Maralei

Maralei is a small area near the city of Boorama in Somalia. There is very little there nowadays. Just rocks and a few trees with a landscape that best represents the setting of the African sun.

But once upon a time this land was home to groups of nomadic travelers, entire clans that came and went upon its surface. The trees gave shade and the rocks hid rivers underneath, while the land, though fertile and arable, provided scant sustenance to the herds of animals that swept across its surface. Eventually though, the nomads stopped coming and moved to the city, the wells dried up and the few trees still there were cut down. Some people stayed behind. And they instead began to farm the land that for centuries was kind to their ancestors. My grandpa was one of them.

And I, though many generations a Maralei and now twice removed, live on the opposite side of the world. The land here is vividly green and wet, raining incessantly with thunderstorms that ravage the sky and home to a people of startlingly pale complexions--beautiful in so many ways. But my heart belongs to another place, it travels back in time to the setting of the african sun over a dry, yellow land that was once home to lions and giraffes, hyenas and gazelles, and my nomadic ancestors who traveled for days in search of the African dream: water.

And even though it has never seen it, my heart longs to experience the hot arid land and the soft, playful wind that teases ever so lightly--with a nostalgia so sharp I sometimes wonder where it comes from.