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.

Tags: #MemoirOfAWanderingSpirit, #Angola, #Luanda, #Caxito, #UNITA, #ChildSoldiers, #Conflict

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.

Tags: #MemoirOfAWanderingSpirit, #Denmark, #Sweden, #DNS, #Iceland, #Neskupstathur, #FromNowySaczToTheWorld, #Akureri, #Reykjavik, #Family, #Canada, #Montreal, #Ottawa, #Harklowa, #Angola