Finally, Chapter 12 is ready. This part of the memoir takes Kacper from the chaotic arrival in Luanda to the red earth of Angola’s central highlands, where a year in Huambo would change him forever.

Luanda greeted him not with war but with heat, dust, and contradictions — beaches and music on Ilha do Cabo, yet streets outside the city centre scarred by poverty and conflict. A visit to ADPP’s sorting centre revealed, in Kacper’s words:

“It was powerful because it was ordinary — ordinary for Luanda, but so utterly extraordinary to me. What seemed like destitution was daily life for the people around me. My own struggles suddenly felt privileged in ways I had never seen before.”

In Caxito, Kacper met Pedro, a trainee teacher who had once been a child soldier for UNITA. Sitting under a mango tree, Pedro spoke haltingly of forced marches, of violence no child should know, and of his fragile dream to become a teacher:

“I hurt people,” Pedro said quietly, eyes on the red dust. “But it was not who I was… I had no choice.”

Years later, Kacper would learn Pedro never fulfilled that dream — killed in an ambush shortly after graduation. The memory of that conversation would stay with him for life.

Arriving in Huambo, the war’s presence was unmistakable: bullet-riddled buildings, mined fields, and nights punctured by distant gunfire. Yet in Quissala, the teacher training college beneath Pedra da Quissala, there was music, theatre, and moments of pure defiance against despair.

“On those nights, the war fell away… the scars of Huambo faded into clapping hands and joyous cries… even teachers swayed shyly in the glow of a place where, for a few hours, life refused to bow to fear.”

There were frictions with the headmistress Dona Ignacia, lessons in humility about post-colonial wounds, and a haunting visit with Halo Trust’s deminers:

“I knew I would never forget it — the courage of Ana and Maria, the grim humour of John, and the knowledge that some of those mines, silent and waiting, bore the name of my own homeland.”

An evacuation scare brought the reality of war closer, yet solidarity among teachers and students held strong. As the rainy season returned and his departure neared, a quiet conviction formed:

“For the first time, I had glimpsed what it truly meant — walking beside people carrying scars of war, trying in clumsy ways to ease a fraction of their burden… this was no passing experience abroad. It was a first, fragile step onto a path that had begun long ago… and now, in the red earth of Angola, had found its direction.”

Weeks later, waiting for his flight home at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, he knew:

“He was going home — yet nothing in him was the same.”

Chapter 12 of Memoir of a Wandering Spirit is now complete — a journey through war and resilience, music and silence, and the first steps toward a life dedicated to humanitarian work.

Link to the album featuring the time in Huambo.