Let’s start with the facts.
I was born a bastard.
Technically.
Two days after I came into this world, my parents got married — paperwork caught up to the prophecy fast.
My mother, a Dutch/South African social worker. My father, a Dutch anthropologist.
Not exactly your picket fence couple. They were wired for wildness — movement, meaning, mud.
Nine days into my life — yeah, nine — we were on a plane. Destination: Darfur, Sudan.
While most newborns are still learning how to blink at a ceiling light, I was soaring far above it on my way to a desert.
That was my cradle.
Darfur. Red earth. Infinite heat. No electricity.
We lived in a traditional mud house. Our fridge ran on gas.
Clean water? That came once a week, strapped to the backs of mules in bloated sacks that looked like offerings from another realm.
We were the only white family in the village.
I was the only white baby they’d ever seen.
Blonde curls. Blue eyes. Pale like the moon.
And so, the village gathered. The women came.
They touched my hair like it was silk pulled from the stars.
They helped raise me — not because they had to, but because something about me pulled them in.
A kind of quiet fascination. A foreign child dropped into the middle of their world.
Not a stranger.
Just… something unexpected.
They wrapped me in their language before I ever learned my own.
They carried me on their hips, sang to me with rhythms older than anything books could teach.
The desert became my first home.
My lullabies were goat bells and calls to prayer.
My toys were sand, sticks, and the shifting light.
And the stars — my first teachers.
That was my beginning.
I wouldn’t remember it all, not clearly. But it shaped me.
It lived in my blood, in the way I move through the world.
That contrast. That stillness. That sense of being other — even before I had words to define it.
Before I could walk, I’d already crossed continents.
Before I could talk, I’d been claimed by a village I didn’t belong to — and yet somehow did.
I learned early: I wasn’t here to fit in.
I was here to exist outside the lines.
And that was the start of it all.
Not just my life —
My story.
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