places

(Goma, DRC - 2003)

Hiking through a burn felt strangely familiar. When I was little, J. and B. and R. and I would play in the freshly burned fields in Liberia. The earth was often still smoldering in places, and we would dig through the crumbling, burned grasses. We had to be careful where we walked, lest we melt our flipflops. It smelled the same as those scorched trees I hiked though last Saturday. I could smell their burned bark as I climbed over them, and the smell of burned wood was so very familiar.

Walking over a lava flow, I told S. about Goma, the town in Congo just across the border from Rwanda at the north end of Lake Kivu. "In Goma," I said, marching along in my sturdy hiking shoes, "Mt. Nyiragongo erupted in January of 2002, and the lava covered everything, up to the second floor of some houses. You can see the second floor windows with the lava spilled partially through. You can see gates that are covered in lava up to the last foot or so, and you drive on top of the lava. The strange thing is that in Rwanda, in much of Africa, most of the kids are barefoot. But in Goma the lava is sharp, so every little kid I saw had at least flipflops. Lava. LAH VAH. I like that word." The lava crunched under my feet, just like it did the first time I ever saw it, in Goma in 2003.

You can leave places, but they never do leave you.