Africa. Not many people have been to Africa. I know only a handful outside those with whom I traveled. It strikes me truly how much everyone is missing that Africa has shown and taught me. The breathtaking landscape and awe-inducing natural events. The irony woven in the sights of extreme poverty coupled with joy. The people who strive to change the world they live in, one step at a time.

And yet the most powerful lesson that cannot completely be conveyed through the words on this page was that of similarity.

In a world where differences cling to cultures, demographics, and geography, I found few differences between the people of Malawi and Zambia, and myself. Only a growing list of physical and heartfelt similarities.

If I remember nothing from Mchewele, the small village where Brian’s well sits, providing clean water for the inhabitants, the conversation I entered into with two young men my age remains engrained in my mind forever.

We, Bill and Joelene Lemke, Mike Stelle, my father and I traveled to Mchewele to dedicate the well we so painfully, yet joyfully built in memory of Brian James Lemke. Brian died on Thanksgiving Day of 2005, after a short battle with cancer.

I left home thinking I could change the way people think, that I could break down the barriers that I knew stood between myself and the people of Zambia. But I also knew they still existed.

I have never been so wrong in my entire life.

Just before we left Mchewele, the two aforementioned young men stopped me, and quickly explained how we, the two of them and myself, were the same. “We are the same age, and we both know Brian. You see, we’re the same.”

What a turn around. I expected myself to tear down the barriers; when in reality, I set them up. In an instant all my preconceived thoughts – divisions that should separate us – vanished.

Everything is different about us. Wealth, skin color, home countries, diseases, the way we think. I refuse to overlook differences. They are anxious to overlook them.

When the word “Africa” enters a conversation, the immediate thought is the HIV/AIDS endemic. Not once did I see a hint of who lived with the virus, and who simply led normal lives.

One in five people in Zambia are infected with HIV. I know I met someone with HIV, but I surely could not tell you who it was, because I don’t know who did. Everyone lived normal lives. Expressing themselves, helping others in need, forgetting differences.

They did show me we had more differences than even I counted. But more importantly, they threw every speck of dissimilarity out the window, and embraced me as one of the same.