White Baboon

Why is this site named White Baboon? Besides the fact that the URL was still available? Well, that’s a bit of a travel story from my own bag of stories. It’s the story about the time where I took yet another step away from believing I was still that socially awkward 13 year old girl who no one picked for the kickball team.

You see, from November 2006 to February 2007, I was living in Mozambique, working with an NGO there. As the Christmas holidays rolled around, I made plans with a friend from the US to go together to Cape Town, tour around, taste some wines, and enjoy life. That was until early December when my friend discovered that plane tickets would be about $1000 less, the price of a new leather sofa, if she came in February instead of during Christmas holidays. So, she said, love ya, babe. But I’m buying a new leather sofa.

I started to panic. I was going to spend Christmas alone in a hotel room in Mozambique. Who did I know in the southern African area? No one. Everyone else had made plans months ago to fly off to trek through Ethiopia, to ski in the Alps, to visit their grandmother in Albuquerque. Why was I such a loser? I kicked myself across the streets of Maputo for being a bad planner and for being so socially inept that fifteen other people, or even just one other person, didn’t want to come visit me. And then that spiraled into just about every other flaw I could come to think of from those extra five pounds to why i got a D in chemistry lab in college.

Crap.

I launched google and started typing in any keywords I could think of besides “someone please come save me.” A safari outfit was running a Christmas safari in Namibia? No. Tickets were really expensive. A week studying cooking in Kenya? No. I don’t like cooking. And then I saw it - a week at Dolphin Encounters, a dolphin center in Ponta d’Ouro, a place that google told me was a mere 75 kilometers from my home in Maputo. Perfect! Ever since I could sit up and clap while drool ran down my hands, I have been fascinated with dolphins. I called Dolphin Encounters and they had a Christmas week special they were running. Even more perfect. I booked one spot, only sighing slightly when they asked if it would be just me in the little reed casita housing or was I coming with someone.

Google forgot to mention that the 75 kilometers was over sand roads and there were no bus services so i had to hitch a ride in a 1974 Land Rover with minimal safety features and that would take anywhere from 3-6 hours, but those are mere details. Dolphin Encounters was fabulous. We would all get up early and go swim with dolphins and then come back and have an amazing breakfast on the beach. I met some really fun travelers who were also there, in groups but willing to take one extra at the table. My only complaint was that when I got into the water, all the dolphins did not turn to me and say, “we have been waiting for you. You are the one. Come swim away with us.” Alas.

One night, Dolphin Encounters said that they were going to do fire walking that night and asked if I would like to join them. Seeing my other alternatives were, well, let’s see nothing, I said sure! What better thing to do when one was four hours drive to the nearest hospital than walking across a bed of flames?

I did it. You are reading the writing of someone who walked across a 10 foot bed of flaming coals. I don’t really understand how it works, but I will tell you the tricks that my African firewalking teacher taught us. 1. Walk with intention. We had to practice walking for him, just to have him say, “Not enough intention! Try again!” 2. Hold your head up and don’t look down. 3. Make a fist. 4. Repeat “cool green moss” as it is the opposite of “burning flaming coals” 5. Have the power of the crowd support you and 6. He had some long scientific explanation about the percentage of water in our bodies and water displacing when it heats up and then being replaced with cooler water from the body and thus you always have a thin layer of cool water at the bottom of your foot protecting you. At least that last one sounded like a plausible reason for why I might be able to do this without having to be helivaced out for burn wounds.

The firewalker taught us all these things as we sat there gathered around the picnic bench on the beach. I kept being reminded of my near-panic fear levels as, in the background, about a foot to the left of where the firewalker stood, I could see the bonfire being stoked as they burned the logs down to coals. Finally the firewalker stopped talking and said it was time. “How exactly should I hold my fist?” We went over that. “How do I know if the crowd is really supporting me?” They will support you. “Can you repeat that water displacement theory again?” Stop procrastinating. It is time to walk. And he got up to help the guys shovel the coals into a bed and douse it with fluid to get it to flame back up. And then we walked.

Funny, they had accidentally dropped a coal in the sand while transferring the coals from the bonfire to the bed. I accidentally stepped on this coal while nervously pacing the side of the bed watching my classmates walk. Then I walked. The only thing that hurt afterwards? Where I had accidentally stepped on a coal. Drat. Cool green moss. Cool green moss. Never stop repeating that.

After we were done, the firewalker called us all together around the picnic table. He congratulated us for our accomplishments. He told us that explanation six, the scientific one about water displacement, that one was hogwash. You just have to believe to walk across fire. And he said he was sending us out into the world as White Baboons. Did we know how a South African farmer got a baboon off his property?

Uhh, no.

Well, that is a story he said. You see, if a troop of baboons (and I just love saying “a troop of baboons.” C’mon, you have to admit, that sounds cool) moves onto your farm, they can cause a great deal of damage. Getting rid of them is tricky. But, the firewalker told us the African way to do it was to set a trap for one baboon. You can put some food into a container that is secured down and has a hole that is big enough for the baboon to stick his hand into but not big enough for him to take his hand out of while he is holding the food. The baboon will come for the food and won’t let go of the food so is stuck.

Now, you have yourself one baboon. The African farmer then paints the baboon white. (Just on a side note, if any job of mine ever required me to paint a wild trapped baboon, I think that would be my last day at that job). Then you release the baboon and he runs back to his troop. The troop, however, sees a white baboon coming towards them and doesn’t recognize him so runs away. The white baboon follows. The troop runs farther away. And so on and so on until the troop and the white baboon run off your property.

The firewalker said we were now white baboons as we had been transformed, just as the paint had transformed the white baboon. He had taught us that what we can and can not accomplish are rooted fundamentally in our mental views of what we can accomplish. In three hours he had changed our mental views of our ability to walk on fire and we walked on fire. The firewalking was just one physical manifestation of this principle. If we could do that, he challenged us to believe that we could do other things we previously thought impossible. He was quite convincing there under the stars of Ponta d’Ouro.

And sometimes, the firewalker said, when you have a transforming experience, your own troop can be a bit threatened by you. Some people will move away from you. Others will sense this new more powerful juju you have and embrace you. The firewalker said he always had students coming back to him saying that some friends had just mysteriously moved out of their lives after they had worked with the firewalker. But others had shown up.

And so I came to believe that being stuck in southern Africa by yourself for Christmas is not the worst thing in the world. It does not define you as a loser with no social skills. It’s amazing how those long-held images can linger in the back of my head, taunting me when I drop my guard and they have the chance to sneak out from under my bed. But somehow, ever since I walked across that bed of fire under the stars of Ponta d’Ouro, they peek their head out a bit less. (That D in college chemistry still haunts me ;-> )

I believe that travel also has the potential to make you a white baboon. Travel, if you are open to it, can fundamentally alter you. And these three woman who are up on the site, well, they are white baboons.