Getting online: How a mythic bird inspired me to leave the sidelines and step onto the interwebs
Arrivals
I met the Sankofa bird the day I landed in Accra, Ghana, summer of 2001.
When I touched down in that sprawling, tropical city on a breezy Sunday afternoon, I immediately felt closer to my native Haiti — 4,900 miles across the Atlantic — than I had felt living in Brooklyn for a decade, less than half that distance.
As I rode into city center, anticipation made me hyperalert. The sun’s rays really did seem to touch every single thing — just like Mufasa said in The Lion King. The heat; all the browns, bronzes, ebonies, and golds of faces and fixtures; the red earth was the same as I’d known in Haiti. But they all seemed to radiate even brighter.
Mind you, it might’ve just been my eyes adjusting to the outdoors after being inside an airport and an airplane for 20 hours. But let’s go with the emotional reasons.