I have just finished Chapter 25 of my memoir, The World, Again — a chapter that follows the slow, careful return to life after a season of breaking and mending.

It opens before dawn in Biegonice, in the quiet intimacy of my parents’ kitchen. Tea. Bread. The gentle movement of my mother in the half-dark. A conversation that unfolds without effort, as if time and distance had never intervened. There is laughter, memory, worry, tenderness — and the grounding relief of being fully seen without having to explain oneself.

From that table, the story begins to widen.

There is a winter drive to Košice, where the city lies hushed beneath frost, where wool is bought for future jumpers, where hands are wrapped around hot chocolate in a café, and where the possibility of change is spoken aloud for the first time. Soon after comes the email from CrossWorld, confirming a new role and opening a door that had not yet existed in Kacper’s imagination.

The chapter then carries him outward across continents and emotional landscapes:
to Cape Town, where ocean and mountain restore a sense of scale and belonging;
back to Nairobi, where reunions with his team bring tears, laughter, gratitude, and the deep reassurance of shared survival;
on to New York, where past and future sit quietly together in the night;
and finally to Oxford, where a new professional life takes shape.

In Oxford, Kacper walks streets he once wandered as a young, uncertain boy from Poland, carrying little more than hope and fear. Now he walks them as a professional, calm and grounded, no longer shrinking from the world. His induction at CrossWorld introduces a language of humanitarian work that resonates deeply with his own history: poverty understood as injustice rather than misfortune; gender recognised as a force that shapes every life and opportunity; dignity treated as non-negotiable; partnership valued above charity. His childhood of scarcity and his years with GNI quietly echo through those conversations, giving the work both memory and meaning.

The chapter’s final movement carries him far from Europe, across oceans and histories, to Aceh, Indonesia, still rebuilding two years after the great tsunami. The arrival in Banda Aceh is filled with heat, salt, traffic, prayer, ruins, and renewal — the strange beauty of a city that has learned how to live beside its own loss.

It ends in a guest house that feels almost unreal — gold, chandeliers, fish tanks, pink bedding, earthquake briefings — and in the deep, dreamless sleep of someone who has finally arrived where he is needed.

The World, Again is about commitment.

Commitment to work.
Commitment to people.
Commitment to remaining open to life even after it has been frightening.

This chapter marks the moment when healing becomes movement, when memory becomes responsibility, when the world — slowly, quietly — opens itself again.

And Kacper steps forward.

Some chapters are written with energy.
Some with urgency.
Some with memory.

And then there are chapters that arrive quietly, the way healing does.

I have just finished Chapter 24 of my memoir, “The Season of Mending.”
It may be the most tender chapter I have written so far.

This chapter follows Kacper at a moment when the world finally asks him to stop running.

After years of missions, wars, borders, airports, responsibilities, and carrying other people’s emergencies on his back, Kacper arrives in rural Scotland at a therapeutic retreat called Glenmarch House. The landscape receives him gently — mist, old pines, stone walls, frost, and long silences. Nothing dramatic happens there. And yet, everything begins to change.

“The Season of Mending” is not about heroism.
It is about permission.

Permission to rest.
Permission to feel small.
Permission to admit that even the strongest endurance has its limits.

At Glenmarch, Kacper meets Joy, a therapist whose calm presence and deep patience guide him through the slow work of facing himself. Their conversations do not begin with the recent crisis in Nairobi. They begin with the body. With childhood illness. With growing up in Poland under Martial Law. With shame, scarcity, survival, and the quiet architecture of his parents’ love.

From there the story widens — through London, Denmark, India, Iran, Canada, Iceland, Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the long humanitarian road that shaped his adult life. The chapter becomes a kind of inner map of his entire journey, seen not through achievements but through the emotional costs of carrying too much for too long.

Alongside the therapy, life at Glenmarch unfolds with quiet beauty:

• long walks through frozen woods
• snowfall softening the world
• phone calls with his mother, full of ordinary love
• news of the birth of his niece Frania
• trips to Edinburgh and Glasgow
• shared laughter with Ilona and Mateusz, two young staff members who become unexpected companions on this fragile stretch of the road

One of the most important moments of the chapter comes when Kacper, encouraged by Joy, finally begins to tell his truth to people he loves. He writes to Helga in Iceland. He writes to Camila. Their responses — gentle, patient, unafraid — become the turning point. He is heard. And the world does not withdraw its affection.

By the time he leaves Scotland, five weeks later, nothing is “fixed.”
But something essential has shifted.

He boards a small Ryanair flight from Glasgow to Kraków, heading home to his family, to hold his niece for the first time, to re-enter the world not as a man repaired, but as a man no longer hiding.

This chapter is about the moment when endurance ends —
and repair begins.

It is about discovering that the world, even after everything,
is still wide enough to hold you.

There are chapters in a life that do not unfold so much as rupture, and Chapter 23 sits precisely there — in the uneasy space between exhaustion and revelation, between quiet despair and the stubborn, surprising persistence of hope. It is a chapter rooted in Nairobi, though its shadows stretch far beyond it, reaching back into Fangak’s red mud and forward into a Scotland still unseen.

Kacper returns from South Sudan unsteady on his feet, carrying the weight of flooded villages, long nights in leaking huts, and the silent fatigue that follows too much witnessing. Nairobi, with its matatus zig-zagging through fumes, the cafés near Yaya Centre, and the stubborn resilience of everyday life, receives him with familiarity — but not with comfort. His body softens; his confidence thins. He laughs with colleagues, but never quite reaches the laughter itself.

Still, life resumes.
Work regains a rhythm.
The team takes shape around him.

Claire, all calm precision and quiet intelligence, offers a steadiness that makes the office feel less fragile. Nora, bright and expansive, sweeps fatigue from a room simply by entering it. And the newest arrival, Lina — multilingual, outrageous, brilliant — folds into the trio like a missing instrument.

Together they climb the Ngong Hills. They laugh into the wind. For the length of an afternoon, it feels possible to be light again.

But humanitarian normality is always provisional.

The first blow lands with El Wak.

Two Kenyan colleagues — men Kacper had known, laughed with, trusted — are killed on their way home, not on duty, simply living their ordinary day. The news reaches him through tears in Nora’s eyes. The world tilts. Kacper and Nora charter a small plane to the border, crossing the arid land with the hollow knowledge that nothing they do will ever be enough. They sit with mothers and brothers, drink bitter tea, listen to grief that has the texture of dust and age, and promise to remember.

And then — because the field never obeys a single emotional register — the chapter turns to the absurd and the ancient: the fifty cows.

A colleague in Old Fangak is arrested after a foolish mistake involving a married woman. The local commander demands compensation not in money, not in negotiation, but in cattle — the tall-horned river-country cows that carry prestige and pride. What follows is one of the strangest logistical operations of Kacper’s career: hiring a cattle expert, purchasing the right animals in Bor, and organising the perilous two-week march northwards through contested land.

It is farcical, frightening, and somehow beautiful in its own wild logic.

When the cows finally arrive, Commander Lual beams like a triumphant monarch and declares — to Kacper’s astonishment — that anyone is welcome to sleep with his wife so long as they bring equally fine cattle.

It is a moment both ridiculous and real, an anecdote Kacper will later tell with a mixture of disbelief and affection. But comedy does not erase cost. Once the laughter fades, a strange emptiness settles inside him.

And this is where the chapter deepens.

Loneliness — long denied — begins circling him more tightly. Shame grows quiet but sharp. The memory of Rio returns not as longing, but as guilt. He sees his reflection and flinches. Nights stretch. Thoughts acquire edges.

Slowly, softly, he begins imagining an end to his own story.

One evening, when Claire and Nora are out, he locks himself in the annex room. Vodka. Pills. Silence. A long spiral he cannot see his way out of.

By chance — or something that looks very much like grace — the two women turn back after a minor car accident. The guard insists Kacper is inside. They force the door open. The ambulance arrives. The night becomes a blur.

He wakes in Nairobi Hospital — and the chapter offers a quiet echo to long-time readers:
He knew these corridors from another fear, another year.

What follows is one of the most intimate passages in the book.

A Kenyan psychiatrist sits by his bed and simply refuses to leave until Kacper speaks. It takes three days. When words finally break through, they come as tears first, then as the truths he had carried for years — his longing, his shame, the belief that he was unlovable, the quiet ache he had never dared to articulate.

The doctor listens, without flinching, without judgement.
In a country he had feared might reject him, he finds unexpected tenderness — the first person on earth to whom he ever tells the full truth of himself.

It becomes the chapter’s most profound irony and its quiet redemption.

Marc arrives from New York, offering compassion rather than consequences, insisting that GNI stands with him. No punishment. No shame. Only care.

