This blog, that blog, moving on

This blog will live on, and I'll update it with memories and things if and when they come up. I'll try to put some pictures here soon, too. But for now, I'll be returning to the other blog: http://naivejim.blogspot.com. Thanks for reading. Really, thank you.

jim

Home

I'm home.

If I was a better blogger, I might have posted this much sooner. Unfortunately, I've put this off a little bit in order to adjust. I could probably have written something when I got off the plane, but I was tired. I think I have an excuse. But, had I blogged sooner, it would have looked something like this:

"I'm home. I bought cheese for mom and spilled coffee on the flight attendant. Now I'm going to bed."

All of that is true. I am home. I bought cheese for mom, smoked gouda, the best $15 hunk of cheese I've ever purchase. I did spill coffee on the flight attendant but that, I think, was her fault and I did apologize. And then I did go to bed.

To add a few more boring details: Both of my bags arrived safely in Detroit, where I checked them through, but one of them didn't make it to Grand Rapids. It came later that night and they sent it right to my house.

The first place I went when I got home was Panera Bread with my family. Dad was in St. Louis, so he couldn't join us. But I had long wanted a good sandwich, and Panera Bread delivered.

Sometime right before I landed in Amsterdam, McCain conceded the election and Obama won. And from that point until yesterday, I didn't stop hearing about it. Come to think of it, from the time I arrived in Dar Es Salaam, everyone was talking about it. When people found out I was American, they demanded to know why I wasn't in the United States, voting for Barack Obama. Wote Watanzania wametaka Barack Obama. My cab driver told me that he thought Kenya, and maybe Tanzania, too, would go crazy if Barack Obama won. He told me they wouldn't work for a week, and would just party. As far as I know, he's probably right.

The first question most people ask is "How was Africa?" And, God bless 'em, this is a terribly frustrating thing to answer. Because I can't really summarize or put it into words yet. How were the last three months of your life? You have to think about it, right?. This was not a weekend trip, it was three months of life. You can tell the people who've been there, because they ask specific questions. "What was something tough you experienced?" "Where were some of the places you went?" "What were the people like?" "What was the weirdest thing you ate?" Those are questions I can answer. If you ask, "How was Africa," I'll either give an equally brief answer ("Good.") or stammer and tell you awkwardly that I don't know yet. I don't have my impressions all formed yet. This is the kind of thing that doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a while.

Someone asked me in church today "is your heart there?" and I told her it wasn't. I've been expecting people to ask me if I'm going to drop everything and move there, and "Is your heart there" sounded an awful lot like, "Are you going to drop everything and move there?" She told me her experience must have been opposite because as soon as she was there, her heart was there, too. I loved being in Africa, but I'm glad to be home. I'm still at the stage where I'm soaking up home, reconnecting with everyone I haven't seen, enjoying brushing my teeth with tap water, and hiking in the woods without thinking about puff adders. So, my heart is pretty firmly planted here. For now. Which is not to say my heart isn't a little bit "there" too. And maybe someday I'll drop everything and move there. But for now, lots of people are going to get vague answers from me.

But ANYWAY.

I'm home and adjusting. I still wake up at 4 am for no good reason, and I'm still learning how, even in the span of three months, the world has moved on without me. And all of the pictures, the good pictures, are up on Facebook.

As for today... Today I watched football and it was glorious, even though it was the Lions.

jim

And now for my final thought...

I’ve never been good at summarizing. Which is pretty strange because I’ve read lots and lots of summaries (most often in textbooks to probe for buzzwords and easy answers before tests when I haven’t read the chapter). And so here I am, on my last day in Africa, waiting to go to the airport, and I really haven’t got a way to sum this all up.

Maybe it’s because where I am doesn’t feel like Africa. It feels like Florida. It feels like Generic Vacation Spot. I'm at SeaCliff, some expensive hotel that some foreigners built here so other foreigners can visit Tanzania and not have it feel so… foreign. They have a foreign supermarket where you can buy Oreos and Dr Pepper (which I just did, without hesitation.) You can eat at restaurants and sip lattes in coffee shops that feel just like the ones back home, and visit a book store to browse the same selection of books you’d see at a Borders or Barnes and Noble, and buy educational crap for your kids at one of those “Learning is FUN” type places that seem to be in every mall in the USA. But, I have already ranted about all of this before. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like places like this – it’s a nice and necessary step toward my own culture. And I’m sitting here anyway, so who am I to judge? It’s just not a place where I’ll say, “Yeah, this is what I’ll remember about Africa.”

This is the point of the post where, if I were in some pleasant, nostalgic writing mood, I’d break into some poetic essay on how serene the landscape is and how God must have surely saved His best ideas when he crafted Tanzania’s mountains and filled its pristine lakes, and how breathtakingly deep and full the night sky is, and how the church choirs sound like the choicest angels plucked from Heaven’s School of Music. All of those things struck me and you kind of need to come here and see them. Or hear them.

And if I had the time, I’d take a moment to summarize all the stuff I did or, if I were to rephrase it with modesty, the stuff “God did through me.” I readily admit that he had a role in everything that happened to, with, from, over, under, around, inside, or despite me while I’ve been here. The truth is, most of my impressions came not from the perspective of a giver or a doer or even a servant, but of a wide-eyed guy who just wanted to see how this part of the world works, one that hoped to be an instrument and did his best not to get in the way. I have had a wonderful time and I have no intention of downplaying it with sarcasm or cynicism. I love Africa and I would love to come back and maybe someday I will.

For now, though, I miss my home and my family and friends*, and in a few hours I’m going to get on a plane and go home and see them and shower them with hugs and lavish African gifts upon them. I am thinking more about there than I am about here. I have been on the road almost constantly for the last 35 days, and I’m almost back to my own bed, to my own home. I can tell you about what I will miss when I begin to miss it. Trust me, it will sound better then. It will be more poetic.

So I will conclude with the one nugget of information that seems to stand out more than any other right now, and that is this: If you go to Africa, and you ride the bus, and if the bus makes a bathroom stop, please please please watch your step.

See you soon.

jim

*Note: Not all friends will be lavished with gifts. Offer restricted to those who made specific requests. Must have replied by 31 Oct 2008. Must be 18 or older, excepting those warranted by executor of offer or by tribal council. Offer not valid in Puerto Rico or New Jersey.

Zambia

I am sitting in an internet cafe in Ndola, Zambia. If you look at a map of Africa, there's a little piece of the Democratic Republic of Congo that hangs down and bottlenecks Zambia. Ndola is just to the left of that.

In my money belt, I have nine 50 kwacha bills and some identification, little else. For the few of you who aren't up to speed on African exchange rates, they have a combined worth of about ten cents.

