It is amazing how much my diary of five years ago brings back. I tended to write down only what I did, leaving my thoughts out, but it brings out a lot of old emotions and incidents that I didn't want to write down.

Finishing high school meant leaving Kenya. There was nothing more for me to do there, and it was the expected thing to do. While staying with parents in Africa for an extra year was quite common, it was seen as only delaying the inevitable return "home".

In April 1983 it began to hit me just what leaving meant. I had been accepted into The University of New Brunswick in Canada, but knew nothing about life away from Kenya. I had grown to love Kenya, and did not want to leave, but realized that I had to. There was a bridge to be crossed an burnt, and the unknown was beyond.

I wanted to fit as much into those four months as I could. During the April school vacation I managed to travel a bit, and spend my last week at the coast. School started again in May, and my schedule was full until I left. I wanted to climb Mount Kenya again, but the only possible time to do it was a weekend, and the logistics were just too much. I started taking pictures of everything I did. I was shooting around 40 slides a week for the last three months.

A large part of my senior year of high school was taken up with "Kiambogo", the school yearbook. I was one of the editors and was involved in every aspect of the book. It ate time. I was busy until it came out on July 15th, one week before the end of classes. Perhaps it was good that I was busy, and didn't spend too much time worrying about what was on the other side of the bridge.

I was terrified of Canada. At the time when most of the Americans at RVA had been accepted into colleges in the States, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do. All I had ever wanted to do in life was fly, but the few places where I knew about that I could learn at were expensive and far away from any relatives.

The Raes were family friends from New Brunswick. Their son David had gone through UNB Engineering and had come back to Africa with a temporary job in Zambia. I did a few things with him while he was at Kijabe, and heard a bit about UNB. Money wasn't a major problem there because of government assistance. I decided that I liked math, but would like to do something more practical, so I applied to UNB Engineering. It was some comfort to know that I was accepted in a school, but I still didn't have a place to stay, knew no-one, and knew very little about life in Canada. I was forever worried about these, but there was little I could do.

On May 27th, Lisa came to live with us for the summer. She was a college student from the States who had come as a volunteer to help where Dad was working. She did more to comfort my transition than any other single factor. I was attracted to her, probably because of my few female friends, and it was easy to get to know her as she lived with us. The hardest part about the relationship was that I knew that we would leave in two months, never to see each other again. From her I learned that life in college was not as frightening as I had thought, and that my stereotypes of North Americans were far from correct. She was having a rough time too, being alone and far away from home. We never really talked about our feelings. I don't think I knew how to. I remember one night after some activity at RVA, Lisa and I were walking over to where I had parked the motorbike. She said to me, "Someone pointed Julia out to me tonight, she must be awful jealous." Julia was a good friend of mine whom I had taken to the Junior-Senior Banquet and a few other things. I replied "Why?", truthfully not realizing that anything was going on to inspire jealousy. She thought it was obvious. I can see her point now. I sometimes look back and wonder how I could have been so naive. That episode put a damper on any further attempt to communicate. It's a pity, I had a lot to learn.

The day before I left Kenya I took Lisa for a ride on the motorbike. We stopped at one of my favourite spots, the top of some cliffs looking out over the Rift Valley. We just sat there. It was the last time I was going to be alone with her. I had so much that I had to say, but didn't know how. The only thing I asked was "So, did you learn anything from this summer?" To which she replied, "More than you could ever imagine." If she learned as much from her summer as I learned from her, it was very true.

In June our class went on "Senior Safari". Five days in a beautiful hotel on a beautiful beach. It was a time for the class to get closer, just before they split up to go all over the globe. A few weeks later we had our last big class activity, a banquet at the Hilton in Nairobi. I got in with a few adventurous friends and we wandered around the building during a break. The Nairobi Hilton is a round tower some twenty stories high. We took the elevator to the top floor to explore. The whole outside was rooms, so we couldn't see out. We tried the emergency exit in the middle. We went through a few doors, and up on to the roof. We got a beautiful view of Nairobi at night.

For the last term at RVA the Seniors had a sunday school class on "Re-entry". I wasn't the only one expecting problems getting used to North American life. Various people who had gone through it told us some things to do, and some things not to do. There were quite a few RVA graduates who spent four years in college in the US with the sole purpose in mind of getting back to Africa. I decided not to allow myself to fall into that trap. I would be a Canadian. If I had a chance to return to Kenya in the future, great, but I wasn't going to expect it or work towards it.

High school graduation is a big marker in most peoples lives. With me it was more, it was walking onto the bridge between my past and my future, knowing that the past was to be totally left behind. I don't remember much about graduation itself. I left Kijabe that afternoon, and Kenya that night. My friends were splitting up to go all over the world. I said goodbye to almost everyone and everything that had made my life what it was.

Two days before I left Kenya I was in David's room by myself, looking out the window. I saw the Great Rift Valley stretching out before me, a hundred miles of grassland.

I went and laid down, thinking how I had grown to love the beauty in that rugged volcanic area. Then I noticed the picture of Mount Kenya that I had given to David, hanging above the door. Thoughts flooded my mind of the wonderful times on that majestic mountain, above the clouds in eternal snow on the equator, so near to God. All of a sudden I heard a small voice talking, saying "Never again will you see your beloved mountain or the Rift Valley." I said, "But God, this is home, this is what I have grown to love, I have to come back, return home!" The voice said "Never". I cried.