Baobab Tree

Photo of the baobab tree (at top) by Paul Ferraris

Maybe it’s the editor in me but I always feel like every trip has a theme, as well as some symbols and motifs, emerging as the days unfold. The baobab that crazy big iconic tree of southern Africa became a kind of theme, symbol, and motif for our trip to Zambia this summer. It just kept emerging seemingly at every turn. The most literal was at a turn. We stayed a little outside of the heart of Livingstone this time, up near Mukuni Village and driving down to town each morning and then back to the hotel each night, we would look for the giant baobab that stood at the intersection of the main road into town and the small road up toward the village. This particular tree has a flimsy looking ladder hanging off it, that people climb to get a glimpse of Victoria Falls in the distance. Maybe it was the inspiration for the mural that Finn painted a few days later on the front of Maher Christian Academy. As Finn, Bella, and Monnix were putting the finishing touches on the tree, Finn asked the principal’s husband, Favour, what the baobab signified in Zambia. He said it signified resilience and endurance. Its ability to hold water and survive from one rain to the next, through often long periods of drought, was emblematic of those qualities. It simply keeps on keeping on. One bright Tuesday we visited the Baobuyu Learning Center, a beautiful school founded by a Canadian expat. The school provides a top-notch learning experience for children ages 2-6 from the local community. It also hosts a sewing circle of the same name where a group of local women make beautiful wares from colorful chitenge cloth. As each woman told us her story of how joining this collective changed her life--from the ability to rent her own apartment or buy a piece of land for her family to live on to providing work she felt proud of--I couldn’t help thinking how appropriate the baobab was as inspiration for the name of this collective, and for the image Finn had painted on the front of the Maher, and as a symbol of this part of the world. Endurance and resilience.