Zambia is not like Tanzania. Actually, I guess it mostly is like Tanzania, only everything has taken one single step towards the United States, or at least towards South Africa. Here, people seem to wear nicer clothes, and live in bigger houses. More of them drive cars and the roads get a little bit more upkeep. You can go around the corner and pick up a bucket of chicken from Hungry Lion. Every city has a Shoprite, an African supermarket chain. In Tanzania, I know of two cities with Shoprites. And there are lots and lots of foreigners, too.

The other day, we were driving the Great North Road down from Tanzania, and we passed a few clusters of date palms. They say you can trace the line all the way to the Indian Ocean. It's the path the slave traders took, and they tossed their date palm seeds out as they ate along the way. Many of them took root and grew tall, and now we can see right where they go. The palms we saw grew amid huge farms with long lines of sprinklers where they grow tomatoes and cabbage and soybeans. It's agribusiness. Things in Zambia have changed.

Also, as most of you know, it's Duwali time. It's the Indian new year. And there was a fireworks show. We went to the local sports club, where the rich and the expats hang out, to watch. There was a huge crowd there, made of Indians and Chinese and Europeans and South Africans and wealthy Zambians. I thought it might have been the most diverse crowd I've ever been a part of. Each of us paid 30,000 Kwacha to be there ($8 USD). As it turned out, it was a great fireworks display, just like anything you might see in the States on July 4.

The next day, we went on to Mufulira, which is a little further north along the border with the DRC. The town is pretty big, and it survives entirely due to the mine. This is the Copperbelt of Zambia, they say, and for the last several decades, the town has thrived. But lately, production has dropped and the mine might close in the next couple years, leaving 14,000 people jobless. We drove around, and saw where the Rugby club was, and the Cricket Club, and the Swimming Pool, and the Football Club, too. All of them are closed or rarely used, testaments to a Western presence that once was. There's a golf club where the fairways are nice and green in the rainy season, but no one goes there any more except to eat in the restaurant or go to the bar. The foreign investers are mostly gone. Already the city looks dead and the Meiers, missionaries I've known from back home for a long time and with whom we're staying, joke that there's nothing to do in Moof. And they still have the mine. The Meiers don't know what will happen to the town, and their church, and their ministry here, when the mines close. The city will die.

In Tanzania, everyone farms. Even in the big towns, many people have a plot of land somewhere that they farm corn or something with. People there live a little more poorly, but they can eat. Here in Zambia, nobody farms. There are big farms, and people in villages still make their living off the land, but in cities like Mufulira people will have their way of life abruptly reinvented when the mines close.

Tomorrow, we begin the two day trip back to Mumba. Then, I have another two day trip across the country back to Dar, where I'll fly away next week. I'll be home, and it will be good to be home.

One Love

Did it.

There it is.

For now, I'm in Zambia for another week. I've been traveling almost non-stop since the start of the month, and won't be done until I'm home in Michigan November 5. I'll see you all then.

One Love,

Jim

Pre-Kili

I don't know why people climb mountains. They are big. So big that they are symbols for big, they define big, they're metaphors for impossibility. We stay away from them, build roads around them and sometimes under them but never over them.

I live (or have lived) on a plateau that is to the west of the mountains of Africa's Great Rift. There are no acacia trees or mosquitoes or baboons or cobras, and we can't grow oranges or rice or papayas or mangos. Three miles away, at the foot of the rift, lies the Rukwa valley. There, people grow all those things and fight the bugs and the heat and the snakes and mangy apes. Three miles from where I sleep, a vastly different world. Between us: Mountains. Nature respects the mountains.

Almost nothing lives or grows on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe lichens. Maybe moss. Nothing else. The animal kingdom doesn't mess with mountains, at least not this one. Yet, thousands of people climb it each year. Not all of them make it. Maybe we should take a note.

I never wanted to climb mountains, always assumed it best to leave them alone, to leave it to the moss and lichens and goats, and to Moses and the vegans who wear those Life is Good T-shirts. And so when someone asked me if I'd like to climb, I laughed, said "I don't think I'll be doing that, I'm broke and sorely out of shape." But they persisted, and since I was going to Africa anyway, and since you only ever need to do this sort of thing once, and since I'd had a nice long run of 24 years and would be going to Heaven in the end anyway, I finally said yes. Besides, the worst thing that could happen is that I a) die on the mountain and go to heaven or b) wuss out halfway up and come back down a failure, get disowned by my friends and family and pursue what I already know to be my inevitable future in the circus. And I kind of like the circus.

And now, I have seen the mountain, and it is big. When I first saw it, it didn't look so big, just a subtle peak with its head in the clouds, a long way off. Then we drove and drove and it didn't seem to get any bigger until finally we were at its base and it was suddenly so impossibly ginormous that I have no words to describe it appropriately. In my experience, things do not get this big. Dump trucks are big. Skyscrapers are big. Kilimanjaro is... I don't know. It's a landmark and an icon. It's mind-blowingly huge. Even as we drove away toward Arusha, it didn't shrink, and an hour down the road where we sat in the shadow of Mt. Meru, a very large mountain with no crown of snow, we saw Kili's glacier poke out above the clouds and it was still dominant, still king, still refusing to fit within the scope of my eyes. Kili reminds me, most assuredly, that I am still very very small and had better not even think about setting foot on it. Kili is famous. It's on postcards. To my knowledge, I am on no postcards.

In preparation, I've been climbing and clamoring and and hiking for the last three months, and I am as ready as I will ever be. Tomorrow morning, we're actually going to climb it. We'll drive to the mountain and put our feet on it and walk slowly, slowly toward the summit, three and a half miles up into the atmosphere to where the animals don't go.

So for now, I'm going to stop talking about it. It's all kind of surreal anyway, and I'm not doing it justice. I know we have a lot of people praying for us, and that is all the reassurance I need. If we summit, it will be Friday, I think.

One Love

jim

souvenirs

I am glad to be off the bus.

I am so glad to be off the bus.

Yesterday I took a 12-hour bus ride from Mbeya to Dar es Salaam. Two hours into it, we took a pit stop, a bathroom break. Now that I think about it, this was our only stop except for lunch, and it was two-hours into the trip. But on this stop, we pulled off the road and everyone hurried off the bus and into the bush to relieve themselves. I went last and trekked down a path which the men quickly claimed as their own. I walked past everyone else, chose a spot, and reunited with the animal kingdom. I walked back to the bus and sat down in my seat. Now, since I was traveling alone, I had no one to urge me to watch my step, and once I sat down I was met with the sudden, unmistakable odor of human waste and the sneaking suspicion that I was somehow responsible for it despite the fact that I had only “gone onesies,” as the Africans say (which they don’t say.) Since I had no room to check my feet, (a backpack betwixt them, a wall in front of and beside them, another gent’s legs on the other side, and a seat filled by myself behind them) I could not confirm or deny that it was I who had returned with a… souvenir of our stop. I help hope that one of the many other feet on the bus had an unfortunate hanger-on. A few hours later, after much gagging and guessing, I got off the bus for lunch and discerned that it was, indeed, I who had borne great displeasurous* odor upon the bus. I was thusly forced to bear it the majority of the trip, as I had carried a fair amount back with me and shared it with the floor beneath my feet and, quite possibly, my backpack which rested upon it. In short, I smelled people-poop the whole way here.

