The decision to take up residence in Mambrui came on the seventh day after my first visit to Africa. 
I had been enveloped, enveloped by the smells, the light, the colours. 
If you ask me why I made such an irrational and immediate decision, I cannot account for it.
But I felt an almost physical need, which prevented me from leaving these places.
I recognised in Africa, in the smells as in the colours, a second mother of mine, a land from which I came but which I only now recognised as mine. Just as animals recognise their mother, their brothers, their father, by their smells, by their noises, so I found and recognised in Africa something that was in me, atavistically compressed and concealed. I felt I was living in places that were mine, where I recognised myself and where I was comfortable. 
A form of inner déjà vu. 
I fell ill, as unfortunately happens to many people in Africa, with malaria. And after a long and very heavy hospital stay, saved by a miracle, and with after-effects that I still carry with me, my desire to return to Africa was even stronger. They called me crazy: are you going back there where you almost died? 
They did not understand that the illness had been nothing more than a request from my homeland to share it completely; it had been a baptism through which I now feel I identify completely with it. 
Sickness in Africa is being reborn to life.