I can hear my Mom singing to a Janis Joplin song through Skype. “Are you listening?” she asks. “My generation was blessed with great music.” I call her often and we sometimes leave the speaker on as each of us do our stuff; I guess it is a way to keep ourselves company.  “I use to steal my father’s radio every day from 8:00 to 9:00 pm to listen to the Creedence Program,” she says remembering her teenage years as she plays Have you ever seen the rain? There is a nostalgic feeling to this song. My uncle Andres carried a Creedence tape in his car and played this song every time he dropped me at the airport when my summer vacation in Mexico City was over. “Do you like Home Sweet Alabama?” my Mother asks. I can’t reply, I’m ready to go to bed and for all I know she will stay awake until very late searching for old songs on YouTube.  Nostalgia and internet are a powerful combination.

Some of us have steady jobs, some of us have dead-end jobs, some of us have inspiring dream-like jobs, some of us are jobless. Some of us have children, some of us don’t. Some of us are married at 24, 34, 44, some of us are not, some of us are desperately seeking for a partner, some of us are gay, some of us wish to be single.  Some of us know our mission in life, some of us don’t, some of us don’t care, some of us walk endlessly to find it. Some of us blame the others for our bad decisions, some of us take responsibility to change the patterns. In life and personal decisions, no rules apply; inspiration does. There are many ways to milk a cow, to crack a nut, to write a poem, but there are many more ways to lead your life. We learn by observation, but again, there are many ways to observe, so we select what to get inspired by. The key, I guess, is to make sure you get exposed to as many different examples of paths to select your own. For the first time in a very long time, I feel finally walking on the right direction. Where am I walking to is still uncertain, but I don’t care about it anymore. “What happened to Brenda in Africa?” people have been asking continuously and I can only answer that I let go. “I imagined being naked, metaphorically,” I clarify as I share the Africa epiphany,“and all my belongings and attachments are taken away from me. What would I rescue? What would I keep with me?” The answer is nothing, I have myself. “Am I ever going to have full clarity on what I want?” Arloinne asks as we walk down Alvaro Obregon from Roma to Condesa in Mexico City, “I came back from Europe expecting Mexico to bring back the possibilities, and now I miss Berlin and my life there.” According to my mother questioning hasn’t ended even at 60. My recent words of wisdom: It is what it is, so keep walking and make the best out of it.

I listen to Norteñas as we fly from Lagos to Calabar, close to the Cameroon border. I'm so tired that the line between dreams and thoughts has become blurry. The music takes me to Sinaloa and images of man wearing Texan boots and cowboy sombreros get mixed with storylines of hunters and gorillas in the forest. We just spent two weeks in Sierra Leone working with partners to develop the initial story for a drama on chimpanzee conservation; tomorrow we'll sit down with scriptwriters from Nigeria and Cameroon to agree on the story for gorilla conservation in the border between both countries. I sometimes wonder how I ended up working in all these parts of the world, a question that probably many people wouldn't - or can't afford to - ask themselves. I'm lucky. Life has provided me with enough content to write a book, which makes me feel a sense of guilt for not even trying. Dream and reality remains blurry until the stewardess hands me a plate with chicken and yam. Next to me a Nigerian 20-something man plays with his iPad impatiently; he is returning home for the May 1st holidays. The cheap pink toilet paper in the restroom reminds me that this airline not only tries to cut any possible costs, but that is not really reliable. I rather go back to the dreamy state I was before. As we prepare to land, the Norteño playlist is coming to an end and for a moment I wish I was landing in Mexico. Why I did decide to leave in the first place?