But all of that aside, it wasn’t so bad a trip. I only had an awful African soap opera on the tube to deal with, and a guy next to me with whom I jockeyed for the arm-rest, and knees that inexplicably burn in agony when I rest them at acute angles for seven hours at a time.

I am so very glad to be off the bus.

And here I am, in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. It is the hot and humid time of year, and that is genuinely saying something. I am in the tropics right on the ocean. The air is thick, and I’d bottle it for you if I could. It’s hot enough that I was sweating through my shirt over breakfast, at 8:00 am. (And to think, A week from now I’ll be in a place in the same country where it reaches below zero.) Dar is a fantastic city. There are lots of big buildings and you can sleep in air conditioning and buy ice cream and A&W Root Beer (2,450 shillings each – I bought two for about $4.50 today).

(Hold on, I just remembered the word “Gondwanaland” for no explicable reason. If you know what Gondwanaland is, please tell me.)

We went to Slipway, a bayside resort where lots of white people hang out. And having been away from all but ten of them for so long, I find them fascinating. I want to stare and shout “Wazungu!” Slipway is a resort-ish, touristy shopping and eating place. The shame in this, I thought today, is that many people I guess (and probably guess unfairly) that many people come here and stay in a nice hotel and visit a game park and see some wild animals and buy some carbon-copy souvenir ebony carvings, and then get on a plane and go back home. And they will say that they have seen Africa, without ever sharing a meal of ugali under a kerosene lamp, or frightening a baby who has never seen a white person before, or catching a cold from a village kid, or changing a tire in the bush. I am just arrogant enough to claim merit badges for each of those, and three for the last one. And I wouldn’t mention sleeping by hyenas, listening to a church choir, or staring at the Milky Way from below. But I guess you can say this about anyone who travels anywhere. “Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt,” right? You probably haven’t really seen a place until you’ve been culture-shocked by it, and even then you don’t really know it. I don’t know Africa. All I know is Michigan. And I miss Michigan.

But now, I am no different. I am a tourist. Dar is only a stopping point for me, on the way to Kilimanjaro. Tomorrow morning, we’re getting on a bus to go and do something so stupid as to climb a mountain, something impossibly high that people stay off of and build roads around, the top of which no animals can live on. We’re going to haul ourselves to a dangerous altitude to say we’re no smaller than a mountain, to set before our eyes a fleeting but spectacular sunrise. We’re going to see this place. The truth is, I am super excited (ugh, I just used “Super Excited.” Guess I better go watch The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or something) to do this stupid, stupid thing. But more on that once I’ve actually seen the mountain.

One love,

jim

Well Adjusted

Tuesday marked the half-way point of my trip. Six weeks here, six more before I leave. We spent the day in Sumbawanga and I realized for the first time that things aren't weird anymore. This is at least a little
scary for me because the last time I was here, I never reached this point. Which made going home, back to Burger King and Television and the endless competition for your attention and your senses and your
dollars, all the more easy. I never really left last time. Now, I am really here. I am here because I am adjusted. And being adjusted is troubling because it means I'm going to have to do it all over again when I get home. People say reverse culture-shock is worse than culture shock.

Things don't seem so different now. I am used to the taste of the food and the lack of variety. I am used to rice and beans for every lunch, and I did everything you can imagine to make it seem less like rice
and beans before I settled on just letting it be rice and beans. I haven't had breakfast cereal since early August. I think before I came here my consecutive mornings with cereal streak was running into the thousands. I am the Cal Ripken of cereal-breakfasts.

I am used to sitting idly by during conversations, since I can neither hear or speak Swahili well enough to participate. But if people speak slowly enough and gesture and point and write and grab a translation
dictionary for me, I can just begin to make out what they're talking about. Of course, eavesdropping is right out.

I'm also used to not knowing what anything is, and just assuming I am not supposed to touch it.

I am used to longer church services with louder and better choirs, and character-testing spine-wrenching benches.

I am used to being perpetually dirty, perpetually late, perpetually sore and knicked and bruised. I am used to not being able to move my arms because my clothes are stiff from drying in the sun.

I am used to hearing every bit of news well after-the-fact. (Little Mexico burned down! They will have to build it bigger, stronger… I guess they'll just have to call it Mexico.) Odds are, I'm not up on your gossip. If you're sick, I'm sorry. If you're engaged, congrats. If you're married, I'm sorry. I'm glad to hear about your new job or promotion. Once I get back, I guess.

I am used to the weather being infinitely more pointless a topic of conversation than it is back home. "Sunny again." "Yup." (Although, last night it rained and all of Jangwani and Mumba said, "Holy Crap.")

I am used to having flies around my ears and spiders on my walls and cockroaches on my floor. I am used to "inside" being a subjective term and it not being a refuge from African wildlife.

I am used to seeing white people and wondering what in the world they're doing here. I always want to ask them, "What in the world are you doing here?"

If my time in Africa is half gone, then my time in Mumba is just about over. This weekend, we're going out to show the Jesus film one more time in the Rukwa valley (like Mumba, but hotter with less mountains and more bugs and snakes.) Next week, I'm leaving to travel across the country, first to Mbeya, then to Dar, then to Arusha where I'll climb Mount Kilimanjaro. (I will probably see lots of white people there and
for once, I'll be the guy that knows all the Swahili.) Assuming I survive trying to climb to the highest mountain in Africa without any experience or reason, I'll meet the Shermans back in Mbeya and go straight to Zambia for the rest of October. I fly home in early November.

If I can ask a huge favor, and if you don't mind terribly, pray that I don't die on the mountain. Climbing Oct. 6-11, if you want specifics.

Thanks for reading this. I appreciate it. I'll keep you updated on the mountain stuff next week.

jim

Rampant Soda Shortage Grips Africa

I Consider this a Total Catastrophe

They are out of Coke in Sumbawanga. They're also out of Pepsi, Sprite, Fanta, Spar-letta, Tangawizi and Mirinda, the entire variety of East African soda options. How a whole town runs out of soda, I cannot say, but this is Africa and things like this happen all the time. It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that the truck or trucks bringing soda from the bigger cities into Sumbwanga drove off a cliff. Not joking. And so, basically everyone in western Tanzania who hasn't amassed a wartime stockpile of Coca-Cola is Lent-ing it for September. A few opportunists in town have a few cases left and are selling them at exorbitant prices. Like I said, some things are the same across the world. I'm just waiting for the day an African pays $10,000 for a PS3.

