The Roots
Bio(logy/graphy)
It all started at sixteen.
Six months in Canada to learn English. First time alone, first time far away. The experience was tough. It awakened in me a taste for travel and discovery that never left.
I was born in the Cévennes, grew up in Geneva, sat my baccalaureate in Martinique. Three territories before twenty. Steiner school first, which taught me that art and manual work are not the margins of intelligence but its heart. Then philosophy, in my final year. Then the backpack, the factory jobs to save up, and the first departure towards Southeast Asia.
I met her at Bangkok airport. I was arriving. She was waiting for someone else.
A few years later, we found ourselves on the same university benches in Geneva. This time, we didn't miss each other.
What followed is a life as two, then six. Seven countries, four continents, four children born along the way. With every departure, something came undone and recomposed differently. Nineteen years now that we have been moving like this, with no trajectory drawn in advance, but together.
After all those years around the world, do we still have roots? Where is home? An old Maasai man in Kenya once told me:
"Home is where you are, right now."
A Maasai elder, Kenya
That sentence stayed with us. After fifteen years of nomadism, we wanted to put it to the test in Senegal: a hectare of red earth, a house of adobe and thatch, organisations, a community in the making. Some days, it looks like an anchoring. Others, the question remains open.
What I have come to understand is that professional life and private life don't balance out. They intertwine. The children grow up among the projects, the projects among the children. Symbiosis or chaos, depending on the day.
The baobab doesn't choose its ground either.
Its seed is carried far by the wind and the birds,
until the day it takes root.