My freshly broken-in hiking boots were swinging against my legs in a steady rhythm as I meandered through the streets of Amsterdam, three weeks before my 18th birthday.
I was alone, exploring my little heart out in the 23 hours I had in this wild, foreign, and yet very freeing city. The last time I had been in Amsterdam was when I was 12, during the Pride parade, and that is a trip I will never forget...
But that is a different blog post, so let’s get back to the airport before my next flight departed for Arusha—a small town just off the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, where once, a long time ago, this was a home of mine.
Here I was, returning 13 years later to stay in the middle of the Serengeti with Marianne Whilhamine von Zedwitz Leibenstein Brühl Zastrow, my 85-year-old Countess grandmother. There was limited (and I mean limited) electricity, water, and internet as well as no English speakers. I mostly grew up in Uganda, a country nearby, but finished schooling in the United States for the four years previous to this trip and let me tell you, it was good to be home.
The greatly missed smell of Africa hit the very second I stepped off the plane onto the radiating tarmac. I made my way to find Obedi, a driver sent by Shosho (Kikuyu for grandmother) to bring me out to her school in Mutakuja. Well, I’m going to save you the suspense and let you know—he wasn’t there.
I had, luckily, made friends with some volunteer doctors on the plane who were going to the local hospital KCMC, and they offered to give me a very generous ride. So we adventured out into the African bush in the dark to find Mutakuja Secondary School of Sustainability.
No maps. No phones. No road signs. Three hours later, bouncing along on dirt roads cut through and around massive dried mud holes, asking Maasai for directions about “turning the corner at the hut”. My life was back to normal.
And alas, when I found the school I had been traveling 50 hours to reach—no Shosho.
The askari (a Masaai warrior hired to guard the property) showed me to a small room for the night. I didn’t really sleep in my tiny bunk room, with no fan and no bedding, at 35°C (90°F) but its an adventure I will never forget.
I learned the next morning that the school was on holiday, and my grandmother had accidentally sent Obedi a day early, then headed up the mountain for some respite from the heat. So I followed her up the mountain.
Shosho:
This woman was born a Countess in a pre-war world of horse-drawn carriages and castles for every season. How is it that she now lived in the wild African bush, speaking only Swahili and teaching children how to dig wells, plant for droughts, and learn the trades?
Eighty-five years of survival, love, and adaptation is how something like that happens. She carried 3 passports, lived on 4 continents, and spoke more languages than I know.
She described her first memory to me as a long day of travel in a horse-drawn carriage at the age of four to what she now called “their Summer Castle,” where she was greeted by 40+ house staff before being taken up to her room, which had a coal-filled metal bed warmer in her ornate chambers.
Fast forward to 1945, when her family was living in downtown Dresden as the war raged on. She was forced to flee the carpet bombing by the United States as the city she knew was diminished to rubble. She lost everything. This was when she walked for 12 miles in the frigid February snow before being found by French soldiers and taken to safety in France. When they were also invaded, she moved to Sweden, and toward the end of the war, she met a German translator.
After my grandfather led the interpretation section for the Nuremberg Trials, they married and headed to Kenya for a fresh start.
After agricultural school in Elderet, they moved with their two infant sons to a small coffee farm in northern Tanzania on Mount Kilimanjaro. She talked a lot about learning how to simply ¨do¨ life during this time—how to cook, clean, and move about without the lifestyle she was accustomed to pre-war.
My grandfather led tented safari trips that would last for weeks at a time while they produced small-batch, quality coffee and eggs. My father and his younger brother were split between boarding school and helping on the farm.
In 1972, crisis struck again. The farm was nationalized by the Tanzanian government, as were their bank accounts. They had only weeks to leave with nothing.
After selling a few heirlooms, they managed a trip to San Francisco to start another new life. Shortly after the move, my grandfather passed away from a heart attack (or a broken heart), and my grandmother had big decisions to make. She tested out running prop-plane photography safaris in India before realizing her childhood dream of becoming an artist.
She spent decades in Manhattan painting and gold-leafing large works before, at 75, deciding she needed—and wanted—to be back in Africa, giving back what she could. So she sold it all, and 10 years into her adventure, she was crying happy tears over the humble jar of mayonnaise I brought her. Life is wild.
It was during this time, living with this legend of a woman, that I learned the building blocks of life without understanding any of it.
Then I left to summit Mount Kilimanjaro...
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