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.”