, and we are bound.