In the end, the decision is made: Kacper will go to a trauma centre in Scotland, a place dedicated to those who have seen too much and carried too heavy a load for too long. He boards a KLM flight — Nairobi to Amsterdam, then onwards to Edinburgh — stepping into the cold Scottish air with fear, relief, and the first faint stirring of a future he had not imagined.

The chapter closes not with triumph, nor with certainty, but with movement.
With breath returning.
With the fragile understanding that survival, too, is a kind of beginning.

✨ Two New Chapters: “Ten Golden Days” & “Where the Cows Wait”

The journey continues. Two new chapters are complete — and with them, Kacper crosses another threshold in his long passage through war, work, and wonder.

Chapter 21 – Ten Golden Days

This chapter moves between two kinds of quiet: the strange hush of New York debrief days after Angola, and the tender stillness of a pilgrimage to Przemyśl with Mama. It sits in the tension between glass towers and cemetery pines, between lavender sheets in Lower Manhattan and the remembered mud of Bentiu — a week that lets Kacper feel both the distance from the field and the thread that still binds him to it.

In New York, he arrives bone-tired, slips into a small guest house in Lower Manhattan run by Peter and John, and discovers how comfort can sharpen memory: the softness of linens pulling Bentiu back into the room — swamp reeds, gunfire, sacks of sorghum intruding on blue walls and polished floors. The city glitters; his body refuses to forget. On Sunday, a grace note — a reunion with Magda and Ania from Nowy Sącz. They wander Times Square, drift into the hush of Central Park, tuck into a riverside walk along the Hudson; friendship steadies the day.

Then home to Nowy Sącz — and a drive east with his mother to Przemyśl, to look for Aunt Rozalia’s grave. The town greets them with San River light and old Galician façades. At the cemetery, time folds: pines, oaks, linden, birch; damp leaves underfoot; angels with broken wings; Cyrillic and Latin scripts side by side. Hours pass before they find the simple mound marked Grób Sióstr Świętej Felicyty — Sr. Rozalia. They stand a long while without speaking; grief and gratitude share the air.

A few brief excerpts

“The contrast itself seemed to be the essence of his life — Manhattan and Bentiu, lavender and swamp reeds, soft linen and dust.”

“Sunday unfolded with a brightness he had not expected… They showed him their hidden corners too — a bookshop folded between glass towers, a café with worn wooden tables, the riverside walk along the Hudson where the roar of traffic softened into the rhythm of water.”

“The cemetery gates stood tall and unhurried… It was still green — impossibly green… Catholic and Orthodox markers stood side by side — Latin and Cyrillic script entwined like old neighbours in quiet conversation.”

“Set apart from the more elaborate monuments… a simple iron cross… a small wooden plaque, lovingly carved: Grób Sióstr Świętej Felicyty — Sr. Rozalia.”

📷 Related photo albums for Chapter 21:
• Album 1 – Meeting in Sitges, Spain
• Album 2 – Visiting Przemysl, Poland


Chapter 22 – Where the Cows Wait

The flight south brings him to Nairobi, 2005. A new posting, a new continent’s rhythm. The war in Sudan has paused — but peace itself feels fragile, tentative, “a promise whispered more than shouted.” The city hums, half-hopeful, half-tired.

He meets Martin, the cautious programme manager whose kindness hides behind slow words, and Ruth, the logistician whose laughter never burns out. They will become his compass in the months to come. But first comes Lokichoggio, and then the north — the borderlands where planes land on airstrips of baked clay and the line between safety and need is drawn in dust.

“Southern Sudan was no longer at war, but neither was it yet healed. The land itself had not caught its breath.”

What follows is one of the book’s most haunting journeys — to Old Fangak, a village half-drowned by swamps and memory. Here, Kacper learns what endurance looks like without spectacle. Hunger and faith coexist, silence speaks louder than policy, and even peace smells faintly of smoke.

“He began to see what hunger meant — not statistically, but bodily, intimately. Poverty was grief, was infection, was silence after the last breath.”

And then, the discovery that gives the chapter its name: the cows. Sacred, sung, guarded by boys barely older than children. They are wealth, diary, ancestor, and song — the living heart of the Nuer world.

“Cows were not animals here. They were spirit and wealth and prayer. They were diaries and dowries, ancestors and heirs.”

Through them, Kacper grasps a truth larger than aid or ambition — that dignity and survival are not gifts to be given but languages to be learned. The final pages breathe with stillness and reverence:

“Sometimes he thought of the imbalance — of children lying hungry while cattle were led to higher ground. It felt cruel. But then, when he looked closer, it was almost holy — a covenant written in mud and milk.”

When he finally leaves, Ama folds laundry in silence — a quiet goodbye heavier than words.

“Fangak had entered like water through cracked earth — slow, steady, impossible to remove.”

Back in Nairobi, he realises he is no longer the man who arrived. Something in him has softened, widened, learned to wait.


Between Glory and Quiet

These two chapters mark a turning point. Kacper steps out of survival and into responsibility — no longer just the witness, but the one who must decide, lead, and sometimes fail. The tone of the memoir matures with him: the writing grows slower, more spacious, haunted by the awareness that every victory is partial, every lesson incomplete.

From the frozen light of Manhattan to the humid dawns of the Upper Nile, Memoir of a Wandering Spirit continues to map not only the world’s crises but also the small, stubborn sanctuaries that endure within them — friendship, faith, humility, and the grace of work done with open eyes.

“He knew this was just the beginning.”

Chapter 20: Ashes and Oceans — Complete 🌍

Another chapter is complete — Ashes and Oceans — and it feels like one of the most intimate so far.

The story follows Kacper’s return to Angola, to the land that once shaped him and now welcomes him back with both warmth and unease. It is 2003: the war has ended, but its ghosts still live in craters, in memories, in the slow rebuilding of lives and hope.

He arrives in Luanda, stepping off the plane into the heavy, coastal air. The city stretches before him, still wounded and magnificent — colonial façades dissolving into tin roofs and dust. Ashes and oceans — beauty and devastation intertwined, neither yielding to the other.

This time, Kacper works with Global Nutrition International, a small humanitarian organisation determined to restore a fragile balance between need and capacity. He meets Javier and Isabel, Manuel and Elena — colleagues whose lives blur the line between duty and exhaustion. Together, they form a temporary family of sorts, united not by perfection, but by persistence.

“Angola in 2003 was a country trying to rise from decades of war, but the war had not yet loosened its grip. Its ruins were not only in shattered bridges or burned villages — they lived in the fragile bodies of its people.”

From Luanda, the road leads south, through Lubango, Matala, and Chipindo, where red dust coats the trucks and every movement feels like an act of resistance. Convoys crawl through minefields. Planes bring food, medicine, and the illusion of control. The work is relentless, and often feels insufficient.

Kacper’s vulnerability threads through the chapter quietly but persistently. He struggles with his body — heavier now than before, self-conscious, uneasy in his own skin. In group meetings and dinners by the sea, he feels both part of the mission and apart from it, burdened by the thought that perhaps he is not doing enough, not fitting the image of what he once imagined a “real humanitarian” should be.

“He did his job, filled the spreadsheets, wrote the reports, counted the rations — yet he could not escape the sense that the work was only a bandage over something vast and unhealed. He wanted to do more, to be more, but the limits of the world, and his own, pressed in like heat.”

An explosion near Chipindo changes everything. He survives, but his hearing does not — a ringing remains, constant and merciless. It becomes his companion, a reminder that service always costs something, even when invisible to others.

In Luanda, he finds a fragile source of light in Pombinha, a friend whose laughter softens the hard edges of his days. She brings warmth, humour, and an unexpected tenderness — a reminder that kindness can survive even where life feels precarious. Their bond is never named, but it anchors him.

“Pombinha had a way of seeing through him — through his pride, his fatigue, even his shame. Her presence did not erase his loneliness, but made it bearable.”

After long months of exhaustion, he finally allows himself to escape — briefly, impulsively — to Rio de Janeiro. There, in the rhythm of the city, he meets Camila, whose presence unravels him in ways he didn’t expect. Their time together is filled with light, laughter, and a longing that both heals and unsettles. Yet beneath the beauty lies guilt: a sense of betraying his own discipline, his own ideals.

“Rio was all movement — music, bodies, colour — and yet he felt strangely exposed within it, as if the city’s light had nowhere for him to hide. Camila made him laugh, but when she looked at him too long, he saw himself reflected in her gaze: a man both yearning and afraid.”

“That night, as waves broke against the dark beach, he realised that joy and regret often walk hand in hand. The world could still be tender, even when it refused to forgive.”

The story moves between the coast and the interior — between despair and resilience. There are days when the work feels futile, others when a single delivery, a repaired well, or a saved child carries the weight of redemption.

In Benguela, by the ocean, the team retreats for a few days of uneasy rest. The sea crashes endlessly, carrying both beauty and guilt — a reminder of what remains undone.

