Volume 27 · Number 4 · Summer 2010
Aggies Abroad Essay:
Discovering love and a livelihood by way of Africa
Some years ago, while I was home from UC Davis on summer vacation, I complained to my father that I wanted to get away, and he suggested that I visit friends of the family who were missionaries in Africa. Neither of us could have anticipated how that short exchange could eventually lead me to my wife and my career.
After that conversation, I slowly internalized the idea of visiting our friends, and decided that I should add to my very limited knowledge of Africa. Back in Davis that fall, I began a three-quarter sequence on African politics taught by Professor Donald Rothchild that brought to life the history and politics of Africa. Less than halfway through the fall semester I decided I wanted not only to visit Africa, but also to attend school there.
I soon applied to the Education Abroad Program for the University of Nairobi study center in Kenya. Months later, I landed at the Nairobi airport with 11 other students. We were taken to the university and given rooms in a dormitory just for the night. I lay down on a thin single mattress with a worn sheet and simple wool blanket that was not enough for the chilly night air. I tried to comprehend that I was in Africa, 10,000 miles from home. I wondered how it would go.
It went splendidly. I learned about Africa, both in and out of the classroom. I took interesting courses, including East African literature from two of Kenya’s most famous authors, Taban Lo Liyong and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (now at UC Irvine). I huddled in the corner of my room with my new African friends when riot police invaded our dormitory and I almost peed on a Cape buffalo’s head in the dark at Ngorongoro Crater. I swam in the Indian Ocean and camped in the Serengeti and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. I walked by “Europeans only” benches in Johannesburg and was drenched in the spray of Victoria Falls. I visited Abomey, the capital of the former Fon Kingdom in Benin, and ate fufu in back alley restaurants in Ghana.
Back in California, I kept in close contact with the director of our study center in Nairobi, Professor Philip Bell of UC Santa Cruz. Several years later he had moved to Rice University in Houston, and he invited me to teach there for a year as a visiting lecturer. Already working in the departmental office at Rice was a young woman who had just moved there from West Virginia.
I am still a professor (after a Ph.D., UC Berkeley), and I am still married to the same woman from West Virginia after 27 years. Although I have traveled all over the world over the last 37 years, I did not return to Africa…until this spring, when I led a group of University of Texas M.B.A. students to South Africa.
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