When I was two years old my father was a helicopter pilot and my mother ravenous for adventure, how much farther away could we go than Upper Volta? We spoke french and washed our vegetables in Potassium Permanganate. I ran barefoot through a garden of mangoes and lizards. I sat high on the shoulder of our gardener like a small queen floating through the jungle. I squatted on my white chubby haunches eating rice and spicy peanuts.

Do I remember?

These memories have been gifted to me, wrapped in photographs and stories told and retold, yet I wonder is there more, between the lines of someone else's story, do I remember something truly of my own? Can I remember the smell of a jungle garden and the warmth of skin the colour of ebony, of meals I ate with my hands and that burned my tongue? can I remember my father. 

On our arrival back to a frigid white Canada, had everything gone as planned, my short African adventure may have stayed simply a wonderful ‘idea’ of an adventure an  old album full of photographs On arriving home however I was involved in a tragic car accident, my father was killed and my mother gravely injured, in an instant I acquired trauma, in an instant my life took a new path. 'The accident' has been a defining moment in my life and Africa has always been tangled into that story.