“At night the sound of the ocean drifted faintly up into Lubango’s hills, far off yet insistent, mingling in his mind with the high, merciless ringing in his ears. Ashes and oceans: beauty and ruin bound inseparably, neither yielding to the other.”

The chapter closes with quiet reflection — Kacper standing at the shoreline, aware that he has changed again. He understands now that vulnerability is not weakness, that failure is often the twin of effort, and that even imperfect work can carry meaning.

🌊 Related Photo Galleries
• 🇳🇦 Namibia — echoes of the red earth and the open horizon
• 🇦🇴 The Angolan Coast — where the Atlantic breathes against the scars of war
• 🇺🇸 The Big Apple — a reminder of the other world waiting beyond field missions
• 🇧🇷 A Visit to Rio de Janeiro — where beauty, temptation, and reflection intertwine

Ashes and Oceans is a meditation on aftermath — on what remains when the adrenaline fades, when the job is done but never finished. It is about fatigue, imperfection, friendship, and the stubborn grace that keeps us trying anyway. And it is also about the vulnerability of feeling — that brief, disarming truth that even those who give their lives to the world still crave tenderness.

Chapter 19 is now finished, carrying Kacper into one of the most layered transitions of his journey. Titled Between Shores, it traces the crossings — physical and emotional — that mark the passage from one stage of life to another.

The chapter begins in New York City, where the dizzying scale of Manhattan seemed to dwarf him. Yet in this metropolis, a piece of home emerged: a reunion with his old friends from Nowy Sącz. Their laughter spilled into the roar of the city, proof that friendship could travel as surely as he did.

“They stood together on a New York sidewalk, the city roaring around them, and for a moment it was as if Nowy Sącz itself had crossed the Atlantic. The past and the present folded into one another, a reminder that no distance could erase the bonds of origin.”

The journey then shifts to Prague, where Kacper travelled with his mother. Walking over Charles Bridge, pausing in quiet squares, they found a closeness that had often been obscured by distance and circumstance. For Kacper, Prague became not only a lesson in history, but a lesson in presence.

“Prague unfolded not just as a city of spires and bridges, but as a lesson in how beauty and burden can exist side by side. With his mother at his side, Kacper felt that whisper more deeply than ever.”

From there, the narrative settles in Paris, where the city itself became a passage. By day, he learned the ropes of humanitarian work — logistics, finance, the architecture of missions. By night, he wandered the banks of the Seine, falling in love with the rhythm of a place that seemed to breathe both past and future. Paris was where vocation and longing converged.

Finally, the chapter carries him to Île de Ré, where bicycles, harbours, and the Atlantic winds taught another kind of lesson: that learning is not only about ambition or duty, but also about noticing, slowing down, and being reshaped by the ordinary.

📷 Photo Album – Île de Ré

“The island revealed itself in colours more honest than any textbook: whitewashed houses with green shutters, geraniums spilling over stone sills, salt in the air. Kacper realised that learning could be a slow act of noticing.”

Between Shores is not only about moving between countries. It is about being suspended between identities — son and professional, learner and humanitarian, dreamer and doer. Each crossing leaves a trace. Each shore leads to another.

Chapter 18 marks the close of one of the most intense stretches of Kacper’s journey — a passage through Sudan that held violence, resilience, absurdity, and sudden silences that still echo.

It begins with nights in Rubkona and Bentiu, where gunfire tore through the darkness, only to be dismissed the next morning as “just two families fighting over cows.” In these contradictions — laughter beside loss, neighbourly protection alongside casual killing — Kacper discovered what it meant to live between terror and absurdity.

The chapter takes us deeper into the realities of humanitarian work: the conscription of two young Nuer nurses, Thiech and Gatluak, who vanished into warlord Paulino Matip’s militia overnight; the Therapeutic Feeding Centres in Wau and Unity State, where malnutrition rates reached famine levels; and the crushing weight of numbers that were never just statistics, but children’s bodies, parents’ impossible choices, and grief that became routine.

And yet, the rains did come. And, at least for a time, the guns did fall silent. Kacper’s time in Sudan closes with moments of surreal humanity — neighbours offering reassurances after bloodshed, colleagues sharing whispered jokes under mosquito nets, and his own return to Khartoum before reassignment to Angola.

Here are a few short excerpts to bring you closer to the texture of Chapter 18:

“The streets were nothing more than ruts of red dust, sometimes interrupted by puddles that reflected the sky like broken mirrors. Goats wandered freely, sometimes pausing to scratch against leaning wooden poles. Children ran barefoot, chasing tyres with sticks, laughing as if war had never passed this way. Women sat outside their tukuls weaving mats, grinding grain, or stirring pots balanced on three stones and fed with dry branches. The market buzzed quietly — stalls of sorghum, dried fish, worn-out clothes laid on tarps. Some women balanced impossible loads on their heads: plastic jerrycans, bundles of firewood, stacks of vegetables. Nuer-style homesteads stood in clusters — circular, low, with neat fences made of twisted branches. Smoke drifted lazily in the late light, from cooking fires or perhaps burning grass. It smelled of wood, ash, and something faintly sweet — a scent Kacper would come to associate with this place.”

“The Global Acute Malnutrition rate had surpassed 22% in Unity State. Ten percent was already considered an emergency. Thirty percent meant famine. But numbers, Kacper learned, were the gentlest part of the story.”

“Few lived past fifty. Many died by violence, yes — but more by slow neglect: lack of food, medicine, or clean water. Poverty was grief, was infection, was silence after the last breath.”

"That night, after the woman and her child had been admitted, Kacper and Lucy sat outside the compound, each with a mug of sweet karkadé in hand. The generator had been shut off early, so the silence was fuller than usual — punctuated only by the faint trill of night insects and the distant barking of dogs near the barracks.

Above them, the stars came in layers, thick and low, as if you could climb them if you dared.

Neither spoke for a long while.

Then Lucy broke the silence.

“Do you ever feel like we’re part of it?”

Kacper turned to her, not quite understanding.

“Part of what?”

“The theatre,” she said. “The coordination meetings. The clinics that aren’t clinics. The statements about humanitarian neutrality while everything burns around us.”

Kacper didn’t answer. He sipped the karkadé. Let it cool in his mouth.

Lucy continued, more softly now.

“I mean, we do what we can. But it’s like trying to keep the roof on a house that’s already on fire.”

He looked at her, this friend with whom he had shared so many battles, floods, impossible days. Her face was drawn, streaked with dust. Her blouse still carried the mark of the child she’d carried earlier — a faint outline of sweat and weakness. But her eyes were clear.

“We didn’t start the fire,” he said.

She smiled faintly.

“No. But we live in the smoke.”

They sat like that for a while — two foreign souls under a borrowed sky, neither defeated nor triumphant. Just tired. And still there."

With this chapter, Kacper’s Sudan journey closes — fragile, luminous, and unfinished. Ahead lies Angola once more, and with it a different horizon.

Chapter 16: Between Borders

From the rooftop silence of Wau, where survival was written in dust and endurance, Kacper’s life kept stretching outward. The war had turned Wau into an island, but his work required crossings — north to Khartoum, east to fragile corners of Sudan, south to Nairobi, and sometimes further still, back to Paris or even Dublin. Each journey felt like slipping through a membrane: from Antonovs rattling over frontlines to the polished calm of Parisian cafés, from the immediacy of war to the cities that only brushed it through reports and statistics.

“Flying itself carried that same mixture of threshold and uncertainty. Once, on a journey to Khartoum aboard a Sudan Airways Antonov, Kacper found himself part of a scene that seemed almost too absurd to be real. The pilots were Russian, the rest of the crew Sudanese. Before take-off the plane sank into a patch of mud at the edge of the tarmac, and the solution was announced without hesitation: the passengers would push. Under the hot sun they leaned their shoulders into the steel belly of the aircraft, straining until the wheels rolled onto firmer ground. By then the engines had overheated, and one of the pilots, utterly unfazed, cooled them by pouring buckets of water over the metal as though dousing an animal after work. Kacper felt dread rising like a tide — his chest tight, his legs light with the urge to faint. Yet the crew’s calm, their matter-of-factness, made the surreal seem routine. If we die, he thought, it will at least be a highly unusual death. The thought itself, absurd and strangely comforting, carried him back on board.”

Flying became a theatre of the surreal. On one flight to Khartoum, passengers were asked to push the plane out of a patch of mud before overheated engines were cooled with buckets of water. Every border crossed was not just geographic but existential — between safety and danger, belonging and estrangement.

Chapter 17: The Body’s Secret

The battles outside soon gave way to one within. A sudden illness sent Kacper from Khartoum’s clinics into a whirlwind of uncertainty. The doctors whispered a word heavier than any he had carried before: cancer. The diagnosis was uncertain, yet its echo hollowed him out. Evacuation orders followed swiftly — first Paris, then Nairobi.

