Belonging Was Never a Place
What the mountain gorillas of Rwanda taught me
It took me more than two years to disconnect George’s cell phone.
I never kept the phone on or even charged it. Yet, turning off the service and giving up the number that had been part of his identity for as long as cell service has been available felt more permanent than his memorial service.
His email account is still active, though. Thousands of junk emails arrive every week, and every so often I still scroll through them, just in case something important somehow finds its way there. It never does anymore, but I still look anyway.
None of those decisions came easily. And the idea that a stranger likely answers his cell phone number is something I can’t think about without feeling a pit in my stomach.
George died three years and four months ago today.
Seven months ago, I remarried.
I never imagined I would find love again after losing him. Thankfully, I married a man who doesn’t ask me to leave George behind. He understands that love doesn’t erase love. In fact, he totally embraces it, and the photos of George I keep around our house.
Besides, George has a funny way of reminding us he’s never very far away.
I had just left Volcanoes National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and not far from Uganda, and said goodbye to the both the golden monkeys and my beloved friends and travel companions. On the walk to meet my driver, I struck up a conversation with a man from Los Angeles. We had about twenty minutes together. Aside from his wife and the porter there to guide us, we were the only ones in this remote field at the edge of the bamboo forest. Naturally, I struck up conversation.
I asked what he did. Real estate, he said. I asked what kind. Commercial. I inquired further, which sector, and mentioned my late husband had been in commercial real estate too.
That’s where we connected the dots. It turned out he’d bought a portfolio of real estate from George’s former REIT. They had never met. But he knew of him. Meanwhile I am thinking… wow, this is so random!
As we reached the parking lot, he stopped. “Can I show you something?”
He pulled out his phone, opened his contacts, and handed it to me. There it was. George’s contact information. Everything you needed to know if you were looking to reach a man as if he were still alive, including the cell phone number that is permanently etched in my mind, along with the ringtone I assigned to it, which always causes me to abruptly turn when I hear it play.
They’d never met. George died. And still, he had it.
Nearly 8,000 miles from home, after weeks spent traveling across Africa, just before beginning the thirty-six-hour journey back to my daughter, my new husband, and the life waiting for me…
There was George. Winking at me from this stranger’s iPhone screen.
I was already emotional about leaving Africa. Seeing George’s name felt like the hug I needed.
When I walked out the door in Naples weeks earlier, I looked at his photo on our kitchen counter and said, “Grab your angel’s wings. We are going on another adventure.” I should have expected that he would find a way to remind me that his love and memory have no geographical restrictions.
But to understand why I was standing in that parking lot in Rwanda in the first place, I have to go back to a woman named Aline.
The life I lived with George in Toledo bears little resemblance to the life I live today. For starters, I no longer shovel snow. Not that I did much there either, but I call Naples home now.
I no longer own the yoga studio that shaped both my days and my life for so many years, though I remain deeply connected to the community that continues to thrive there.
And I no longer spend Sunday afternoons logging into Skype. Does that even exist anymore?
That’s where this story begins. Not in Africa, but at a boutique yoga studio, on Central Avenue in a small mid-west town, that I opened twelve years ago.
Through Toledo Yoga, I became a mentor with Africa Yoga Project, an organization that paired yoga teachers in the United States with emerging teachers throughout Africa. My mentee was the only participant living in Rwanda.
Her name is Aline. We were first introduced in 2015.
At the time, she had never flown on an airplane. She had never traveled beyond Rwanda except for a thirty-hour bus ride to Nairobi, Kenya, where she attended a teacher training with my teacher, Baron Baptiste, and Paige Elenson. She left behind her job at a local bar, courageously boarded a bus by herself, and chose a path she had no idea would transform her life.
The mentorship program required a monthly Skype call. But after the first one, I knew once a month wasn’t going to be enough.
First of all, the connection was so poor we could barely hear each other. During the rainy season in Rwanda we’d lose each other entirely, and some Sundays we spent almost as much time reconnecting as talking.
Secondly, Aline was painfully shy, which is so hard to imagine now. Back then it took a lot to get her to open up. In her defense, she would say that English wasn’t her first language, although she spoke it far better than she ever gave herself credit for. But getting to know her required both time and patience. Both of which I honored and respected. The program asked a lot… of both of us, and we were both committed.
So we started meeting every Sunday. Each week, it was like meeting a different person. She didn’t just gain confidence. She began to flourish.
The woman who had once struggled to find the words to describe her own thoughts slowly became someone who spoke with clarity, conviction, and purpose.
She began teaching more classes, enrolling more students, and finding ways to support her community. She overcame (and still overcomes) cultural, political, and religious barriers in order to reach those most in need, the genocide survivors who navigate unimaginable grief.
She earned an opportunity to spend a month studying meditation in Thailand. It was her first time on an airplane. Her first time leaving the African continent.
And she kept saying yes. Yes to new opportunities. Yes to travel (which always amazed me) and yes to the transformation of her life unfolding in the most remarkable ways.
Somewhere along the way, our relationship quietly shifted. As the program came to an end, it was clear she no longer needed a mentor. If anything, I had become the student.
Over the years we stayed in touch, but meeting in person always felt unlikely. George never had any interest in traveling to Africa, and despite several attempts to bring Aline to the United States, it never aligned.
