I’ve learned something new about my memory here. I’ve always known that there are things that rarely stick, unless I put some effort in it, like names or phone numbers. Elli laughs at me for always having to ask her what my Burkinabe cellphone number is. It shouldn’t be too hard to memorize, eight digits, but I don’t know, I just constantly keep on mixing them up.
My memory is more of the bigger-picture-kind. I remember systems, things that logically fit together. In school, I was great at math and history and science, because those subjects are all about processes and chronologies and pieces that fit together to make a bigger whole. I guess my memory is associative, and based on understanding. A phone number can’t be understood, neither can a name. Photosynthesis, on the other hand, or the French revolution can.
What I’ve learned here, though, is that I have a great memory for places too. Maybe it’s something that I was born with. I’ve never been prone to get lost anywhere, and can usually find my way back if I’ve been someplace once. Before smartphones, I could even find my way to places I’ve never been to by memorizing a map before leaving home and knowing how I should walk based on that. It shouldn’t surprise me, then, that I have a memory that easily translates between real-world-features and representations of the same things as seen from the sky, such as in maps or satellite images. But I also think that my years as a geography student has fine-tuned this talent of mine. I’ve had plenty of practice trying to interpret maps and aerial photographs and other representations of the Earth’s surface.
Here, I’ve walked through eight villages this far, for about ten kilometers each. I’ve logged GPS points every hundred meters or so, and I have taken notes. But when I sit down and go through the points, I barely have to look at my notes. I feed the coordinates into Google Maps, and based on the satellite image there, I remember exactly what it looked like and what I was thinking when we walked there. And when doing my re-visits to the villages, I have been able to recount the path that we walked with the help of the map sketches that I’ve made, clarifying for the villagers (who are not as acquainted with maps as I am) by explaining that this is the field by the big baobab tree, and here is the bare soil that they’ve tried to improve by digging down stone rows, and that is the little patch of holy forest where the big snake lives. Things that I haven’t even written down in my notes, but that I just remember anyway.
I guess the conclusion that can be drawn from this, is that I have a good memory for landscapes. I remember visually. I think that means that at least part of our memories, not surprisingly, are interest based. I remember landscapes, because they interest me, and I remember maps, because connecting them to landscapes comes naturally to me. And based on this, one could say that I’ve chosen just the right profession. Luckily for me.
Katja Malmborg 