“The word cancer had not yet been confirmed, but it lingered in every silence, in every doctor’s lowered glance. It was not the war outside anymore. It was the possibility of a war inside.”

What had once been the rhythm of war became the rhythm of waiting rooms, procedures, and fragile reassurances. He lay under anaesthesia in Khartoum, endured colonoscopies in Nairobi, and later found himself at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, all within weeks. Four scopes, a surgery, and the gnawing thought that the fight might now be inside his own body.

“That evening, at Rue Niepce, the GNI team organised a small party. It felt good to be among familiar faces, who celebrated his recovery as warmly as he did. Kacper retold the story in all its strange twists: the Khartoum surgeon cutting into him for “haemorrhoids”, the colonoscopy that followed, the chaos of the flight to Kenya, the sudden death of his doctor, two more in Nairobi, the absurdity of a first-class ticket to Europe, and finally another at the Pasteur Institute — four colonoscopies and a surgery in a single month. The sheer improbability of it drew laughter, not mocking but grateful, a shared release — a celebration of life, survival, and the strange roads they take.”

Yet amid the fear there were moments of light — the relief of hearing that it was not cancer but a chronic condition to be managed, the bittersweet awareness of life’s precarious edge. Between borders of land and sky, of illness and health, Kacper found himself waiting, suspended between endings and beginnings.

Chapter 15 Finished — Where the Nile Divides

Chapter 15 of Memoir of a Wandering Spirit is now complete. This one felt wide and weighty — a bridge between the intensity of Afghanistan and the long stretch of years that Kacper would spend in Sudan.

The chapter begins with return: quiet holidays in Poland, where life slows to the rhythm of coffee in his mother’s kitchen, winter walks in Biegonice, and gossip with neighbours who still see him as the boy who once disappeared into hospitals and far-off countries. But soon, the pace quickens again.

In New York City, at the headquarters of GNI, Kacper finds himself in the fluorescent hum of logistics — budgets, procurement, contingency planning. The Hudson shimmers beyond glass windows as staff prepare for what comes next. It is here, in a map-lined meeting room, that he learns his next destination: Sudan. A deployment planned for three years, though no one pretends to know what “three years” will mean in a country at war.

From there, Paris becomes once again the threshold. At Rue Niepce, the air smells of coffee, paper, and the accumulated dust of countless departures. Briefings are thick with dossiers, maps pierced by coloured pins marking fragile humanitarian footprints. Sudan is no single dot on a map, but a scatter across vast, uneven terrain — Khartoum, Wau, Bentiu, Rubkona, and beyond. Paris prepares him with its cafés and quiet lessons, but the weight of what is coming is clear.

Then, Khartoum.
When Kacper steps from the plane, the air strikes him like a wall — dry, close, dazzling with heat. The light is too sharp for winter, too brilliant to soften. Beyond the runway, the Nile curves through the city, broad and unhurried, carrying centuries of struggle and survival.

The city unfolds in layers: whitewashed ministries, wide boulevards lined with acacias, roadside tea stalls shaded by scraps of cloth. Traffic is a coexistence of battered taxis, overcrowded buses, and donkey carts weaving stubbornly into modern flow. Soldiers linger near government buildings, watching. It is a place where history and present tense collide in every glance.

At last, the compound — a villa in Al Amarat with high walls, green grass improbably kept alive by careful watering, a patch of order in the midst of dust. Offices and residence under one roof, colleagues above and below, lives lived between files, meetings, and midnight conversations about a war that seemed endless.

From Khartoum, the story carries him further south — to Wau, a town marked by hardship and resilience. Here, the reality of humanitarian work comes into sharp relief: days spent in the TFC among children wasted by hunger, their fragile breaths a reminder of the war’s silent toll; coordination with local staff at the hospital, ensuring supplies of therapeutic milk never ran out. The town was a fragile hub, always one rumour away from violence.

Fear was never far. The Janjaweed — known here as the Murahaleen — sometimes swept through, their presence announced by sudden panic, by stories of raids and burnt-out villages. At times, bombs fell in the distance, dull thuds that turned the air heavy, reminding everyone of how precarious safety really was. Evenings on the rooftop of the guesthouse, Kacper and the nurses would sip tea and listen for the echoes, wondering if the next explosion would be closer.

Where the Nile Divides is about arrivals — not only into a new country, but into a new role, a heavier responsibility. It marks the start of Kacper’s Sudan years, a time that will stretch him in ways Afghanistan only hinted at.

“Beyond the runway, the Nile curved through the city, broad and unhurried, carrying with it the weight of a war that refused to end.”

With this chapter complete, the memoir now turns to Chapter 16 — a closer look at life in Wau, and the crossings, borders, and burdens that came with it.

Photo Album Related to this Chapter.

Chapter 14 of Memoir of a Wandering Spirit is finished.

It takes Kacper deep into his Afghanistan experience — a place and a moment in his life that would etch themselves permanently into his memory. These pages are not just about conflict, but about the fragile humanity that persists in its shadow.

The chapter begins with his arrival — the long road into Kabul — where the city reveals itself for the first time, held between mountains and history, dust and expectation. From there, Kacper steps into the heart of humanitarian work: crowded wards, bustling streets, and moments that defy easy understanding.

Excerpt 1 — The Road into Kabul

The Land Cruiser climbed the last bend, and Kabul spread out beneath them — a sprawl of tan and dust, hemmed in by jagged mountains the colour of old bone. The air was sharp, almost brittle, as if it might break in his lungs. Somewhere below, the streets were already moving: men in long coats hurrying to work, women in blue burqas threading through the crowds, the clatter of carts and the call of vendors rising like a single breath. It was his first glimpse of a city he had only read about — and yet, even before he stepped onto its streets, he sensed it would not let him leave unchanged.

Kacper learns the rhythms of life in the humanitarian compounds, the careful coordination behind each intervention, and the weight of small victories — a child gaining weight, a hospital ward stabilising after a long week. He walks the streets in the early mornings, when Kabul is at its most tender.

Excerpt 2 — The Children in the Ward

In the nutrition ward of the Indira Gandhi Hospital, beds stood so close that Kacper could reach from one to another without moving his feet. The air was heavy with the scent of disinfectant, sweat, and the faint sweetness of milk powder. Babies lay bundled in blankets, their ribs sharp against his palms when he lifted them. Mothers sat cross-legged at their sides, eyes hollow from too many sleepless nights. And yet, every so often, a smile would break across a face — a small, defiant act that said, not today. Those moments felt like sunlight in a windowless room.

Excerpt 3 — The Streets at Dawn

Before the city woke fully, Kacper liked to walk the narrow streets near his guesthouse. There were no car horns yet, only the scrape of a broom on stone and the soft hum of someone boiling tea behind a shuttered window. From a nearby mosque, the call to prayer unfurled into the pale sky. For a few precious minutes, Kabul belonged not to politics, or war, or hunger — but to the people who lived quietly between the headlines.

But Kabul was also a place where silence carried weight. A visit to Ghazi Stadium would stay with him for the rest of his life — not because of what he saw, but because of what it revealed about cruelty, kindness, and the shadows they cast.

Excerpt 4 — Ghazi Stadium

From far away, the sound of the crowd swelled, breaking and reforming in waves. He thought of the women — not as the condemned, not as names on a charge sheet, but as daughters, sisters, mothers. He wondered about their last sight of the sky. Afghanistan had taught him many things, but that day it taught him this: cruelty can wear the face of your neighbour, and kindness can live in the same heart that has seen too much to know the difference. And perhaps the hardest truth of all — that some things you carry away from a place are not its mountains.

Perhaps the deepest lesson came from his Afghan colleagues — especially Jawed — who reminded him that being present in a country like Afghanistan required more than skills or good intentions.

Excerpt 5 — The Lesson from Jawed

One evening, Jawed leaned back in his chair and said, “You must understand — this place has had too many teachers who came to teach, but never to learn.” His words landed quietly, without accusation, but with weight. Kacper realised he had been speaking more than listening, explaining more than asking. That night, as the oil lamp flickered between them, he promised himself that in Afghanistan, he would first be a student.

Chapter 14 is a journey into a city and a country under immense strain — but also into the resilience of those who call it home. Now, with this chapter closed, Kacper’s path will carry him into the next stages of his work, where each step forward is shaped by what Afghanistan has taught him.

Picture gallery associated to this chapter.

I’ve just finished Chapter 13: Passages, a chapter where Kacper crosses oceans and seasons, drifting through moments of stillness and momentum that will soon change everything.

