Back from Africa

Plans for the Future

In the meantime our little family has grown closer. We've all now been to Bali on holiday together, a trip the girls still rave about. Sometimes we go camping for the weekend. It's all good fun and we always look forward to Markus's daughters coming to stay.

As the number of paperback copies of the book sold in Germany nears the one million mark, I start to think about what I'm going to do next. I've recently taken up again with Anna from the single mothers’ group and often go out to visit her in her farmhouse. I love the way she lives. I always enjoy being out there with her and helping with the animals and can actually imagine myself living the same sort of hermit's existence.

Napirai and Markus, however, couldn't imagine living like that. The next thing that comes into my mind is that maybe I should open a hotel or restaurant. lust to keep all my options open, I've enrolled in all sorts of courses, learning about computers, book-keeping, how to make cheese or run a hotel or restaurant. Even so, I don't really know what sort of new project I want to take up, or when or even where. What inspires me most is the idea of running a small hotel, maybe in partnership with someone else. I already fantasies about calling it The White Masai and decorating it in an African style. I drive all round Switzerland looking for the right spot and when I find myself in the southern Italian speaking canton of Ticino, it occurs to me that I could well feel at home there.

A little bit later I spot a newspaper advertisement for an ‘Intensive Italian language course in Ticino, starts one week from today’. Napirai has school holidays at the time so I sign both of us up. All we have to do is find a holiday apartment to let, which is hardly a problem down there in February.

I'm quite laid back about the idea of mother and daughter sharing a desk in school. Napirai is not quite so enamored. We spend the afternoons sightseeing and going on little trips around the area. The climate in Ticino is incredibly mild for the time of year, almost spring-like. After a week I'm so enchanted by the little town of Lugano with its lake, the mountains close by and whole panorama that looks just a little bit like Rio de Janeiro that I can's shake off the idea that this could be where we make our future.

Napirai likes it too although she wouldn't like moving away from her schoolfriends. On the other hand she would enjoy living in a town which has more to offer an adolescent girl than life in a village. We talk over the pros and cons and I'm convinced that at thirteen, Napirai could make the break. Her easygoing, relaxed attitude makes it easier to make friends as we've noticed time and again on holiday. She's even making a good stab at the language already. But she is extremely sensitive and is very adversely affected by bad news or trouble. When we're strolling around town, she stops to drop a coin in the hat of every beggar or busker. She even feels sorry for restaurant owners with no customers and says things like: ‘Look, Mama, there's nobody there. Shouldn't we go in and have a coffee? I'm really thirsty.’ Even when she was a little girl she was quick to help other children if they fell over even if she didn't know them. She really can't bear to see animals suffering. Things like that leave scars that last years.

At one meter seventy-nine tall she also looks older than she is and sometimes people expect too much of her. I hope I wouldn't be asking too much of her to move home and only hope she'd find her feet here soon enough. Although Napirai is happy enough to be on her own she's a great communicator and prefers to have people she likes around her. She's creative, paints, writes letters and listens to music for hours on end. She has a good ear for music and sings wonderfully. On the other hand she's not really into sport. The only physical exercise she's really up for is dancing; she's got no lack of energy for that. All in all I'm proud of my adorable, sensitive, carefree girl.

We'll cope with the change and be happy here, I'm sure, because I feel deep in my heart that it's time for a change from our old home. The biggest problem is going to be the Italian language, particularly for Napirai in school. But other families manage a move abroad, sometimes with three or four children. Why shouldn't we? In any case Napirai has a phenomenal memory and is naturally good at languages. Later she'll be pleased to have an extra language.

Initially Markus isn't too thrilled by my plans: he's afraid he won't find a job in Ticino and for that reason says he doesn't want to go. After our first two weeks on the language course, I bring Napirai home to go back to school and then return to Ticino to finish the course. I find I'm managing to retain my basic Italian and all of a sudden I find it incredibly difficult to leave and go home. When I get back I'm unsettled and make up my mind: I absolutely have to move. There's some role waiting for me in southern Switzerland.

Markus is marvelous. In the meantime he's actually managed to find a job in Ticino and moved into a holiday let down there so he can start work straight away. Napirai can stay on in school until the summer holidays and then we can move into the new fiat we've at long last found. There was a lot of luck involved there too. I had scoured every newspaper in Ticino, searched the Internet and was driving the six-hour round trip twice a week, only to realise that all the flats I saw were either too small or in the wrong location.

I ended up finding our dream apartment by a chance glance through a Zurich newspaper. I would never have thought of looking in this paper but with Markus down there on his own for two months already and having been let down once more on another flat because the owner wanted to let to a local family, I was scouring everything that came to hand. And there under the heading Ticino I found a single advert, inserted for one day only, as it turned out. It was the flat we wanted and was free to rent immediately.

