Here's the farm where I stayed in Groosbot, in the Overberg. I don't have a photo of him, but I met Marc Weiner working in the Bodhi Khaya office, and he and I had a conversation about our love for Botswana. He said he used to work there in the mid-90s in the Okavango Delta, his favorite region of all. You can imagine my surprise in finding a true bush guy, complete with Crocodile Dundee hat, at a meditation retreat in the coastal farmlands. He didn't think I would know the place he once lived.
Camp Okavango, he said.
My assignment in May was Camp Okavango, I told him.
Marc couldn't believe it.
"Do you know Obie?" he asked.
He's one of my best friends in Botswana! I was helping him out at Xugana three weeks ago.
Marc and I wrote a note, and he enclosed a photograph of himself in an envelope I placed into the Xugana mail bag, headed out by bush plane today. How can a continent this vast bring people together in such coincidences? With that little card Marc was able to catch up Obie on his life's meanderings for the past decade and to ask about Obie.
Thus two friends, one a white South African, the other a black Motswana, were reconnected.
Maybe, as though emitting an untold signal, we kindred spirits are drawn to each other by our love of the delta. We recognize each other before we know it.
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