It begins in Finland, where winter swallows the horizon in white silence. Kacper steps out of Helsinki airport into air so sharp it feels crystalline. Snow muffles the city’s sounds; Senate Square gleams like a frozen crown. In Lahti, Leena greets him with warmth and tea, their conversations echoing dreams born in Angola and Denmark. A train ride east carries him through endless forests bent under snow, past golden lights in lone farmhouses, until he reaches Kesälahti. There, a tiny school welcomes him with laughter and curiosity. He walks frozen lakes, runs barefoot from the sauna into starlit snow, and finds in Finland a vast stillness that lets him listen to himself again.

From Finland, the journey takes a bold leap to New York City. The Atlantic crossing feels like stepping into myth. Manhattan’s skyline shimmers like fallen constellations as the plane descends. A kind couple welcomes him, handing over the keys to their apartment overlooking Central Park. Suddenly, a boy from Biegonice lives alone in Manhattan. He roams Fifth Avenue, samples hot dogs and pretzels, and feels the city’s pulse under spring sunlight. He meets strangers who remind him that the world is wider than skyscrapers, stands at Battery Park watching ferries glide toward the Statue of Liberty, and imagines one day walking the halls of the UN. Meals are simple, but each bite tastes of arrival, of possibility cracking open under New York’s chaotic sky.

After a week, Kacper returns to Nowy Sącz. Winter is thawing, mountains breathe faint mist, and the house in Biegonice feels both comforting and small. He teaches English to earn a living, crosses into Slovakia on weekends, and keeps writing letters to NGOs scattered across continents. Then comes the email that shifts everything: an offer to work in Afghanistan with a humanitarian organisation. Training first in Paris. The news thrills his mother and frightens her, but beneath her fears lies pride.

And so comes Paris — not as a postcard dream, but as a gateway into a new life.

Kacper arrives with little more than a suitcase and a folder of instructions, stepping into a city that feels alive with purpose. The headquarters of the humanitarian organisation occupies a modest building, its rooms buzzing with quiet intensity. Maps of conflict zones line the walls, corridors echo with hurried footsteps, and meeting rooms hum with a dozen languages.

Training is relentless but exhilarating. From dawn till late evening, Kacper and other recruits are immersed in the realities of crisis response — how aid reaches besieged towns, how convoys thread through war zones, how negotiations open fragile corridors of safety. He learns about logistics, emergency health interventions, food security, and the silent strength of coordination that keeps field teams alive. Security briefings describe kidnappings and evacuations with unnerving calm. He begins to grasp the weight of responsibility that comes with entering a place where survival is not guaranteed.

But Paris is more than classrooms and briefings. The city itself becomes part of his initiation. At dawn, he walks along the Seine where mist rises from the water like breath from the city’s lungs. After long days of training, he wanders through Montmartre’s crooked alleys, discovering tiny bistros where jazz floats through the doorways. He loses himself in the Musée d’Orsay, stares at Van Gogh’s fevered skies, and feels both overwhelmed and emboldened.

Evenings often end in a café — bitter coffee in Saint-Germain, fresh baguettes eaten on benches near Notre-Dame. He watches Parisians rush past with scarves trailing, listens to animated debates about politics and poetry, and feels the city slowly seep into him. For the first time, he imagines a life lived entirely beyond the borders of Poland, shaped by international work and a sense of global belonging.

Paris changes him quietly. It teaches him more than procedures — it gives him rhythm, language, a sense of scale. It shows him that helping others means not only courage but humility and collaboration. The city itself feels like a threshold, preparing him for a path that began in a hospital ward years ago and now stands ready to carry him into conflict zones.

“By Thursday afternoon, as light rain misted over Paris, Amira, the poised HR officer, appeared quietly at the door.

‘Your visas for Pakistan and Afghanistan have been approved,’ she said with a reassuring smile. ‘You’ll leave this Sunday — first to Islamabad, then to Kabul.’

The words settled like both a weight and a liberation. It was no longer whispered possibility beneath Parisian skies. It was real.”

Passages is a chapter of thresholds — from frozen lakes in Finland to New York’s restless skyline, from family warmth in Nowy Sącz to Parisian boulevards glowing at dusk. Each place leaves a trace, each passage reshaping the boy who once lay in Polish hospitals into a man ready to step into one of the world’s most fragile frontiers.

With this chapter closed, I now begin Chapter 14, where Kacper steps into Afghanistan — a place where fear and purpose will meet under a sky filled with dust, mountains, and war.

Photos from Finland
Photos from NYC

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.

The journey continues.

I’ve begun writing Chapter 12 of Memoir of a Wandering Spirit, a chapter that takes Kacper for the first time to Angola — and to Africa. This is where a new continent, with its vast skies and red earth, begins to shape him in ways he could never have imagined.

These pages revisit a younger self — inexperienced, idealistic, still struggling to understand the world — as he arrives in late 1990s Luanda, and later, as he begins to uncover the human cost of Angola’s long civil war.

Here are two extracts from the draft, offering a glimpse of where this chapter is heading:


🌍 First Impressions of Luanda

'...One morning, ADPP sent a battered Toyota Land Cruiser to collect them. The vehicle looked as if it had survived a dozen wars — sun-faded paint, a cracked dashboard, seats patched with duct tape — yet its engine growled with stubborn strength. Later, Kacper would learn that these old Toyotas were the lifeblood of humanitarian work. They were not built to be pretty, but to never give up.

That day, it would take them beyond Ilha, beyond the soft refuge of beachside cafés and palm-lined promenades, into another face of Luanda. Only Daniel, Jannik, Tomasz, Kurt, and Leena could join; the rest were still trapped in immigration paperwork.

They crossed the causeway linking Ilha do Cabo to the mainland, leaving behind the turquoise calm of the peninsula. Avenida 4 de Fevereiro, the city’s main artery, opened before them. Colonial-era buildings — once elegant — stood with chipped façades, their balconies hanging tired and rust-stained. Between them, newer communist-style concrete blocks loomed, harsh and monolithic. To Kacper, they felt like echoes of Warsaw or Kraków in the 1980s — only here, the sun had bleached them, and time had bitten deeper.

Their ugliness carried its own beauty: peeling walls painted by residents in improvised murals, laundry strung like prayer flags, small balcony gardens breaking the grey monotony. These buildings were homes, dreams stacked floor upon floor, defying their brutalist shapes.

As the Land Cruiser rattled onward, the city throbbed with contradictions. Banks and currency exchanges operated beside wooden stalls selling cigarettes by the stick, powdered milk, and dented tins of sardines. Street vendors pushed carts stacked with Coca-Cola bottles coated in red dust. There were few mobile phones; no kiosks plastered with colourful phone card ads yet. Instead, long queues formed at public phones where people waited patiently, hoping to speak with relatives abroad.

Workshops spilled into the alleys. Men crouched barefoot, hammering metal sheets into doors, welding sparks flashing in the humid air. Mechanics repaired ancient Russian Ladas and weary Land Cruisers under makeshift tarpaulin roofs. Women moved through the chaos like dancers — balancing baskets of cassava, bright mangoes, or live chickens on their heads, their dresses bold with African prints that flared like sunbursts in the dusty light.

The further they drove, the sharper the contrasts became. Mercedes sedans and imported SUVs — symbols of Angola’s fledgling oil wealth — sped past rickety wooden carts pulled by donkeys. Soldiers lounged at intersections, AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders, smoking in the shade. Barefoot children chased one another across piles of rubbish, laughing freely, while goats scavenged in open sewage channels. Stray dogs pawed at heaps of plastic and fish bones. The smell was heavy — a thick, sour mixture of red dust, petrol fumes, rotting fruit, and waste baked under the sun.

Music floated over it all — semba rhythms and distorted Portuguese pop from battered radios. Preachers stood in the backs of trucks, shouting sermons over the traffic’s roar. Sirens wailed in the distance, swallowed by the city’s relentless noise.

Gradually, the concrete thinned. Asphalt crumbled into hard-packed earth. The skyline flattened into a sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and half-built brick houses. The slums stretched wide, a maze of paths where barefoot children darted and market stalls leaned like windblown fences. Waste piled higher here, a testament to neglect and survival intermingled. Yet even in these harsh edges, life pressed on: women washing clothes in basins, men fixing radios under the open sky, someone blasting music loud enough to reach every corner.

After ninety minutes of jolting over potholes and choking dust, they finally reached ADPP’s sorting centre, far past Viana, in the outer sprawl of Luanda. Corrugated warehouses rose from the red earth, surrounded by bales of donated clothes wrapped in plastic, stacks of shoes, battered boxes with faded stamps from Denmark, Norway, and other far-off places. Workers, faces glistening with sweat, moved steadily under the oppressive heat, sorting each item by hand. The air was heavy with dust and fabric fibres, the faint smell of salt and mildew from the long sea voyage.

Kacper stepped out of the vehicle and turned back toward the direction they had come. The skyline of Luanda shimmered in the haze, a distant mirage — a living contradiction of wealth and want, beauty and neglect, laughter and despair.

Nothing dramatic had happened on this trip. No danger, no sudden revelation. And yet it struck him with a force he could not explain.