Now that we knew our new address, I was eager to get Napirai registered for the local school at the end of the holidays. I used my meager Italian to arrange a time to go and see the school and get to know the teachers, because I think it's important for Napirai to get a glimpse of the area and her future classmates. Two days before the end of term we head down to Ticino feeling really just a little bit nervous. But the teachers are so friendly and kind that Napirai is immediately reassured. Now she can look forward to the new school year in a happy mind and with just a tinge of curiosity.

Back in German Switzerland I start organizing the move straight away. Markus can hardly help me now that he's already living in Ticino. When I realise how expensive a professional mover is going to be, I decide to do it all myself. I nip down to a car rental firm and look out the biggest van you can legally drive with an ordinary car license, and decide there and then that it will have to do. Whatever we can't fit in over the next couple of days we'll simply sell off or give away. We pack up only the most important stuff and that's already more than enough. We can't even find people to take some of the other things. All the furniture for Napirai's bedroom which we've had for more than five years finds no takers. We do a deal with a nearby charity clearance warehouse, a place that takes unwanted furniture, sells it off cheaply and hands over whatever cash comes in to local good causes. They agree to come the next day and take what-ever's left.

The big day comes ever closer and Markus and I still have no idea who's going to help us pack. I don't believe in hassling friends to help me move; the real friends will volunteer. And that's what happens: four days before we're due to move, Anneliese volunteers to lend a hand, and on the day itself Anna turns up with her grown-up daughter and her son who's a big strong lad now. Even my father, with whom I've had little contact since his divorce from my mother, turns up to help, which I find very touching. Two friends of Napirai turn out too so by the end of the evening before our long drive south, all our worldly chattels are safely packed up.

Everything we haven't been able to fit in or find a taker for will be picked up by the charity clearance people after we've gone. We spend our last night in the flat sleeping on blow-up mattresses. The next morning Markus sets off in the van along with my father. I follow behind them with a packed car, while Napirai goes off for her last day in school here.

When we get to Ticino we unload everything into our new flat in an almost tropical temperature of thirty-five degrees Celsius. As we're sweating away carrying everything inside my mobile goes off. It's a man from the charity clearance people saying that they don't want the stuff we've left behind after all. When I ask why not, in an irritated voice, he coolly tells me that the child's bed won't sell without a mattress and that the wardrobe has a hardboard rather than proper wooden back to it. Their customers have higher standards! Oh yes, and another thing: there are two stickers on the bookcase. He has complaints about everything else too as if the only furniture he'd accept is stuff that's completely unused.

When I make some sarcastic comment, saying I wasn't exactly living in squalor, he tells me unapologetically that they'll take it away for me, but only if I pay. That makes me really mad and I tell them to get out of the flat and leave everything there. To this day I've never understood what the point of their so-called organization is.

Still in a bad temper about it all we start the long drive back to return the van. But before we can do that we have to dismantle all the furniture and everything else in Napirai's old room and load it up. She's disappointed to find that not even a charity warehouse would take away all the things from the room she loved so much. We pile it all into the van and drive over to a friend in Wetzikon who understands the situation we find ourselves in and has promised to take it all to the tip on Monday. It's ten p.m. before we've unloaded it all into the storage area next to his house.

Just as we're getting ready to drive off I spot a group of Africans in the garden next door who've been having a party and are watching us with curiosity. An idea hits me and I say to Markus: ‘Run on over to those people and tell them they can have any of this for nothing.’ When he does they nod enthusiastically.

Exhausted but proud at having managed everything, we take the van back and half an hour later drive by our friend's storage area again in our own car. We're delighted to see that everything we left there has found a new owner. The next day I tell Napirai that an African child somewhere is sleeping in her old bed and enjoying all her old furniture, and her eyes gleam.

Now three months after our first course in Italian, here we all are living in Lugano. Napirai is getting used to it although she still misses some of her old friends. But three hours’ train journey isn't exactly an impossible distance to cover. We're living in Switzerland after all, not Africa, and so far not one of us regrets the sudden move. Our flat is in an old villa and the owner has become a friend and a modern grandma-figure, a real ray of sunshine.

Since I've moved to Ticino I've felt more and more obliged to do what so many of my readers have asked and write a follow-up to my first book. Up until now I'd never have thought of it. But living here in these almost tropical temperatures with a wonderful view over the lake and all our interesting new acquaintances, I'm bound to find it easy. It will also be a way to answer all the questions I keep getting asked in letters. I start work straight away and find I'm really enjoying it, and so I put off my plans to start a hotel indefinitely.

Once more I'm astonished how a decision made in an instant can change your life and suddenly break an old routine and set you off on a different path. It's only a question of having the courage to make the change.