The Rains Down in Africa

Any path, if followed long enough, or in some situations short enough, will lead to a magic door. It might be a looking glass, a wardrobe, a rabbit hole, or a rip in the space/time continuum, but each traveler comes to that threshold where he must abandon the world he knows and dive headlong into a world he thought he knew could not exist. All roads lead to Faeryland, if you're willing to open the door.

My own path began in the Sunshine State and ended in John Conrad's "Dark Continent" - or rather, the modern, post-colonial version, which may be the better or worse version, depending on who is telling the story. As for the journey there, I won't complain about the airline food, irritable flight attendants, or redundant security checkpoints. David Livingstone would have gladly borne a substandard movie selection in exchange for the discomforts of 19th century travel.

We - Mr. K. and I - touched ground in south Uganda, jumped north to Ethiopia, then hopped back to our original landing point in the sub-Saharan tropics, alongside a flock of Muslim men en route from a pilgrimage to Mecca. Americans are easily unsettled by the sight of a devout Muslim man reading his prayer book on a plane - but the truth is that we were probably on the safest flight in the world, since al-Qaida is not in the habit of sabotaging the Islamic pilgrimage industry. But that's a subject for another time.

As for magic, the wind picked up pixie dust the moment the jet wings caught the wind. From an airplane window, the whole world is magical, whether you're flying above the Atlantic or getting a bird's eye view of your homeland - an experience not unlike seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time. But when my enchanted door arrived, I was sitting in a pickup truck, trusting a Ugandan Catholic priest to deliver my coworker and me safely to a town I'd never heard of: Butare.

The ride had been a blur of bumps and migraines and gratuitous honking horns on disintegrating roads, cutting through slums and plantations and lush green hills and Coca-Cola signs. Hot pink walls, promoting an aggressive African cell phone service, brightened the otherwise drab facades of rural shanties and roadside markets - the kind the Big Bad Wolf could have blown to Madagascar with a huff and a puff. The people in these villages don't have the luxury to ponder function and form; they know only mud and straw and rusted sheets of corrugated tin. The true Simple Life. Simple and hard. And tumbling by us at 50kpm in a dizzying panorama of mangos, bananas, and white, female mannequins. Yes, mannequins, displayed outside clothing shops without the extravagance of a glass showcase.

At some point, the truck turned left onto a narrow dirt road, and the scenery changed. No more highway, no more shops, no more utility poles, no more cell phones or Coca-Cola. Wild forest closed in around us, then unwound its leafy fingers and guided us through our magic door, into the solitude of a valley whose unending length and depth I did not yet comprehend. Mr. K. pointed out a field where local farmers were growing tea, and as I studied it, we turned onto a narrower path and began to climb the mountain, with the intent - I later found out - of going all the way to the top. The priest just barely eased on the gas pedal, though the road had no guardrail and any slight miscalculation could send us plummeting to our deaths. But you soon forget about safety in a place like this, where a man can be grateful to take his last breath with the scent of life in his nostrils instead of the stale lingering decay of a hospital bed.

As you approach the misty heights, the crystal clarity of the lower sky draws you over the valley to vivid shapes and colors. The tumbling slopes unfold like a patchwork quilt of tree-bordered fields, draped across the curves of a sleeping giant whose monstrous limbs stretch on to world's end. The quilt would be almost too precise, except for the clumps of leafy cotton escaping torn fabric and broken seams: a splash of the wild to invigorate the domesticated pallet. Steep rock faces and tropical gardens mark the quilt's uneven edge, and you follow one mountain to the next, to a faint blue peak, to a whisper of something beyond, only to be startled back to self-consciousness by the sight of a boy leading goats across the road in front of you. Where did he come from, you silently wonder. Maybe a magic door of his own. Maybe all magic doors lead to Butare. But he is working, this is home, and, like many young boys, he will never see the mountains until he forsakes them for something new.

Tall evergreens the width and color, if not the age, of Roman columns hold up the clouds above Butare and flank the road to the Catholic convent: an old house perched above the village like a beacon to the gods, reminding Zeus that men still dwell here, nestled in their huts of mud and straw in the giant's palms and the nape of her neck.

It was in this village that we found ourselves cornered by 900 children in a schoolroom designed for a quarter of that number. Mr. K. and I couldn't take credit for the water pump that our company had financed, but we were given a warm welcome and sent away with a new request for funds, since the nuns were of the opinion that the classroom's broken windows were a problem. The windows became a problem that day, in fact, when a downpour trapped us in the office and came crashing down like machine-gun fire on the leaking tin roof. A cynical traveler might suspect the nuns had performed a Catholic rain dance to give us a show we wouldn't forget. But there is no need to synthesize hardship when it defines your existence. Many sisters had come and gone, unable to cope with the demands of this remote, though beautiful, outpost. But those who toughed it out and stayed were glowing in their quiet, patient way, as if they knew they belonged here.

After the storm, we hit the road with extra cargo in the bed - several very excited children - and drove them to their homes. The students walk to and from school each day, often leaving home before sunset. The sisters worry about their safety, but there are no buses in the mountains, and the families don't own cars (or have electricity, for that matter). Our passengers' faces beamed with smug smiles as they waved and called out to their classmates falling behind on the road, and it was then that I realized these Faeryland children were not unlike our own. They may not have televisions to watch, or computer games to play, but they still act like kids, and they cannot help but act like kids, because that is what they are. They laugh and play, get into fights, test boundaries, daydream in school, and sometimes fall asleep during Mass. If you unzip them, you'll find one heart, two lungs, a large and small intestine, and an assortment of bones and muscles, and you'll see that the girls are not sugar and spice and most surely not everything nice. They speak a strange language, but it is a language, and only humans among all creatures can be said to understand language. God severed our tongues at the Tower of Babel, not because the tribes of men were different, but because they were too much the same.

In the end, the most surprising thing about the world on the other side of the magic door is not what is different, but what is the same. And in an odd sort of twist, the things that are the same are the things that matter most - friendship, sorrow, love, hope, worship, faith, desire. We need magic because we are magical, which is just another way of saying we need our humanity because we are human. Every person is a magic door, if you're willing to walk through it.