It was powerful because it was ordinary — ordinary for Luanda, but so utterly extraordinary to him.

He realised, for the first time with painful clarity, that what seemed like destitution to him was daily life for the people around him. It wasn’t a spectacle. It wasn’t exceptional. It was simply life — ordinary in ways he had never understood. The children running barefoot through garbage, the women balancing impossible loads on their heads, the men mending rusted car parts in the dust — this was not weakness, but resilience shaped by circumstance.

And his own life — the house in Biegonice, the schools in Poland and Denmark, even the struggles he thought were heavy burdens — suddenly felt privileged in ways he had never seen before.

The thought unsettled him. A quiet shame pressed against his ribs. Who was he to be shocked by this? Who was he to arrive here, wide-eyed, treating the ordinary life of others as revelation?

As the team walked toward the warehouse, Kacper lagged behind for a moment. The red dust clung to his shoes, and he knew this ninety-minute drive would remain with him forever — not as a dramatic story to tell, but as a quiet, unshakable turning point.

It was the first time he understood that ordinary is never universal...'

⸻

🕊️ Pedro’s Story

'...That afternoon, the visitors had more time to talk with the students, to share stories beyond the lessons and the rhythms of the compound. Kacper found himself sitting under the shade of a broad mango tree with a young man named Pedro — a trainee teacher not much younger than he was. Pedro spoke softly at first, his words halting as though pulling memories through a narrow doorway.

He told Kacper about his past — about how, as a boy, he had been taken by UNITA fighters. A child soldier. The words felt jagged in the air, like stones scraping each other. Pedro described being forced to do things no child should ever see or be asked to do.

“I hurt people,” Pedro said quietly, his gaze fixed on the red dust between his feet. His voice cracked, barely more than a whisper. “But it was not who I was… I had no choice.”

He spoke of the night his village was attacked — how armed men stormed in, burning homes, shooting anyone who resisted. He remembered watching family members die, feeling a small hand torn from his as he was dragged away into the bush. From that night on, his childhood ended.

“They gave me a gun before I knew how to hold it,” he said, his words halting like a wounded breath. “I was a boy… but they told me I had to kill or be killed.”

The memories spilled out in fragments: long, forced marches through forests; being made to burn villages that looked like his own; nights lying awake, sick with fear and guilt after raids; watching other children beaten or shot when they tried to run.

“I became… cruel,” Pedro admitted, his hands trembling in his lap. “Not because I wanted to be. They broke us until cruelty felt like survival.”

He described finally finding the courage to escape, running for days without food, hiding in ravines, terrified that UNITA fighters would hunt him down. In crumbling towns he found no safety, only suspicion and silence, until eventually government forces pushed UNITA away from the province and he could begin to emerge from hiding.

“But freedom…” he said, looking up at Kacper with hollow eyes, “freedom did not make me whole again. It was hard to be among people. Hard to let anyone close. Hard to believe love could be real.”
Only later, when the fighting eased and Caxito’s province fell under steadier government control, did Pedro feel a flicker of freedom. But freedom did not mean peace.

“It was hard to be among people again,” Pedro admitted, his voice thin as a thread. “Hard to… not be cruel. Hard to let anyone touch me without feeling rage. Hard to believe love could be real.”
There was a long silence. The mango tree’s leaves shivered in the breeze.

“But time…” he continued, finally glancing toward Kacper. “Time helped. I found people who were patient with me. Slowly, I learned again. I wanted to change. Sometimes I still don’t want to… but more often, I do.”
Now he wanted to be a teacher — to stand in front of children who, like him, had been marked by war. To show them that scars did not have to be destiny, to help them reclaim the parts of themselves that soldiers and guns had tried to take away.

As Pedro spoke, Kacper listened with a stillness he had never felt before. The distant sound of drums, the hum of insects, even the heat seemed to pause around their conversation. He realised that no book, no classroom in Denmark, had ever prepared him for this: to sit beside a survivor of war his own age and feel, without words, the weight of a world broken and stitched back together by fragile, human hands.

Years later, long after he had left Angola, Kacper would hear of Pedro again. The news came like a blow to the chest: Pedro’s dream of teaching had never been realised. Soon after finishing his studies, he was killed in an ambush — bandits attacking a roadside bus on the way to his first teaching assignment.

When Kacper learned of it, the memory of that mango tree came rushing back — Pedro’s quiet voice, his halting confession, his fragile hope for change. Kacper struggled to digest it. It felt like the war had claimed Pedro twice — first as a boy, when it stole his innocence, and again as a young man, just as he tried to step into a life of peace.

It made Kacper think of his own journey — how differently life had unfolded for him, how he had been spared the brutality of guns and forced choices. And yet here he was, able to move freely, to learn, to dream of helping others, while Pedro’s courage had ended on a dusty road.

For years afterward, whenever Kacper thought of Angola, it was not only the red earth, the vast skies, or the humming nights that returned to him. It was Pedro’s face beneath the mango tree, and the knowledge that survival and justice were never evenly shared — that even the strongest hopes could be cut short by a single pull of a trigger on a nameless roadside...'

Chapter 12 is just beginning to take shape, but already it feels different — heavier, more rooted, a turning point in both the memoir and Kacper’s life. More updates, photos, and fragments from this chapter will follow soon as the writing unfolds.

At DNS, Ulfborg, Denmark, sometime during middle of 90'ies

I’m thrilled to share that Chapter 11 of Memoir of a Wandering Spirit is now complete!

This chapter has been an emotional and expansive one to write — chronicling a time when Kacper, having returned from the long road journey through India and the Silk Route, begins to settle again… or at least attempts to.

But ‘settling’ for Kacper never quite meant staying still.

📚 Studying, Searching, and Belonging

Back at DNS in Denmark, Kacper immerses himself in a world of learning, both formal and deeply personal. He continues his studies alongside his international classmates, who have now become friends — or more precisely, a kind of chosen family. They challenge his ideas, reflect his contradictions, and inspire him to become more intentional in how he sees the world.

Their evenings are filled with debates about injustice, music sessions, and planning for future projects. The emotional thread running through the chapter is one of discovery through connection — with others, but also with parts of himself he hadn’t yet recognised.

🌲 Denmark, Sweden, and Teaching Practice

Kacper embarks on various short trips throughout Denmark and southern Sweden, often for his teaching placements. These journeys offer more than pedagogical insight — they allow him to witness different communities, lifestyles, and systems, deepening his sense of purpose as a future educator and humanitarian.

He reflects often on the contrast between the chaos of travel through Asia and the orderliness of Scandinavian towns, realising how different types of calm — and disruption — shape him.

🇮🇸 Iceland — Where the Cold Holds Warmth

Kacper’s journey to Iceland unfolds like a song remembered. He is welcomed not by strangers, but by friends whose laughter he already knows — friendships kindled months earlier in Denmark and now deepened beneath northern skies.

Helga and Inga greet him in Neskaupstaður, strong and steady, with a quiet energy that carries him through the unfamiliar. Their cousin Bryndís, gentle and glowing, offers a different kind of warmth — the kind that asks nothing but gives everything. In Reykjavik, Ragna moves through the city like poetry in motion, always with a book tucked under her arm, pointing out quiet corners only locals would know. And Teitur, straddling Iceland and Denmark with understated grace, shows him how home can exist in more than one language.

The days unfold like pages — from the raw edges of Neskaupstaður to the calm streets of Akureyri, where the air sharpens thought. Reykjavik reveals itself in layers, and then, as if to crown the experience, he floats in the Blue Lagoon — warm water meeting frozen air, silence meeting memory. Iceland does not shout. It lingers. It stays.

📌 '…They took the train to Copenhagen, chattering with the giddy energy of children let out for summer. Then, from Kastrup Airport, they boarded an Icelandair flight to Keflavík, stepping into a world of sudden dark skies and biting wind. From there, they transferred to a small domestic plane — the kind that hummed and dipped with the air — and flew across a land that looked more like a myth than a country. Below them stretched black lava fields dusted in snow, glaciers that caught the light like polished stone, and frozen rivers coiling through valleys no road could reach. And then, nestled at the edge of the eastern fjords, they saw it: Neskaupstaður, a fishing town clinging to the mountain’s hip, like a poem written in basalt.

He stayed with Helga and Inga’s family for over a week, wrapped in the glow of candles and firelight, and a kindness so unexpected it nearly overwhelmed him. It was dark for most of the day, the sun slipping up only briefly like a tired eye — but inside, there was warmth. Laughter. Connection.

There were gifts under the tree — including an Icelandic wool jumper, hand-knitted by the girls’ mother. Kacper wore it with pride and reverence. There was food he would never forget: dried fish with endless butter; sweet, dense Christmas bread; the infamous hrútspungar — marinated ram’s testicles that made his eyes water more from disbelief than taste — and, most astonishing of all, an entire ram’s head on a plate, grinning quietly beneath a glaze of cultural shock.

