Counting Teeth

August 2011

From the minute I step out of the plane and walk onto the tarmac toward the customs building with my daughter, I know I love this place. We cross the tarmac and enter the shade of the terminal building. The woman at customs examines my papers carefully. "Why do you have this passport?"

"Because I am a South African citizen?"

"Yes, but it says you were born in Okahandja. Why don't you have a Namibian passport?"

There are people queueing up behind us and I try to keep my response simple. "It was stolen."

It's the truth. Shortly after Julie, Andreya and I had returned to South Africa, someone broke into our car and stole my briefcase, which had my passport in it. I tried to get a replacement right away, but the Namibian officials were adamant that I had to apply in person in Windhoek. With each passing year, the chances of getting a new passport seemed more remote. By the time we moved to Canada, I had given up on my Namibian passport, but Namibia followed me across the ocean, just as it had followed me on road trips throughout my childhood. The road to Port St. Johns was filled with stories of the time we travelled to Swakopmund; the trip down to East London was about the time we drove through the Namib Desert. Any dirt road on the way to a farm would remind Ma and Dad of something Namibian. And yet, although these stories filled my life, I knew many of them only as words that accompanied photographs and from a collective family memory, for at the time I was still too young to recall more than fragments on my own and I longed for my own Namibian experiences and for something tangible to tie me to the country I'd always considered home.

Try as I might, I cannot recall Ma and Dad ever looking at a map because the names of places were so ingrained in their minds. Somehow, they just seemed to know which road to take. And they remembered where they'd been. They knew each place and in each town, behind every Karoo bush and every camelthorn tree, they had a connection. And always, Ma had a story to tell. Every tale she told meandered until it returned, safe and complete, to where we had started: in Namibia. Ma could make a story loop out across the veld like an ox whip before she tugged at the handle and let the tale double back and crack to a conclusion. But until then, her stories would bend and twist and prod us toward our destination until we fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamed of Namibia.

After we had returned home from holidays at the beach, we would unpack the driftwood of our days at the florist shop, where Ma could give these gifts of the sea new life in her arrangements. Then we would manoeuvre the caravan into a corner in the backyard, where it rested until it was called to duty again. When the memory of the trip had receded somewhat, I would take the key, the one with the cloverleaf head and the faded woven leather tassel attached to it, and walk to the caravan to pry open those memories once more and give them a new life too. Opening that door to the caravan was to find solace in the imagined roads and stories of past journeys as they retold themselves over and over on the lines of the map that covered the fold-out table. In a world still without television, all we had to divert our attention on rainy holidays were books, board games and maps.

The table map stretched as far north as Zimbabwe and the lower half of Zambia, showing me the location of places with magical names like Kitwe and Kariba and Cahora Bassa. From Mozambique, the map stretched west until it hit the Atlantic Ocean somewhere north of Luanda and Moçâmedes. At the end of 1975, after Angolan independence, Moçâmedes became Namibe, and the thud of land mines and soldiers' footsteps would ring in the ears of a generation of children as they were maimed into adulthood. But in the caravan in the backyard, I was unaware of such changes. The names on that map were simply places beyond my back garden, places I knew from reciting them over and over again as the storm clouds passed, places I knew I wanted to visit one day. And squashed in the middle between these far-off places and the dot that marked our hometown with the caravan in our backyard, off along the west coast of Africa, lay Namibia.

Even in Canada, Namibia kept inserting itself into my life, reminding me of that year I spent there in 1990, the year of independence. One evening during dinner, I mentioned that I would love to go back.

Between mouthfuls of food, our youngest daughter, Sinead, planned the trip.

"There's an awful lot of 'we' in your plans for me," I said to the head of red hair that was stretching across the table for more roasted potatoes. "And don't stretch across the table."

"By the time you leave, I'll be done high school. I'm coming with you." It was more a point of information than a request or a suggestion. She stuffed another roast potato into her mouth.

And so here we were, Sinead and I, waiting to get our passports stamped.

"Well, you're back now, so you have to apply for one, nè?" The customs official's voice startles me out of my reverie. "And who's this?" She looks at Sinead's passport. "You were not born here, I see. That's okay. Your dad's Namibian. You're one of us. Welcome home." She stamps our passports and waves us through.

We wait almost forty minutes for our luggage. Sinead gets bored and wanders off to find a bank machine where she can draw some money. Eventually, our luggage arrives and Sinead leads us toward the car rental desk she'd discovered during her forty-minute walkabout.

As we walk out of the building, two men squatting on the ground look up from their game. Owela, a favoured pastime of many Namibians, is one of the oldest forms of mancala and the two men move the stones about with enthralling dexterity. I watch them play as I soak in the dusty green of the camelthorns and the glorious abundance of black skin that surrounds me. The pulsating heat of stone and sand melts into my head alongside long-forgotten memories. I am breathing home after two decades away. The dust of the Khomas Hochland covers my sandals. One of the owela players catches my eye and smiles as he leaps up to offer me a copy of The Namibian. By the time he has pocketed my change, I am forgotten and his mind is already focused on the important matter of winning his game.

We leave the two men to continue their battle of wits and begin the search for the pickup truck we've rented. We pack our bags in the back and get in. Before I start the bakkie, I do the unimaginable: I put a map in my daughter's hands and instruct her to navigate.

Sinead grunts. "You're kidding me, right?" The map remains unopened in her lap.

Travel, like Africa, is in Sinead's blood. She grew up between continents on trips back to South Africa to visit family. At eighteen, she knows the best places to snooze in an airport lounge and can navigate her way through customs with her eyes closed. Yet despite her ease with international travel, my directionally challenged daughter cannot find her seat on a plane without the aid of a GPS. Fortunately for her, there is only one road to take from the airport to Windhoek. We enter the city as the sun is setting and head straight for our bed and breakfast. The map of the city unfolds itself from my memory as I round the circle at the Christuskirche, turn onto Independence Avenue and up John Meinert Street.

Sinead had spent the summer before our trip volunteering at a camp in British Columbia where she had picked up a cold. Between the effort of fighting a cold and an eternity in airplanes and transit lounges, she can barely manage to stay awake. We decide to order in. While we wait for our pizza to arrive, Sinead crosses her legs and spreads the map of Namibia out in front of her on the bed. She stares at it for a while before turning to me. "If Namibia has two deserts, where do people find water for farming?"

Namibia's rivers are not the mighty Yangtze River, nor are they the Nile or some other famous waterway about which numerous books are written. In fact, for much of the year, Namibians complain about the sheer lack of water and the majority of its riverbeds are oversized sandpits. "They use underground water where they can, or they rely on water from the dams they've built. The Kunene and the Okavango rivers flow all year round. There's enough water if people are careful."

Sinead looks at the map again. "So, that's desert and that's desert and that's dry and that's wet." Her fingers drift across the map and settle along the Caprivi Strip in the tropical north. "That's why most of the people live in the north, I suppose?" I nod, but already she's off on another tangent. She changes tack sharply, this child of mine. For someone who's suffering from a cold, jet lag and lack of sleep, she's pretty chatty. I keep being drawn...