Unfortunately for the Shermans, I am a soda drinker and converted them from non-Soda-ists about a week after I got here. And so yesterday as Trevor and I shared the last bottle of Coca-Cola, we were like island castaways somberly polishing off the last coconut, trusting that fate or future might somehow provide for our well-being in ways beyond our comprehension. To thee I entrust my being, Lord God.

Soda is best from the glass bottle. It always has been, it always will be. I'd like to know why bottlers in the United States have forsaken it. Is it too expensive? Then why can African bottlers afford to do it? Surely the novelty of glass bottles would wear off soon after the market has been inundated with them. Offer big deposits on bottles, people won't smash them on the side of the road. People can drink them where they buy them like they do here. Environmentalists would love the idea, too – less garbage. Of course, they're very heavy, especially en masse. But in the U.S., you don't have to lug them 40 miles to refill them. You can throw them in the back seat of your Dodge Shadow and haul them to Meijer. I'm telling you, there's some merit to this idea. (I'm not thinking clearly, am I?)

So anyway, we're out of soda out here and you can expect this blog to slowly regress into lunatic ravings until we're replenished. Count on it.

Miss you all,

jim

Tasty Animals and Ministry Things.

It's late and I just sat down to write this blog. A few minutes ago, I heard a huge explosion outside. Naturally, I went to check it out. Steve Sherman just shot a rabid jackal in his front yard. Never a dull moment in Tanzania.

Speaking of shooting things…

I went on my first hunting trip. Ever. I figure Africa is as good a place as any to learn about hunting. So, we borrowed Sumry's hunting truck (Sumry is a friend of the missionaries here and he owns one of the biggest bussing/trucking companies in Tanzania) and left for the wilderness early Monday morning. We drove five hours north, up through Katavi National Park, and camped just a few miles from its edge.

In Mumba we don't have to worry about lions or snakes (there are puff adders here, though) or tse-tse flies. So of course, I had to ask our guide, Bila, about everything I could possibly be afraid of. The seasoned veterans laughed at me a little bit. Still, I noticed that Steve slept with his shotgun at his side. Bila told me in broken English that, "Of course there are lions and they are very danger." Also among our friends: Big hairy spiders, cobras, black mambas, hyenas, bee swarms, wild fires, and hot African sunburn. It's also a bad idea to touch pretty much any plant. They all have thorns, and even the grass is so tough and stringy that it will cut your fingers if you try to pick it (this, I learned, with a bloody index finger.)

I don't have a hunting experience from the United States to compare this with but as I understand it, back home you put up a tree stand or a blind, sit down and fall asleep until a deer wanders into range. You shoot it, track it, cut its guts out, and haul it back to your cabin and string it up in a tree. I guess you could probably do it like that here. But we had a well-outfitted hunting truck, and we spent all day driving over the bush looking for delicious animals to blow away. In the end, the two young guys shot a reed buck each (reed buck are like small white tail) and three of us shot small fowl, which we cooked for dinner. We gutted the second reed buck and threw his remains about 100 yards from camp. It didn't take long for vultures to show up, and Trevor promptly shot one with a .22.

It is hard to sleep in a tent with just a shred of nylon between you and an animal appropriately called a man-eater, especially with a large tasty animal hanging from a tree just outside. Fortunately, the lions never visited us – they stay away from fires at night. But the hyenas showed up in the middle of the second night. We heard them yelp. It's a loud, ascending Ow-Woo-oot! And it's even better when they do it 20 feet from your tent, where you just peed. It's unsettling to hear things breathing, romping in the dry brush, looking for food. When they came, I went rigid in my sleeping bag and laid still and wide-eyed. Josh, next to me, slept through the whole thing. Hyenas, Steve tells me, can bite through an elephant's femur. We heard them crunching the bones, absolutely shattering them. Still, they're more like raccoons than bears. They're mangy and ugly, like big rodents, I guess. After about an hour in camp, around 4 am, they went away.

Since I've been here, I've eaten topi, rone, and now reed buck. They're all really tasty, if you're wondering.

Last week, we got out to show some films in Jangwani, the nearest village to Mumba. We didn't show the Jesus film because, as I understand it, that village has already seen it 37 times. We put up our screen and started some music and people came. There were probably 500 people at one point.

In the past, they had film reels. Pastors could preach while they changed reels, and people stayed to wait for the end of the movie. If you preach after the movie is over, everyone will leave. So with a DVD player and a projector, you have to pause it in the middle to let someone share the gospel. Lots of people tune out, and some of them leave, but movies are such a rarity that the majority will stay to watch whatever you show. So people get to hear a message. We could show pretty much anything and they'd stick around, but they really want stuff in Swahili. One of our films is from the US in the 70s, dubbed in Swahili. It's about a man who learns to serve Christ with his business. I'm not sure how well village-dwelling farmers identify with Christian warehousing strategies - it seemed pretty boring to me - but people ate it up. I guess that if people are hearing the message in whatever way it's a good thing. We have a pretty limited selection of Swahili language films to show as alternatives to The Jesus Film. If you find something good, send it this way.

We had some sound problems that night and we got started pretty late, unfortunately. The next night, our speakers died in the middle of a health film we were showing for the Caraways here. They could really use some quality sound equipment out here. It would be nice to have some good speakers and a nice amp. But you make due with what you have. Hopefully they'll all be fixed and ready to go soon.

See you all soon,

jim

Minority

Yesterday we went to the monthly market in Jangwani. It's a traveling entourage of vendors and other entrepreneurs, and they visit our cluster of villages on the fourth of every month to set up shop. They sell food and clothes and machetes and pots and tools and sandals made from old tires. And some other stuff, too. It's a big attraction for anyone who lives within ten or so miles of here, and some come from as far away as 40-50 miles. Everybody goes. There were thousands of people there. I guess they have nothing better to do.

It was about a 30 minute hike from the missionary houses, and I went with Trevor (missionary kid - I teach him geometry, he translates things for me, we're going to show the Jesus film), Josh and Silas (two visitors from Michigan who incidentally were in my cabin when I was a counselor at Grace) along with Denisi and Aidani (two guys who live on the compound whose fathers work for Kanisa la Neema, Grace Church of Tanzania) Trevor was the translator, I was the "adult supervision," Aidani and Denisi helped us get black people prices instead of white people prices, and Josh and Silas just looked for sharp things to buy.