There were choir performances in the town church, where the air trembled with harmony and wood creaked beneath boots damp with snow. There were stories of the fish factories, and of the people who worked them — stoic, funny, resilient. They spoke of their fathers waking at four, their mothers gutting cod with bare hands, of ships lost in fog, and winters that felt endless but were somehow endured. The church, with its plain altar and low, golden light, seemed like a hearth for the whole community — a place where music softened the weight of cold days and long, sleepless nights.

And outside — there was the Iceland Kacper had only half-believed existed. Neskaupstaður was hemmed in by steep mountains, their dark shoulders blanketed in snow that never seemed to melt, only shift. The sky hung low, the daylight a brief silver hush between long walls of darkness. When the sun did rise, it skimmed the tops of the peaks like a rumour. The sea, just beyond the town’s edge, breathed in and out beneath a film of ice, vast and indifferent. Winds carved down the valley like blades, and the fjord echoed with creaks, cracks, and the distant moan of winter’s weight. The air smelled of salt and pine and something ancient. It was brutal. It was magnificent. And in that frozen stillness, Kacper felt something stir — not fear, but awe. A kind of reverence. As if the land itself was humming a hymn.

He rode a horse for the first time — an Icelandic horse, stocky and proud. The animal seemed to understand something about him, and he never forgot the feeling of movement that was not entirely his own.

He loved that family. He loved that place.
Something invisible stitched itself between them.
And years later, the threads held.

Helga visited Biegonice — twice — once alone, once with the entire family. Inga came too, with their brother and both parents. They slept in the small rooms of the brick house, ate soup in the garden, laughed over language gaps, and charmed Kacper’s parents with their warmth and earthiness.

When Jurek married Aneta, Helga was there — not just as a guest, but as kin. She even wrote about the wedding in a travel magazine in Iceland, describing a Polish village celebration with curiosity and affection.

Much later — nearly thirty years on — Helga told Kacper that the house where he had once stayed, nestled in the folds of Neskaupstaður, had burnt to the ground. Nothing was saved.

He sat with the news for a long time.

But even then, he knew: the house may have vanished, but the home remained. It lived in the memories, in the songs they sang, in the wool jumper folded at the back of his wardrobe, still faintly smelling of snow…'

📷 Link to pictures from that memorable trip to Iceland.

🇨🇦 Canada — The Other Side of Memory

Across the Atlantic, Kacper touches a landscape shaped by the footsteps of those who came before — his mother, his aunt, cousins who crossed oceans in search of something firmer than fate. Canada is familiar and foreign, comforting and strange.

In Montréal and Ottawa, he walks the streets they once walked. There are shared meals and polite conversations, embraces that attempt to stretch across years of distance and difference. The warmth is real, and yet something flickers just out of reach — a sense that what binds them is thinner than time.

He listens, watches, absorbs. And quietly, he understands: this place, though once imagined as his own, was never quite his. It is a mirror reflecting both inheritance and divergence. Gratitude and longing. The unclaimed corners of belonging.

📌 '…Soon he was on a plane, crossing the Atlantic. Watching the ocean dissolve into a continent shaped like a promise. The cabin lights dimmed. He couldn’t sleep. He pressed his forehead to the window and thought of Montreal, where his mother had once wept in silence after a long day’s work beside Basia, the deaf Jewish woman she cared for with such tenderness. He thought of the letters from Basia’s family, offering her a new life, a fresh beginning. And of her quiet decision to return home instead. A brave no — spoken with love. He thought of the family who chose exile and the parents who chose to return.

The lights came on. Trays rattled. The plane descended through a bank of cloud, and a city appeared — bridges over the St Lawrence, English and French signs vying for space, rows of homes with iron staircases, the kind of winter-grey he knew by heart, even if it was spring.

A new continent.
A new road.
A new way to understand the old story.

And he stepped into it — backpack tight on his shoulders, notebook in his pocket — ready to ride it from the east to the Pacific and back again, ready to listen, ready to map the distances inside himself.

He arrived in Canada in the late spring of 1996, stepping off the plane into the soft air of Montréal, his eyes adjusting to a new light, a new continent. After years of imagining, wondering, piecing together scraps of stories, he was finally here — in the country that had shaped his mother’s sacrifice and his family’s imagination.

He stayed first with Auntie Maria — or Aunt Marysia, as she now called herself. Not an aunt by blood, but a cousin of Grandma Lidia, his father’s mother. She had come from Harklowa, a small village in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains, and like so many others displaced by war and betrayal, she had boarded a ship westward, carrying only a suitcase and impossible dreams.

Her early years in Canada had been hellish. She worked menial jobs, spoke broken English, rented rooms with strangers. She went without heating. Without enough food. Without her children, who were left in Poland until she could earn enough to bring them over. She never complained — but the silence of her struggle was seared into the way she moved through the world.

By the time Kacper met her, she had transformed.

Auntie Marysia was striking, unforgettable. She was a large woman — easily 130 or 140 kilos — but carried herself with the defiant glamour of a starlet past her prime but never out of the spotlight. Her dresses were always elegant, and often startlingly short, revealing heavy legs clad in shimmering tights. She loved bold necklines, exposing the top of her chest like a stage curtain drawn just enough to tease.

And then there was the jewellery:
Necklaces upon necklaces, layers of gold chains, rings on every finger, sometimes two per hand, hooped earrings that brushed her powdered jawline. Her wrists jingled with bracelets as she walked. Kacper once joked that she could probably survive a power outage just by standing in a dark room.

Her makeup was a ritual.
Red lips, sharply drawn eyebrows, cheeks blushed into permanent delight. Her hair — always styled — bouffant, pinned, lacquered into submission. She had her own aura of perfume and powder, something halfway between a ballroom and a memory.

There was a story behind each item she wore, and even more behind those she didn’t speak of. She had married four or five times, always to Polish or Ukrainian men. “And they all died on me,” she’d say with a sly wink. “I don’t know why the police never investigated. But I make a nice widow.” Then she’d toss her head back and laugh — rich, rolling, self-aware.

But beneath the glitter was grit.

Kacper knew that all this splendour was not about vanity — it was about victory. She had made it. She had brought her children across oceans. She had helped his mother find her footing, find work, and bring dignity back to their house in Biegonice. She had paid her dues — and now she would shine.

Her apartment was spotless. Impossibly so. The carpet looked combed. The porcelain figurines stood in perfect ranks on velvet runners. Even the light switches seemed polished.

Maria was not just a character — she was a force of nature, equal parts defiance and affection. And Kacper loved her for all of it…'

📷 Link to pictures from Canada.

🇩🇰 Back in Denmark — Between Departure and Becoming

Denmark steadies him once more, but the rhythm has shifted. The final months at the school are filled with a quiet urgency. There are still books to read, classes to attend, walks through the woods and around the lake — but always with a feeling of something approaching.

Kacper spends hours studying Portuguese, letting the sounds of a new continent settle on his tongue. He learns the names of Angolan towns, traces their histories, listens to stories that hint at both promise and pain. With Daniel, Tomasz and Jannik — his future teammates — he imagines the road ahead. They speak about teaching, about war and peace, about what it means to truly serve.

At the same time, there are the goodbyes that aren’t quite goodbyes — dinners that last longer, laughter that carries a little more weight, friendships held with the kind of care that only comes when parting is near. He watches the seasons shift. The rooms grow quieter. The school, once a whirlwind of discovery, becomes a place of anchoring.

These are the days of preparation — not just for a departure, but for an immersion into a world unlike any he’s known. And though the air is calm, something stirs underneath: readiness, tinged with awe.

📷 Link to pictures from the time at the college in Denmark.

This chapter was a joy to complete — not because every memory it holds was easy or bright, but because it brought with it a sense of clarity and grounding. It felt honest, spacious, and necessary.

Now, it’s time to begin a new stretch of the journey — writing about Angola, and about setting foot in that vast, aching, astonishing continent for the first time. A place where red earth meets resilience, and where everything — absolutely everything — begins to shift.

I’ll keep you updated as the memories unfold.

✍️ Why I Am Writing Memoir of a Wandering Spirit

Some stories don’t announce themselves. They settle quietly in the body — not forgotten, just waiting.
Memoir of a Wandering Spirit is one such story. A narrative shaped not by tidy chronology, but by memory — restless, longing, and full of the traces left by people, places, and moments that refused to fade.

This is my story — as I remember it, and as I have come to interpret it. It’s written in the third person, because at some point in the telling, I became Kacper — a version of myself through whom the journey flows more freely. Some details may be blurred or refracted by time. But the essence is true. The emotions are true. The events, while sometimes softened or rearranged, are rooted in lived experience.