Ten years after our first Skype call, we finally had an opportunity to meet in person.
There are very few people in life with whom you can trace a decade of growth so clearly. To hug her, to laugh with her, to finally look her in the eyes instead of through a temperamental computer screen, was one of the most meaningful moments of my trip.
Today, Aline leads an organization that reaches more than 5,000 students every week in Rwanda (the number astonishes me). Not only that, she works with the United Nations to bring yoga, mindfulness, and healing into the most war-torn communities around the world, often at the very edge of the battlefields.
I still picture the young woman who nervously boarded a bus for thirty hours to attend her first training. Now she boards airplanes and walks into some of the most difficult places on earth with peace as her badge.
Ten years ago, I was helping Aline find her voice. Today, she’s helping thousands of others find theirs.
Being with her in her home country was such a gift. We had less than twenty-four hours together, which included a greeting at the airport and a short drive to our hotel, a beautiful morning at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where Aline shared pieces of her own story and her family’s struggles during that time and beyond, a lunch inspired by local cuisine, and shopping (of course). Not the kind of shopping tourists usually imagine, but a chance to meet the remarkable women weaving beautiful baskets by hand, supporting themselves, their families, and one another through their craft.
Naturally, I came home with more than I needed and an extra bag to carry it all.
One of those baskets now sits in my favorite spot in the house, holding an orchid. Every time I walk past it, I don’t just think of Rwanda. I think of Aline. And of course there is the one she gifted me. A beautiful butterfly woven into the design. To me, it’s perfectly symbolic of her journey and her transformation.
Leaving her was harder than I expected. Not because our time together had been long. But because we’d already spent ten years building the relationship.
The hug goodbye wasn’t the end of something. It felt like the continuation of something that had begun all those years ago on Sunday afternoons over unreliable Skype calls.
Rather than goodbye, we said “Until next time.”
One of her dreams has always been to visit the United States. And I am desperately hoping we can finally make that happen.
As emotional as saying goodbye was, I never had to carry it alone. My dear friend Debi saw exactly what this reunion meant to me.
She and her husband, Pierre, along with their family, did something I’ll never forget. They invited me to join them in Rwanda. They folded me into their family as though I’d belonged there all along. They even included me in the “Gorilla Trekkers” text thread long before our departure, a thread of family musings, jabs, and photos that always made me feel part of the tribe.
Without them, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have been standing there, hugging Aline goodbye.
While I thought I was traveling to Rwanda to see gorillas, the truth is, I was traveling to finally meet the woman Aline had become.
And though this article seemed like it should be easy to write, I struggled, and I couldn’t figure out why.
So much happened along the way. But this last part, the finale in Rwanda, jammed into a few short days, seemed to carry the most weight.
George showed up as an encore. Aline was at the center of it all. And the gorillas? That’s what everyone asks about.
When I was scrolling through the photos looking for what I wanted to share, in hopes the words would find me, everything finally came into focus.
This trip wasn’t about wildlife. It wasn’t even about Rwanda. It was about belonging. And oddly enough, the gorillas showed me that.
Belonging has always been complicated for me. As I reflect back, though, it’s been a thread that I have unknowingly pulled through so many of my previous articles.
I’ve written about grief, about friendship (that seems to be a sticky one that will get more attention soon), family, reinvention (I am an expert at that), identity, even trends.
Underneath all of them was the same quiet question.
Where do I belong? How do I fit in?
I am a product of divorced parents. I divorced myself. I made choices outside the norm: falling in love and marrying an older man, losing him unexpectedly and my best friend a year later, and then remarrying. All those moments were filled with uncertainty and loss.
Standing in the bamboo forests of Volcanoes National Park, I was surrounded by mountain gorillas so close I could hear them tearing bamboo with their teeth. Babies tumbling over one another, playing their own version of ring around the rosy. A mother nursing another. A silverback mating. Yes, we saw that primal moment too. I wasn’t simply observing wildlife.
I was witnessing something far greater. I was witnessing belonging.
This troop of gorillas, like all others, created their own unit. Several females. A large silverback. Tons of babies, all nestled into the bamboo of the forest with an unmistakable rhythm to it all.
For primates, belonging isn’t simply comforting. It’s essential. It’s how they survive. And it’s actually how they’ve thrived (again). Once on the edge of extinction, they’ve repopulated through conservation efforts and their own natural instinct to gather and protect one another, which was a wonder to see firsthand.
So somewhere between meeting Aline, being welcomed so effortlessly into Debi and Pierre’s family, sitting among a gorilla troop that instinctively protects one another, and finding George waiting for me in the most unexpected place on earth…
I realized I’d spent the entire trip surrounded by different expressions of the very thing I’d been searching for most of my life.
Belonging.
As I finally conclude my Africa articles, I am reminded that sometimes the greatest gifts people give us aren’t extravagant at all. Sometimes they simply make space for one more.
Always EDITing,
Leslie
P.S. If you made it this far… thank you! I am grateful to share this journey with you. Next up… a return trip I am about to embark on for my health and wellbeing. One I am so excited about. Yet, another country. More to come next week.
As always, your comments fuel me.
Join me here… turns out it's really cool to belong.