My Ancestral And Spiritual Journey Has Taken Me Around The World

[title maintitle=”” subtitle=”Discovering My Ancestral Roots”]

For the past 11 months, I have been on a spiritual journey searching for something. I’m not sure what it is I’m looking for spiritually, but thus far it’s lead me to Thailand and Cuba.

This journey all started around my birthday trip to Thailand last year in September. I was positive this experience was going to be my eat, pray, love moment. Instead, I discovered that I need to have patience, I like Thai food, and that I’ll never go to China again. Not much for a spiritual awakening.

Fast-forward a few months after my trip to Thailand and that’s when I started feeling a connection to my African roots. It felt as if something spiritual was calling me back home. But, where the heck is home in Africa?

Like many descendants of slavery, I don’t know where my ancestors originated from in Africa. Rumor has it that on my mom’s side we are descendants of freed Haitians, but that hasn’t been substantiated.

Trinidad hottie who answered my Santeria questions

Continuing to follow my intuition on this spiritual journey, I ended up next in Cuba. That feeling of some ancestral calling felt deeper as soon as I landed in Havana. Yet, if my Spanish speaking skills were any indication, Cuba was about to be a dead end on this spiritual journey.

My first trip to Cuba wasn’t a complete waste of time. I met up with this hot guy in Trinidad, Cuba who spoke to me for hours about Santeria. Hindsight, trying to get a spiritual awakening from a guy that you want to jump makes it extremely difficult to focus on the spiritual stuff. The little information I did actually hear made me know, I definitely needed to go back to Cuba.

On my next trip to Cuba, I made sure to schedule the time to talk to a Babalawo, a spiritual title that denotes a Santeria priest. However, when I did finally speak with one, it wasn’t what I expected.

The first thing he said to me is, “a tree cannot survive without roots. You need to discover your roots.”

A tree cannot survive without roots. You need to discover your roots.

I wanted to give him a side-eye as this didn’t solve my immediate needs to have answers. But my mamma raised me better than to side-eye religious folks. Plus, I was too busy crying because I already knew I needed to discover my roots. That’s why I was in Cuba in the first place on this spiritual journey.

After receiving the Babalawo’s advice, I knew my next step was to take a DNA test to discover my roots.

From talking with friends, I discovered that 23 and Me, a company that does DNA testing, didn’t have the best DNA collection when it came to melaninated folks like me, so they weren’t even an option. I ended up using the only other site I knew, Ancestry.com. I wish I had video taped my utter confusion trying to ensure I had just the right amount of spit in this tube to provide a viable DNA sample.

European Acenstry.com results

My results arrived in 5 weeks and I couldn’t wait to find out my ancestral background as a clue to my spiritual journey. Imagine my surprise and slight frustration when I noticed the results were vague as hell.

It said my ancestral background probably originated mainly in Cameroon/Congo and/or Ivory Coast/Ghana. Maybe had I read more about Ancestry.com, I would have known that I wouldn’t discover the names of tribes as I had hoped. The one positive about Ancestry.com is that I’ve discovered 2nd and 3rd cousins I didn’t know existed.

I only wish I had known about African Ancestry, the only company that can trace your ancestry back to a specific present-day African country and ethnic group of origin dating back more than 500 years ago.

It sucks paying again for DNA testing, but I strongly believe after talking to those that have used African Ancestry, it is worth the extra money and time.

Thus, my ancestral and spiritual and journey continues. I hope by this time next year to take a trip to Africa with the knowledge of both my maternal and paternal ancestral background from African Ancestry. Until then, at least Ancestry.com has explained my love for drinking, I’m 6% Irish.