As soon as we arrived, we were celebrities. It's hard to miss white people in a sea of black faces. People wanted to shake our hands, they shouted at us, either to buy their stuff or just to shout at us, and we had a consistent crowd of dozens of curious little kids who wanted to gawk at Wazungu (did I tell you that means white person/European yet? Well, it does.)

We visited the guy who was selling sandals made from tires. I got myself a pair for about $2. This, I think, is an essentially African souvenir. Forget the mass-produced carbon-copy ebony carvings and wax-prints, the rich tapestries, the bizarre novelty musical instruments – no, all I want is a pair of sandals made from a set of Goodyears, like real Africans would wear. (If you want some, I can bring you a pair if I see them again. Just ask.)

We probably did sandal-guy some good, because when we showed up, we brought a huge crowd with us. Everyone wanted to see what the white people were doing. We're a novelty. They don't see us out there that much. People stare, and some people touch. You can hardly blame missionaries for leaving their kids at home when they go out.

After a while our crowd dispersed. Presumably because we didn't do anything bizarre like fly or try to eat a baby or anything. A few children stuck around. Whenever I turned to them, they'd back up all cartoonishly and some would run and hide. A couple times I embraced it and mugged for them, which some found hilarious while others found it terrifying.

At one point, I walked off on my own toward the beer tents (some things are the same all over the world) to see if I could find a cold soda (soda baridi, they say). This proved to be a mistake, because when you mix large crowds and alcohol and curiosity, tact disappears. Lots of people shouted at me, and though they weren't trying to be mean, it was terribly uncomfortable. Maybe if I spoke better Swahili, I'd have felt better about it. It didn't take long for me to forget the soda and turn around and walk back toward the perceived safety and familiarity of the other white folk.

I am not used to being the minority. But in Africa, that is exactly where I find myself. The novelty of being a celebrity was cool for about five minutes, and then I just got this indescribably awkward circus-attraction feeling. This is probably the feeling some people get in the United States when they visit another part of town or
someone else's church or school.

Enough about the market though.

We're going to show the Jesus film tonight in Jangwani. I'll try to get a picture or something of the screen we built and the crowd. Next week, we're going hunting. I've never hunted before. Might as well start where there are lions and hyenas and cobras. I'm sure I'll have a story to bring back then.

Until then,

jim

The Fire

This happened yesterday while you were sleeping.

A man runs into the Shermans house and yells something in Swahili.
Steve responds in Swahili.

"Let's go." he tells me.
"What is it?" I ask.
"Fire."
"Where?"
"By your house."

I drop everything and I run. Down the stairs, out the front door, around the Shermans house, past the soccer field, past Brook's house, past Bibi's house, and I see my house with a wall of smoke rising up behind it carrying ash and debris over my head. It is windy and the smoke is moving fast.

I open the padlock on my door, run through the kitchen into my bedroom and throw important things into my trunk. Camera first. Books. Sleeping bag. Malaria pills. Warm clothes for Kili. I turn to leave, but I stop and fish out my camera and throw it over my shoulder before I run outside. I leave the trunk because the fire is not here yet, and I don't know where it will go or what it will do. A brick wall stands
between my yard and the burning grass and the thick white smoke on the mountainside.

More people have come – men, women, children, anyone who lives on our small, dry hill – and the smoke is swirling around them, billowing over my yard and around it toward the houses extending behind it, the other missionaries homes. My house is at the edge, the first line of defense. Next to my house, there is a small cluster of houses for Bible school students and teachers. A wide strip of dry, dead, thirsty grass stretches down the hillside from our homes, and beyond that, the firebreak. The flames are inside the firebreak, and they are marching through the grass toward our houses, leaving behind a circle of ash.

I jump over the wall and Nestori is there, cutting branches from a eucalyptus tree. I take one. I do not know how to fight fires, and there is no water around. Instead we all have tree limbs, rich and green and full of leaves and life, and we swat the fire with them as it eats the dying grass. Even children fight the flames, pounding the ground with small branches. We swat, the flames recede, and they come back stronger and eat more grass.

The wind is against us, and the fire is overwhelming. The flames forge toward our homes, and in some places they are taller than I am. The ring has reached the path that lines my wall, the only thing standing between my tinderbox of a yard and my home. The smoke is overpowering, blown by the changing winds, and I cannot help but breathe it into my lungs and it chokes me. I cover my mouth with my shirt, but the smoke still gets through. And so I run, gulp for fresh air, and run back. The grasshoppers jump and flit naked, their skin and wings taken as they've fled the flames.

I am hot and frustrated and out of breath, and I want to quit, but I am without sufficient excuse to leave the others, the women, the children, the missionaries to fight the flames without me. I am praying for help with the wind and simultaneously wondering how God can allow such a beautiful and useful thing to be so dangerous, to do such damage. This fire is not beautiful like the ones I have watched across the valley as farmers burned their fields at night. I am not taking pictures. I am sweating and grunting and gasping for air. I have calluses on my hands and they're already open and every swing of the branch stings, but the fire will not go out and we are the only things to stop it. Steve is next to me, and I tell him sarcastically that I am not having fun anymore.

The fire is creeping toward a cluster of trees, and I run in and begin to try to swamp it with my branch. I am downwind. My back is to the trees, and the fire is moving toward me and the flames are as high as my waste. A gust of wind. The flames are at my feet, at my jeans. "Get out of there!" comes from Steve's mouth, strong and desperate. I squint in the smoke and begin to run out of the fire. I feel the heat of the flames against my skin, yellow flames swiping at my face, at all of me. I raise my arms as I run, and behind me the flames take the ground I was standing on. I run beyond the smoke, into grass that will be consumed in a few minutes, and as I gasp for air I can smell burned hair on my arms. I feel my beard, and the hair is short and curled. My face is hot, but I am not burned. Only my hair is singed, gone from the underside of my arms and curled lightly up at the back of my neck below my baseball cap, now drenched in sweat. I am unharmed, but I'm going to have to shave.

The fire takes several acres of land behind my house to the east and south. It stops only at the path beside the brick wall. One side is completely burned, but the grass next to the wall is untouched. It doesn't get into the cluster of houses next to mine, only a short footpath away. It consumes a long stretch of grass, creeping toward the missionary houses behind me, in one place only twenty feet from one with a thatched-grass roof. Trevor tells me that they stopped it at one spot with a single bucket of water. Had it gone past, the wind could have taken it as far as his house, the last one on the hillside. Now, there are several acres of black land and sparse trees unharmed by a hasty and thirsty fire that wanted nothing more than to eat lots of grass and cover as much ground as possible.

The fire started inside our firebreak. Two kids who live on our hill were carrying coals to start a fire near their garden in the valley and dropped them in the grass along the way. They owned up to it later and received a public beating.

