Tribal Connections: Who Comes Home With You?

Loving Village 💜🌿     

I've been thinking about telephone numbers.

Not the ones we've had for years.

The newer ones.

The number somebody gives you before you leave.

The person you met three days ago who is suddenly sending you photographs.

The name that appears on your phone from a city you are no longer standing in.

Travel has always fascinated me for that reason.

We spend so much time thinking about where people go.

Very little thinking about who comes back with them.

Not physically, obviously.

Although if you travel with Kai, there is always a reasonable possibility he has invited somebody home. 😂

But in the quieter sense.

The people whose stories enter yours.

The ones you continue thinking about after the journey should technically be over.

The people who become part of home...

without ever living there.

The People A Journey Gives You

There are journeys where you return with very little beyond photographs and laundry.

There is nothing wrong with that.

Priscilla reminded me of this recently.

Not every holiday has to transform you.

She's right.

I know.

I'm an anthropologist.

We have a terrible habit of ruining perfectly pleasant experiences by asking what everything means. 😂

But sometimes a journey does give you something.

Or, more accurately...

someone.

A person you would never have met if you had stayed where you were.

A conversation that could only have happened because two lives happened to occupy the same place at the same time.

A friendship that begins with:

Are you from around here?

Or:

Do you know where this goes?

Or, occasionally:

I think we're on the wrong matatu.

That last one has had consequences. 😂

And then you leave.

But somehow the relationship doesn't.

That's the part I've been thinking about.

Because Chapter Four begins with all of us in different places.

Maya and Kai have returned from Birmingham.

Priscilla and I are still in Kenya.

The children are in Mombasa.

The rest of the Tribe is scattered across ordinary life.

And yet everybody keeps appearing on everybody else's phones.

Checking in.

Asking questions.

Passing information.

Making sure somebody somewhere knows what is happening.

At one point, Priscilla observes that the organisation itself has begun behaving almost like a nervous system - one part feeling something and another responding.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about that.

Because perhaps connection isn't always everybody being together.

Sometimes connection is simply knowing where the thread leads.

Some Relationships Begin Before We Know What They Are

Twenty years has taught me not to underestimate the beginning of a relationship.

Especially an unimpressive one.

We like origin stories afterwards.

We tidy them.

We give them significance.

We say:

That was the moment.

But most relationships don't announce themselves like that.

You meet somebody.

You talk.

You exchange details.

You promise to stay in touch.

And sometimes you do.

Sometimes you don't.

Then occasionally, without anybody making a decision about it, that person begins appearing in your life.

A message.

A birthday.

A photograph.

An invitation.

Another journey.

And one day you realise the person you once described as somebody I met in Birmingham or someone from Nairobi has become...

a friend.

That's how villages grow.

Not only through membership lists or buildings or events.

Through repetition.

Through recognition.

Through people continuing to answer one another.

Maya Came Home With Names

This is where Birmingham has been sitting with me.

Because Maya didn't return carrying a neat conclusion.

She returned carrying people.

Mrs Celestine.

Mr Clarke.

Bernice Grant.

Mrs Palmer.

People whose names did not occupy the same place in her life before she went.

And one woman whose memory has unsettled something Maya believed she understood about her mother's final day.

That is a very different kind of luggage.

Names have weight.

Especially when they belong to people connected to parts of your own story you thought were finished.

Maya spent fifteen years avoiding Birmingham.

Now Birmingham has followed her home through the people she encountered there.

I don't mean that ominously.

Although Maya may disagree with me at the moment. 😂

I mean that places become personal through people.

You can leave a city.

People are harder.

Once someone has told you their story...

once they have remembered something about yours...

once your lives have touched...

distance does not automatically restore you to strangers.

Kai, Naturally, Came Home With A Network

Then there is Kai.

There are certain things about the Village I have stopped pretending surprise me.

Kai returning from a short trip having somehow acquired an entirely new collection of people is one of them.

He went to Birmingham because Maya should not have had to make that journey alone.

He came back connected to people who had been strangers only days earlier.

This is what Kai does.

Some people collect postcards.

Kai collects human beings.

He would object to that description.

I will use it anyway. 😂

But there is something underneath the joke that matters.

