In these recollections from his two years living in Botswana, Sher recounts moments and describes images from the daily life in a remote village there. His message that comes through from his writings is that although he clearly loved the “timeless” nature of life there, he was always an outsider in his adopted village of Bobonong. Though he says that he almost never felt homesick for his family home and birthplace in Montreal, Canada, and loved the village where he says “I could have stayed forever”, he describes himself as perceived by the villagers to be “someone in the audience, a spectator.” In. his heart he was still a Canadian
At one point he contrasts his existence in the dry and dusty land of Botswana with his family home in Canada. Reminded of it by a picture hanging in his thatched hut, of a lake at Morin Heights in Quebec, Sher describes in colourful detail the passing of the seasons there and of the house itself, which he describes thus: “I know its smells and sounds, the textures of each room. It’s my parent’s home in the Laurentians, a year-round retreat for three generations of one family, a house for all seasons.” He contrasts the icy winters there when the lake is frozen, with the summers and the colours of the autumn leaves. He describes that lake picture hanging on the wall of his thatched mud hut as “a silent timepiece” depicting “a timeless moment in a Quebec autumn, oblivious to the village life that flowed beyond my crooked door”. He also described the picture as “A reference point or a personal grid, it marked my point of departure and return.”
However, apart from those few short paragraphs, the piece describes in colourful and fascinating detail the village life in Botswana, emphasizing and bringing to life his clear affection for the village, its people and the timeless nature of that existence.
Sher describes specific village characters and events that are obviously memory “snapshots” for him. For example, he describes an old man “Hair the colour of ash, shoes torn”. Straightaway the reader can picture this old man, who Sher recounts spent his time “tap, tap, tapping on a chain with a stone.” By relating that he never quite determined just what the old man was doing seems to further emphasize Sher’s perception of the sense of timelessness that prevailed in the village.
Sher also vividly describes the daily passage of the sun across the sky and the heat haze, observing “tired mules coax ploughs through stubborn soil” and quotes Bessie Head, whose writings included mention of “a woman busy pounding corn for the evening meal.” He makes reference to “Children slipped out of the bush, heads crowned with firewood” and refers to the “merciless drought” there. Illustrating how important the rains are in such a dry country, Sher mentions that the word pula means both currency and rain. All these separate descriptions combine to build an overall picture of life in Bobonong, assisting the reader in seeing the village and the way of life there as Sher himself saw it during his two years living among the local people there while teaching English.
He also describes his own life and daily routine, illustrating how he too led a simple existence. He recalls how he took his wheelbarrow every second day to the communal water tap and “bathed with a bucket and basin at sunrise” and recounts how he checked his chicken coop and sometimes “returned triumphant, two warm eggs palmed like a child’s treasure.” He ate in the local style, too, noting that “fingers replaced forks at meals where food was rolled, not speared.” He comments that he did his reading by the light of a candle and “built fires under a canopy of stars”.
Although he doesn’t say why he eventually left Botswana, he comments that “I could have stayed forever despite all the signs.” He then goes on to list those signs as: “A small plant had sprouted from my mud floor. Goats had destroyed my garden: one green pepper, marble-sized tomatoes and something that, briefly, was once beans. Then my chicken died.” It is as though Sher had taken these events as some sort of omens, combining to tell him it was time to move on; that his time there had expired.
In conclusion, Sher comments that in all of the two years he spent in Bobonong, he was “rarely homesick, not in spite of the photograph, but perhaps because of it.” He then notes that he was indeed homesick on just one occasion, when his mother sent him an autumn leaf from Morin Heights.
It seems that though he enjoyed and loved his time in Botswana, Sher always thought of Canada as his home. In the descriptions of the life in Bobonong in Botswana, the contrast with the seasonal changes that he described in Morin Heights in Quebec shows that he still hankered after his earlier life there and eventually was ready to leave Botswana and return to his homeland.
Works Cited:
Sher, Emil. Extract from: Frozen Moment Serves as Reference Point in a Timeless Land. Montreal Gazette 1983.