Steve tells me this happens at least once a year and that they don't have any pictures of people fighting fires. Now I know why. I had my camera with me the whole time, and not once did I think to stop and take a picture.

The only battle scars I've taken from this are the blisters on my hand and some singed hairs along my chin, on my arm, and at the top of my neck. All of our houses are fine. Still, I would rather not have to fight another fire in Mumba or anywhere else.

You Can Hear Ants

I just started a fire so I can have a hot shower tonight.

I've been here in Mumba for a little over a week now, and the adjustment has been kind of tough, as I knew it would be. I am learning just how attached to my standard of living I really am.

For starters, the food is different. Lynn Caraway affectionately refers to margarine for toast (Blue Band, anyone?) as axle grease. Lunch is usually rice and beans. We get American-like meals for dinner, but they're all just a little bit off. The other night, we had omelets, which made for our best meal so far.

The Shermans have missionary friends that live in the Rukwa valley a few hours away, and they have cousins visiting. They were up in Mumba for a day, and someone asked them what their first meal would be when they go home next week. He said they were going to Denny's. I thought, "Man, I could go for Denny's right now."

And at that moment, I realized that I was wanting Denny's and that something was seriously wrong. Seriously, Denny's? And I have only been here for two weeks. You don't realize just how much you're attached to things like greasy American food until they're gone.

But before you think life here is all mystery foods and rustic housing, hear this: A favorite evening activity here is playing Call of Duty. The Shermans have a wireless router that we use to play each other. Not a bad game, if I forget the fact that I've been regularly humbled by an 11 year-old along with everyone else I've played
against. Last night Aideni, a friend of Trevor's who lives across the field from me, got in on the fun. The Africans humbled me in soccer on the first day, and now they're humbling me in Call of Duty. It's great.

It's hard for me to get into my email. I have my computer set up to use a modem with a sim chip from a cell phone to get me onto the internet. It took me a few days to get into it, but now I've got it figured out. I pay by the byte, so it's going to be impossibly slow and expensive for me to put pictures up on here. I've taken around 300 so far, but they'll all have to wait for me to get home.

I have lots of pictures of ants. If you watch the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet, you may have seen one of those "World's Deadliest Animals" shows. I saw one once where Siafu, better known as army ants, were at the top of the list. They go into an area and clean out all of the living things. They devour rats and cockroaches and spiders and, sometimes, people trying to read.

Which brings me to how I learned that the house I'm living in (by myself) is built on top of a Siafu colony. The other night I was reading when Steve Sherman came over to get me for dinner. He went back outside then ran back inside and threw off his pants in my kitchen. He had ants in his pants. They crawl up your legs, and you don't feel them until they bite your thighs – the only remedy is to remove your pants and pick them off. But when we had eliminated the threat, we went outside, and the front walls of my house were swarming with millions and millions of ants, a group large enough to eat a sick or old person. They were taking it over. This is the first time I have ever been able to hear ants. Hopefully the last. But we took lots of pictures. You'll see.

The first week was pretty light, work-wise. Trevor, Steve and I have been building a movie screen out of bed sheets and 2x4s. When it's finished, and once our sound equipment is ready, we'll be going out to show the Jesus Film. Hopefully we can get started this week. This week I also started teaching Trevor some geometry and literature. Thankfully, I have a teacher's guide with all the answers for geometry. In literature, though, I fear I spilled all I had on the first day. Characters, setting, plot - conflict, crisis, resolution… What am I forgetting? (Amy, I'm looking in your direction.) I guess I can just make him read a lot and have "discussions." Also, I'll soon be working on a newsletter for their 70+ churches in the area.

Six weeks from now, I'm climbing Kili. Or, at least, I'll be trying to.

Four weeks after that, I'll be heading home. I miss all of you a ton, and I look forward to seeing you all then.

Time to keep that fire going.

In the meantime, keep praying.

jim

Ninafika (I Arrive)

It is hard to get on the internet, so I hope you’ll forgive me for taking so long.

First and foremost - I’m here and my stuff is here. Beyond that, there’s little more I can ask for. I’m still a little tired. Jet lag will do that to you. At 12 am Tuesday, the sun was coming up as we were going down into Amsterdam. Of course, it was almost six am there. There is something wrong with having another day begin when the last one has not yet ended. So I roamed the Amsterdam airport groggily until I met up with Gloria, a fellow traveler to Dar Es Salaam and onward to Mumba, whose children work as missionaries there and were provided us transportation.

If I am to file one grievance against the airport in Amsterdam, it is that they took away two unopened bottles of Dr Pepper as we were checked through security to board our plane. I purchased them legitimately at DTW, and I will not forget the offense. Dr Pepper poses no threat to air security.

Nevertheless we arrived (almost) on time in Dar Es Salaam where Mike and Lynn Caraway met us with Luka, a three year old they’ve taken under wing from their orphan ministry. His mother abandoned him in the woods as an infant, and after the family found him and returned him she abandoned him again. He was found and brought to an orphanage in Sumbawanga as little more than a skeleton. The Caraways usually take in a handful of orphans to nurse back to health, and they've temporarily adopted him (you cannot officially adopt a Tanzanian unless you are a Tanzanian) while they search for a home for him.

We stayed two nights there with a day in between to run errands and change money in the big city ($500 USD bought me 569,000 Tanzanian shillings.) We spent an afternoon at a pool/hotel on the Indian Ocean and had dinner at Subway, the only chain restaurant with any presence in Tanzania.

Yesterday, we drove across the country to Mbeya where we’re currently staying until we go onto Mumba tomorrow or Sunday. That’s where I’ll live until November. The main highway runs from Dar Es Salaam through Zambia, and it goes right through Mikumi National Park. Just beyond the entrance, we saw the aftermath of an awful accident that took place the night before. A semi truck sat in the middle of the road, still smoldering, and a passenger bus had careened off the side of the road into the trees. It looked as though it might have rolled over. There were probably lots of casualties.

Further down the road, the highway along a cliff up a mountain. Lynn told me that vehicles often break through the barriers on the side of the road and plunge over the cliff. It’s no wonder, as it’s a two-lane highway and people often pass precariously, usually at high speeds. Just as we neared the top, we saw a group of people gathered at the edge of the road and skid marks attesting to yet another tragedy.

Beyond the mountains is Iringa, one of the bigger cities beyond Dar Es Salaam. We stopped here for some lunch with some missionary friends of the Caraways. Less than two minutes on the road (a dirt drive that leads back to the main highway) we lost a tire. Mike and I changed it. I got dirty in the African sun, and it felt like I had arrived. We drove the rest of the way to Mbeya without a spare tire, and much of that leg was at night. Driving at night, as you might guess, is not a favorable option. Mike reinforced this point of few. In Tanzania, you needn’t worry about bandits harming you to take your stuff. “They’ll steal your stuff,” Mike said, “But they won’t hurt you.” The same cannot be said for Kenya where, as I understand it, the punishment for robbery is the same as the punishment for murder. There’s little incentive there to leave people alive after you’ve robbed them.

