I lost Kenya, and with it I may have lost my innocence and, as Renato Zero sings, the "best years of our lives."
I could tell my story, which is the story of a resort entertainer who arrived in Watamu, having had her baptism of Africa in Zanzibar the year before.
It was 2006, and Watamu immediately seemed like the place I could even think about moving to.
A seasonal job, the possibility of settling down with little in a small house of my own, friendships with a few peers I met there and also with very nice Kenyan-born and British-born boys.
Due to a series of vicissitudes that I am not going to tell you about, a good story that ended badly with a half-European, half-African guy, and a working relationship that ended even worse because of promises that were never kept, I decided in 2013 to move to Diani, where I worked for a year in another village, but it was no longer working. The magic that made me feel good and hope for a future away from Italy made of sea, lightheartedness and good positive values was gone. I needed to go back to Italy. But by then the so-called Africa sickness was inside me.
Every night I dreamed of the colors, scents and sounds of Watamu but I knew that, by my nature, I could not start over and meanwhile I was no longer a little girl. I waited tables and worked with my family in the store for two years, then I couldn't make it and went back to Watamu without a job, trying to find a solution to my wanting a different life. And that's when I made the biggest screw-up: I thought marrying a Kenyan man I wasn't in love with but was fine with was the right thing to do (he's not beach boy, but the manager of a big real estate company, just to clarify).
I could not have been in love, given all the differences in my opinion that are irremediable between those born and raised in Kenya and us Italians who arrive there already grown up, but I was convinced that he could be the right person to make two wishes come true: that of having a permanent permit to live in Kenya and becoming a citizen soon and that of becoming a mother.
Well, at least the second one came true but when my son had health problems, I realized that the right choice was to have him treated in Italy. My partner did not want to follow me and indeed, when I left he said he was going back to live in Nairobi, where he was from. Then came the pandemic, the death of my father and many other sad things, with my little man's now perfect health in between.
Here, I wanted to make a family in the country I loved the most, and today I am a single mother in the country where I was born and where I feel like a foreigner, especially having a colored child. There, I have told my story a little bit and I want to give some advice to other girls like I have been: think and act from the heart, but don't embrace Kenya as the promised land. There are wonderful things there but that doesn't mean everything is great.
You are in a foreign land and before you think you belong there, learn some of their language, learn to live like them, eat their food, listen to their stories.
And be prepared to see your first dreams come true but also to lose everything in a short time, just like when you wake up.
However, I still now, when I dream, dream of Africa and the beauty it has given me.
Jua Bahari