About us: Paul & Meta Lapperre

Who are we? Sometimes we get confused ourselves! Two years ago we were ambitious professionals operating in what we euphemistically called competitive environments. We liked the excitement and enjoyed the stress. Since our retirement we take our grand children for a holiday, work in the garden, sit on some not really important committees and plan an Africa-crossing. We suddenly like the easy going and also enjoy this way life. Some forty years ago - when we left for Africa for the first time - we were embarrassingly young, adventurous, driven, idealistic and more than a little naïf. Now we show the first serious signs of old-age wear: Paul had his heart problems two years ago and my breast cancer treatment only came to an end weeks ago. Luckily, the longing for adventure is still there and so is the drive to do something meaningful. The idealism has become more focused and practical. The naivety, alas, has gone. Some things have not changed at all: our believe in a society based on a substantial degree of solidarity, our distrust of professional politicians, our love for Africa and our dislike of religious and other dogmas. We are still critical with respect to unchecked liberalism and free markets, occasionally suffer from the “embarrassment of riches”, to use Simon Schama’s words and, last but not least, we are still fond of dogs.

I was born in Amsterdam in 1939 and trained as a doctor, taking my general medical practitioners degree in the summer of 1966. Being born in 1942 in Essen, Paul is a World War II child. He studied tropical soil science and graduated early 1965. In the summer of that year we married and soon thereafter decided to start our working life in Africa. Paul managed to secure a position as a soil scientist in Mozambique and left in the fall of 1965 to make the first of his African soil maps. I followed almost a year later. In more than one sense the Mozambique years were fertile ones. In 1967 our son Rimbaud was born in the small clinic in Luabo, close to the Zambezi river and not far from the Indian Ocean. In 1969, while we were on study leave in the Netherlands, Roald followed. For a girl we had to wait for some time, but eventually she too was born in Luabo in 1972. We named her Barbara. In a social sense the Mozambique years were fertile too. We became a closely knit family, gradually began to consider Africa our home and learned to be happy in isolated places and under insecure conditions. In 1974 we moved to Kenya when Paul became a researcher with Mumias Sugar Company in Western Province. To my surprise, I had no problems in obtaining an East African General Practitioner’s Licence and found work in St. Mary’s Mission Hospital in Mumias. For two years we lived and worked in Kenya before finally returning to the Netherlands in the summer of 1976.

Paul became Head of the Development Co-operation Office of the Eindhoven University of Technology and I joined the Regional District Health Service and also enrolled for further specialist training. Through Paul’s development projects we kept in touch with Africa. The contacts intensified when Paul began his PhD research on long term international technology development and became an Assistant and later Associate Professor in Technological Development Studies.

In 1988, our two boys went back to Africa to find their roots and lived in the village of Paul’s close African friend, Remigius Mbawala, for some time. Barbara apparently didn’t want to lag behind and spend an internship in St. Mary’s Mission Hospital in 1994. In 1997, all of us went back to Tanzania for Barbara’s wedding with Marc. For the first time in Africa, Marc soon became infected too with a deep love for Africa and its people. And now, before there are more signs of serious irreversible wear, we are planning our farewell to Africa by crossing it from Cape Town to Cairo and by visiting as many of the people as possible we worked with during the four decades of our working life.

And yes, of course we travel in style … with a vintage Series III Landrover 109’’ of the type that served us so well in our African years! We named her “Wa Bashasha” which means “Be Humorous”.

© 2005-2006 Paul and Meta Lapperre - Website by MvS