Still, we made it to Mbeya where we’re eating and resting well and staying safe. This morning we had pancakes and this afternoon I got a haircut (from an Indian barber – he did a good job, Mom) for 4,000 shillings, or $4. So for now, the culture shock has been minimal. Pancakes help that, along with fatigue. Tomorrow we’ll spend another day here and depart on Sunday for Mumba, which is another 6-8 hours beyond here, depending on road conditions.

Thanks for your prayers. Pictures tomorrow. Maybe.

jim

Here we go

When there is chaos, God is doing something.

The last three weeks have been filled with chaos. I sent out support letters, waited for responses, waited to play things by ear. I made a packing list two weeks ago. I whittled away at it slowly, exhausting my life's savings (okay, past year's savings) stocking up for the trip, buying everything from floss to meningitis vaccines, compiling a small library of essential reading for the trip after many trips to thrift stores and book stores (see the bottom). If nothing else, I will have stuff to read. I made more lists, revised the old ones, filed them away neatly. Do you know how many little things you have to do before you leave the country for three months? Do you know how much worse it is if you're a procrastinator?

I prepacked, I unpacked, I repacked, I depacked, I...mispacked. Okay, I packed. I repeated. Tonight, I pulled everything out and did it again. I understand why some people hate traveling. And as I have crammed three months of living - frugal living - into a trunk, a duffel bag and a backpack, I have at least a little bit of worry that something important isn't in there.

Packing chaos aside, I can think of no better way to spend my last full day in the United States than to sit in a ballpark with my dad and my brothers, eating a hot dog and watching Nate Robertson throw a gem and the Tigers gain another victory.

But everything was waiting for me when I came home. The trunk, the lists, the little things, the chaos... The good-byes. Just as we were driving down my block, "Time to say good-bye" came out of the iPod. Not kidding. It's a beautiful song, one that just about moves me to tears even when I'm not about to leave everyone I know and move to a foreign country for three months, but it reminded me that at noon tomorrow, I will leave.

My Uncle Jim and Aunt Bonnie stopped by to bid me farewell, to offer prayers of support. After they were gone, I stood with my family - brothers and sisters and parents all in one room - for one last time and told them I was thankful for them and that I had their support. I cried. I am thankful for my family. I said good bye to Jon and Mary, then Jon and Bethany. Tomorrow morning, I will say good bye to Stephanie and Mom, then finally, as I walk up the ramp at the airport, to my dad, and I will be alone in the world and all of the chaos will end regardless of whether or not my lists are all checked off or if I remembered to pack dental floss or if I feel the least bit prepared.

Or maybe, then again, the chaos will be just beginning.

And so you have my last blog before I am gone. I promise, they'll get more interesting after I land in Dar Es Salaam late Tuesday, jet-lagged and hungry and wondering where I can get dental floss.

One love.

Oh yeah, the reading list:
-J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King (I have to read them someday might as well do it now)
-Flannery O'Connor - The Complete Stories
-Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King
-John Steinbeck - East of Eden (This one is really, really long.)
-Chuck Klosterman - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
-C.S. Lewis - Selected Works
-Various - Great American Short Stories
-Elie Wiesel - Night
-A Thesaurus
-Strunk and White - The Elements of Style

My Call, My answer

I’m going to write about myself. And I really want to sit here and tell you that I’d rather not write about myself, and that I don’t usually indulge in myself all that much in my writing, but that would be a lie. I love to write about myself. You should read my diary - it’s all about me. Actually, you shouldn’t read my diary. Please don’t, it would be terribly embarrassing for me. But I can’t exactly sit here and tell you about what has been happening in your life for the last few months, can I? I have to tell you about my own, and why I’m going back to Tanzania and how this all came about in my life.

My church has held a missionary conference for as long as I can remember. They still do. Once a year, a few missionaries from across the world would come back home and put up a booth in the foyer behind the sanctuary, and stick it with all kinds of pictures and souvenirs for the church members to browse through and gawk at. They’d put out post cards with their pictures and the name of their country and a verse on them. I would hoard them, stick them in the pages of my Bible.

Speaking from the perspective of a sleepy kid who struggled not to nap in church and drew pictures of spaceships during the hymns, I always found the missionary conference to be the most interesting two weeks of the year. You got to hear people talk about interesting stuff. They talked about faraway places and showed videos of African choirs and pictures of dudes in canoes and people making porridge over open fires and stuff. Whatever anecdote they might have told at the beginning was probably enough to satisfy me for the rest of the service. It was interesting.

Even as a child, it energized me. The African missionaries especially. Nothing in the world was as exotically different and shocking as Africa. The people were darker, their houses were smaller, their food was stranger, their animals were bigger, their jungles were darker, their skies were bluer, their mountains were taller, their roads were bumpier, their choirs were louder. Africa was fantastic and unreal, and I had to see it someday.

But then I grew up.

Ever kid has a similar top-five for vocational pursuits. Somewhere in there you’ll see astronaut, professional athlete, fireman, race car driver, and/or ninja. And inevitably they fade away and get replaced by far more realistic, lucrative, and boring jobs like lawyer, doctor, teacher, engineer, architect. Though, honestly, if we could all be ninjas, we’d all be ninjas. And the world would be a lot safer. But that’s beside the point. In my top five may at one point have been Missionary, that’s how much I was into it. But it faded away, too.

And I went through high school and college, and knew that I’d never be an astronaut or a quarterback or a ninja (not in any full-time capacity with benefits, anyway), but I never could figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Through all of the confusion and career conundrums, though, there was a constant of involvement in ministry. I stayed involved on campus or in youth group, I served on staff at Grace Adventures for three years, and in 2005 I got to go to Africa. This wasn’t the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams. In fact, in retrospect it seems like it all came about in such an unplanned, sudden spiral of events that one day I found myself sitting on an airplane with my (then) future brother-in-law and another kid from Muskegon, asking where it was that I was going and if I had remembered to pack enough soap. The soap, as it turned out, was irrelevant, because they lost our luggage and I had to buy some there anyway. When I got my stuff ten days later, I was already thoroughly attached to the African soap, as well as the boxers I’d bought at Woolworth’s and the secondhand clothes I’d haggled for in the markets.

