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