The book is not a collection of facts. It’s a map made of textures: the softness of a hospital blanket, the grit of stale bread on a border train, the weight of silence after an unanswered letter, the squeak of school shoes on cold corridors. I write from photographs, from journals, from physical memory — and from that place where truth sometimes distorts itself to let something deeper rise.

To protect privacy and honour intimacy, I have changed the names of many people along the way. If you find a shadow of yourself here, please know it is written with care, gratitude, and respect.

The memoir traces a journey that begins in a small Polish village and winds through hospitals and classrooms, refugee camps, war zones, and wide, uncertain skies. It is the story of a child who was told to lie still — and didn’t. And of a man who kept returning to the places where pain met purpose, and sorrow met grace.

Below, you’ll find a summary of the first ten chapters. I’ll begin updating this space more regularly as the writing unfolds — with reflections, photographs, extracts, and fragments that didn’t make it into the manuscript, but still insist on being remembered.

🧭 Chapter Summaries (1–10)

Chapter 1: The Road to Zakopane

Kacper is born in Biegonice, near Nowy Sącz. His early life is filled with family warmth, but also illness — first mysterious, then increasingly serious. Weekly trips to Kraków’s Prokocim hospital become routine, where plaster casts are applied to his legs. The car rides, pain, and comfort of the radio etch themselves into his childhood. Eventually, he’s sent to Konstancin near Warsaw, where doctors reveal the severity of his spinal condition. There, he feels deeply alone and witnesses both the unfamiliar (like meeting a Black child for the first time) and the terrifying. Zakopane is the final referral — a clinic with a reputation for miracles. Martial Law is declared. Hope and fear walk hand in hand.

Photos:
Click here for pictures related to this chapter: Early childhood.

Chapter 2: The Operation

The surgery arrives with little warning. Kacper is wheeled in, scared but ready. The operation is long and risky. He wakes to a new body and a country under Martial Law. What follows is pain, infection, disorientation — and recovery. An ambulance ride turns dramatic when soldiers try to stop them. Kacper has to learn how to sit, breathe, and walk again. But he is growing taller, breathing deeper. He watches the snow fall from the hospital window, senses something unfolding far beyond him. The child is changing, and so is Poland.

Chapter 3: The Return

Kacper returns home to Nowy Sącz — healed, but changed. He must now learn how to live outside the hospital. School feels foreign. Friends are unsure how to treat him. His older brother, Jurek, becomes his protector and translator of the world. Family stories take centre stage — his father’s post-war struggles, his mother’s fierce resilience, the myths of Biegonice. A plastic body cast is replaced by a cautious freedom. Kacper learns English, excels in geography, and discovers a passion for the wider world. He dreams of London. Of somewhere else. Of more.

Chapter 4: The Years of Becoming

Secondary school brings both fear and surprise. Kacper is accepted by classmates and protected by his teachers. He excels academically, especially in languages. He joins a local language centre, where volunteers from abroad broaden his horizons. Through letters exchanged with Seraphina, a penfriend from the Seychelles, he explores love, loss, and identity. Family trips, student exchanges, the shock of a classmate’s suicide — all shape his sense of self. His mother briefly moves to Canada to work, bringing back not just money but dignity. These years are slow but powerful. Kacper begins to believe he might belong — somewhere.


Chapter 5: The Dream That Almost Was

Kacper finishes school and begins working at PolTransCom as a translator. It’s an unglamorous but practical start — he earns a salary, translates tedious documents, and navigates the daily routines of office life with an oddball cast of characters. The work is tolerable, but his heart is elsewhere.

A short trip to Germany offers a taste of something freer. Later, he travels to London with dreams stitched inside his coat lining. There, he attends a trade event where he glimpses Princess Diana — a surreal moment that starkly contrasts with his own financial uncertainty and the grimy hostel beds he sleeps in.

He is accepted to the University of York, but funding proves elusive. A British contact, John Brown, had promised financial help, only to vanish. With no money and time running out, he returns to Poland briefly, devastated but still unwilling to let go.

London becomes a place of despair. Back in the UK on borrowed time, Kacper is forced to live rough — at one point sleeping under a staircase at Earl’s Court. His student visa application fails, and he falls through every bureaucratic crack. Still, he teaches private lessons, saves pennies, and refuses to give up. Just as all hope fades, friends offer a mattress and emotional shelter. That kindness — offered in a small flat — is enough. It saves him. He decides to move forward. The dream almost dies. But doesn’t.

Photos:
Picture from Germany, while working for PolTransCom.
Glimpses of living in London, when things were really difficult.


Chapter 6: Kraków, and the Suit That Didn’t Fit

To stay afloat while waiting for something better, Kacper enrols in university in Kraków, choosing diplomacy and international relations — a field that sounds respectable but feels hollow. He arrives wearing a second-hand suit that doesn’t fit, both physically and metaphorically. That image lingers as the central metaphor for this chapter.

Kraków itself is romantic and moody, but he feels lost within it. The classes are formal, dry, and disconnected from the real world. He teaches English privately to survive, floating through a life that feels borrowed. There are occasional sparks of joy — walks through the Old Town, a well-timed joke from a student — but mostly, he is biding time.

He remains haunted by his time in London: the generosity of his hosts, the failures of institutions, the harshness of rejection. These unspoken struggles press against the walls of Kraków’s classrooms. Ultimately, he realises that Kraków was never meant to hold him. It’s a place of waiting, not of becoming. So, again, he prepares to move on.

Photos:
A trip to Venice with Mum and Kacper's 'adopted sister'.

Chapter 7: Where the Windmill Turns

Kacper joins DNS, a radical international school in Denmark. He meets a cast of unforgettable classmates — Agnieszka, Mikkel, Eli, Kurt — and a whole world of shared values and noisy debates. They grow vegetables, clean toilets, study global issues, and prepare for long trips to India and Africa. He finds purpose, love, and challenge in equal measure. The school breaks him open and puts him back together. It’s the first place that feels like chosen family.

Photos:
Saving up period while studying.

Chapter 8: Through the Heart of India

India is overwhelming. Kacper volunteers at Mitraniketan, a Gandhian rural centre in Kerala, and is struck by poverty, resilience, kindness, and contradictions. He travels by train, learns about caste, drinks coconut water, and listens to village children’s dreams. It’s not paradise — it’s difficult and dazzling, all at once. Other DNS students appear along the way. Together, they share meals and stories. India marks him forever — not for what it is, but for what it awakens.

Photos:
The trip around India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.

Chapter 9: Borders and Hostages

Kacper and Silja begin the overland return journey through Pakistan. Outside Lahore, something goes wrong — they are drugged, perhaps kidnapped. The episode is foggy, frightening. Rescued by Catholic monks and reconnected with their group, they carry new fear. The journey through Pakistan continues with emotional caution. The Wagah border crossing into India is deeply symbolic — flags, spectacle, and fragility. They move westward through cities and deserts. Something has shifted. Nothing feels guaranteed anymore.

Photos:
The trip around India, Pakistan and Turkey.

Chapter 10: Through the Silk and the Stone

The route back to Europe leads through Iran and Turkey. Kacper observes veiled women, snow-dusted mountains, and market chaos. He feels the weight of history in each ruin, each checkpoint. They cross into Istanbul — the symbolic bridge to Europe. There, they part ways. Kacper boards a regular bus back to Kraków. No flags, no cameras, no ceremony. Just a return. But he is no longer the boy who left. The story is still unfolding.

Photos:
The trip around India, Pakistan and Turkey.

🔜 What Comes Next

And there is still much more to come.

As the chapters move into adulthood, the accounts will deepen — not only because the events are more recent, but because they involve choices made with full awareness. These next parts will draw heavily from my work as a humanitarian — a path that has shaped the very architecture of my being. You will find stories from the field, from remote villages to vast cities; from makeshift shelters to negotiation tables; from lonely hotel rooms to war zones that changed everything.

But it is not just about work. These chapters will also explore the ties that bind — love, friendship, family, grief. There will be moments of quiet happiness, and others of pain or tragedy. Some stories may be difficult to read, and a few perhaps uncomfortable or controversial. I won’t shy away from them. They’re part of the truth I carry.

Importantly, while I do reflect on the world — on justice, power, inequality, and belonging — I do so from my own narrow window. These are my thoughts, shaped by the experiences I’ve had. I do not pretend they are universally correct. I am not trying to convince anyone. I’m simply offering a view — personal, imperfect, and entirely my own. Some will disagree. Some may turn away. But for those who stay, I hope something resonates.

This page will also become a space for small things that matter:
✍️ stories that didn’t make it into the chapters,
📚 glimpses into the writing process and its technical chaos,
🎒 anegdotes from behind the scenes,
📷 and photos that breathe life into forgotten corners.

Thank you for walking alongside me on this journey.
There’s still a long way to go — and I look forward to sharing it with you.