Connection often begins because somebody is willing to behave as though another person is worth knowing before there is any practical reason to know them.

That's rarer than it should be.

We are very good at networking.

We ask what people do.

Where they work.

Whether there is some obvious reason our lives should remain connected.

Community asks a different question.

Would I still want to know you if you could do absolutely nothing for me?

That's where the interesting relationships begin.

What Survives The Distance?

Priscilla asked me something while we were sitting in Nairobi.

“What do you think we bring back?”

Not only from Kenya.

From anywhere.

I told her it depends on what we allow ourselves to notice.

And eventually we began talking about the things that appear later.

A recipe in your kitchen.

A song in your playlist.

A question that refuses to disappear.

A decision you make differently.

A friendship that survives the distance.

That last one matters to me.

Because distance used to have far more authority over relationships than it does now.

When I first moved from New York to London, letters mattered.

Telephone calls mattered.

Photographs mattered.

You could love somebody deeply and still go months without seeing their face.

Now we complain if somebody leaves us on read for six hours. 😂

Technology changed the speed.

It didn't change the question.

Will we continue carrying one another when we no longer share the same place?

Because proximity makes connection easier.

Distance reveals whether we intend to keep it.

The Village Between Places

I used to think a village required proximity.

Not intellectually.

My anthropology professors would be horrified if I admitted that. 😂

But emotionally.

I imagined community as people gathering.

One room.

One table.

One neighbourhood.

People close enough to knock on the door.

And those things still matter.

But the Village has taught me another form of closeness.

Maya in Leicester.

Priscilla beside me in Nairobi.

Children in Mombasa.

Someone in Birmingham sending information.

Someone else answering from somewhere entirely different.

Different places.

One relationship moving between them.

Perhaps that's one of the things we've been building all these years without quite naming it.

Not a community that defeats distance.

A community that knows how to live across it.

There is a difference.

The People You Still Carry

So I've been thinking about my own journeys.

The people who began somewhere else and somehow entered the architecture of my everyday life.

People I first knew as hosts.

Guides.

Colleagues.

Members.

Someone's cousin.

Someone's friend.

Someone sitting beside me at an event.

People whose numbers are now simply in my phone.

Whose children I ask about.

Whose good news reaches me.

Whose bad news changes my day.

At what point did they stop being people I met somewhere...

and become people I carry?

I don't know.

Maybe that's the beautiful thing.

We don't always notice connection becoming important while it's happening.

Sometimes we recognise it afterwards.

When we're home.

When the journey is technically finished.

And their name appears on the screen...

and we answer.

Until Next Time...

Think about one journey you've taken.

It doesn't have to be another country.

It might have been another city.

Another neighbourhood.

Another workplace.

Another season of your life.

Now forget the places for a moment.

Who came home with you?

Whose number stayed in your phone?

Whose story do you still tell?

Who became a friend?

Who taught you something you still carry?

Who would never have entered your life if you hadn't gone somewhere you weren't before?

And perhaps there is someone you haven't spoken to for a while.

Someone whose relationship belongs to a journey you assumed had ended.

Send the message.

Nothing elaborate.

I was thinking about you.

Sometimes that is enough to pull the thread and discover it is still there.

Because perhaps the most extraordinary thing we bring home from travelling isn't something we bought.

It is the evidence that our lives can become connected to people we once had absolutely no reason to know.

With love and warm hospitality,

— Tonya ☕💜🌿 

💜 Continue The Return

The journey has changed direction.

Maya and Kai have returned from Birmingham.

Tonya and Priscilla remain in Kenya.

The Village is scattered across cities, homes and conversations.

But the connections between them haven't disappeared.

Continue When the Village Carries Home with Chapter Four: The Return, beginning with Episode One: What Did They Bring Home?

Because the things people bring back from a journey don't always appear in their luggage.

Sometimes it's a question.

Sometimes it's a promise.

Sometimes it's a different understanding of somewhere you thought you knew.

And sometimes...

it's a person whose life has become connected to yours.

📖 Read Chapter Four (Tribe Membership required) 

Haven't started Book Two yet?

Begin with Chapter One inside the Tribe Library and follow the journey from the beginning.

👉🏾 Begin Book Two