Anyway. When things arise in such an abrupt, unexpected manner as the trip to Tanzania did, without my planning or consent or selfish ambition to get in the way, it seems as though there are other forces at work in your life and in the world. One night as we sat around a campfire, celebrating the Fourth of July in true African style with rice pudding and “barbecue” (its true identity escapes me now), all of the things about Africa I’d thought as a kid came rushing back to me, unhindered and unflavored by my grown-up impressions and exposure to academia and the media. And suddenly Africa again became the mysterious place that I loved and had only then started to experience. And I decided it might not be so bad to come back again someday.

One day, Grand Valley State University decided they’d had enough of me and my money and that my credits were satisfactory enough for them to spit me out with a degree and tons of debt. I didn’t have a career path in plan, but I had enough ideas to survive on for a while. I did an internship with Relevant Magazine in their editorial department. When I got home, I searched for and found a job with a small business magazine in Grand Rapids. And always, I thought, before I really get going, I’m going back to Africa, at least for a while. Almost always, I targeted this fall, 2008, as a time to go. And when Barb Sherman called me last fall and asked if I wanted to go back, I knew that I would be on my way soon enough.

I got laid off at my job just before Christmas. Those circumstances are strange and they warrant a whole different conversation, but it suffices to say that it freed me up to pursue other opportunities, none of which panned out because there was something else more significant in my future, and I still had an open offer from Steve and Barb Sherman.

I don’t remember ever making a decision to go. I remember realizing one day that I was already planning to do this and simply had yet to tell the Shermans and my parents, and I guess myself, about it.

I am not qualified to be a missionary. And I don’t know for sure that that’s what God has blocked off for my entire future. But I know that this was something I had to do now. And I know that though God does not always call the qualified, he does qualify the called.

A startlingly brief, inaccurate, uninformed summary of Tanzania that should be taken with a grain of salt

I feel a little bit like a seventh-grader about to give a class presentation. You see, I want to tell you lots of interesting things about Tanzania because you probably haven’t been there, and you probably don’t know much about it. The majority of people can't point Tanzania out on a map. So if you can't, either, you're normal. So, let me begin:

Here’s some boring but essential stuff that you and I will both soon forget: Tanzania is in Africa, on the east coast. If you were to hold Africa like an ice cream cone, it would be at that webby part of your hand between your thumb and index finger. It’s the 34^th largest country in the world, about twice the size of California. For your convenience, I’ve included a map with a gigantic yellow arrow:

Tanzania is like Michigan, where I live, in that it’s surrounded by some Great Lakes – Lake Malawi, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Victoria. That’s probably where the kinship ends, though. Michigan does not have Tanzania’s mountains, nor its rainforests, nor its terrifyingly poisonous snakes, nor its man-eating lions, nor its tribal diversity. We do however have black bears and multiple peninsulas. Tanzania has no peninsulas and no black bears. Edge: Michigan.

The highest point in Africa is found atop Mount Kilimanjaro (If all goes well, I’ll stand there in October) and the lowest point on the continent is found at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika (If all goes well, I won’t stand there, ever), both of which are in Tanzania. Also found in Tanzania: The Serengeti plain, Zanzibar and the spice islands, Gombe National Park (where Jane Goodall spent lots of time writing down fascinating things about Chimpanzees) and Olduvai Gorge, where scientists say mankind was born, though I can’t confirm that because I wasn’t there when it happened. You’ve probably heard a little bit about all those things, just maybe not that they’re in Tanzania.

Also fascinating: Tanzania grows lots and lots of bananas. They’re a staple there, because they provide great nutrition and require relatively little work. A well-maintained banana grove will produce for 30+ years. Bananas need good rain and high temperatures, and Tanzania has both. Africa grows 35% of the world’s bananas, and the average African eats 550 pounds a year. So says a National Geographic book about Tanzania.

There's a lot more to be said, but I believe I promised a startlingly brief, inaccurate, and uninformed summary, and I'd hate to disappoint you.

I leave twenty-seven days from today. Then I'll have much much more to write.

Keep reading.

Jim

Pictures from 2005:

Thanks

Thank you. It has been my goal to get you here to share all of this with you. Now it's my goal to keep you here, to keep this interesting and relevant by not focusing solely on myself. I aim to serve a big God who has big plans, plans I don't yet claim to understand. This blog is about those plans and my role is to share my perspective on them as I take part in them. My plans are to watch and learn and live, and my hope is that He will find me useful.

I'll be keeping this blog because I love to write, and I hope you'll find my writing worth reading. I hope to have some stories worth telling - stories about His plans and His work and His creation and His people.

Africa is a big continent, the second largest in the world after Asia, and I wouldn't begin to claim to understand all of it. One of the things I have read and heard over and over is that Africa is diverse. Africans are united by geography and perhaps little else. It is impossible to equate Mauritanians and Mozambicans, Angolans and Algerians, Namibians and Nigerians. So what I will observe about Tanzania isn't necessarily reflective of the rest of the continent. In fact, Tanzanians are greatly varied among themselves: Most will never see the capital, Dodoma, or the other capital, Dar Es Salaam; most tribes have a language or dialect that isn't spoken by the next nearest tribe.

I have been to Tanzania before, but I am not an expert. So I go again as an amateur with wide eyes and a pen. And, when electricity permits, a laptop. I hope to share with you my perspective with a healthy dose of imagination and discernible truth. And, when electricity permits, photographs. For now, I'm counting the days (53, I think) until I land in Dar Es Salaam to trade in television, fast food, and showers with water pressure for beautiful landscapes under breathtaking night skies, ugali, and impossibly bumpy dirt roads.

Again, thanks for reading.

jim

Everything you need to know (and a few things you don't)

Here it is. The first post, the one that is supposed to sum everything up, the one that introduces me, my life, my trip, my purpose, my everything. In safely anonymous web-logging style, of course. This is where it all begins; this is where I begin to share this journey with you.

Let me start with this: How did you get here? Do you know me or not? I’ll tailor the summary for you.

If you’re here randomly or stumbled upon this: Maybe you googled “How did they make that skittles commercial?” and found my other blog (and you were inevitably disappointed that I can't answer that question), followed the links and somehow ended up here. That’s great. You probably don’t know me, and that’s fine. I’m going to Tanzania, partly because I couldn’t stop thinking about the place after I went there before and I wanted to go back, wanted to see it again and experience it and write about it and live and breathe and smell and taste it again. I wanted to meet its people and slap its mosquitoes and watch its sunsets and stare dumb-founded at its night sky packed with more stars than can ever be counted. Most people who go there will tell you they experience the same thing. I was fortunate enough to find an opportunity to return, to answer a call for a need and, lest you believe I think this is all about me, hopefully be put to work while I’m at it. And so, I’m going to Tanzania in August, returning to the States in November, if all goes well. While I’m there, you’ll move onto other things, googling John McCain and Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, