Photo: Origins
Feb. 12th, 2021 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stonepicnicking_okapiI've been hesitating about posting this, thinking it might be too navel-gazing, not interesting to anyone but myself, but here goes. So Minor (age 9) has a country project for school and picked Rwanda (his father's Rwandan) and I got him a book about Rwanda from the library and lo and behold.
This is where okapi comes from. The back of the minvan says OKAPI CAR. It was a transportation company that ran between Butare and Kigali when I lived there many, many years ago. It was known for reckless driving and speed. It has since gone out of business.
But when my father died a couple of years after I left Rwanda, he left me his minivan, so I called it okapi (after the Rwandan business) and when I was searching for a username for my AO3 account seven years later, I picked the nickname for the car (which I still drive!). I had no idea how much significance the name would come to have for me. It really is a huge part of my identity now. More often than not, I think of myself as okapi. And it was sort of incredible to open a book and see the very beginning of it, a seed which was planted seventeen years ago.
This is where okapi comes from. The back of the minvan says OKAPI CAR. It was a transportation company that ran between Butare and Kigali when I lived there many, many years ago. It was known for reckless driving and speed. It has since gone out of business.
But when my father died a couple of years after I left Rwanda, he left me his minivan, so I called it okapi (after the Rwandan business) and when I was searching for a username for my AO3 account seven years later, I picked the nickname for the car (which I still drive!). I had no idea how much significance the name would come to have for me. It really is a huge part of my identity now. More often than not, I think of myself as okapi. And it was sort of incredible to open a book and see the very beginning of it, a seed which was planted seventeen years ago.
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Date: 2021-02-13 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 11:59 am (UTC)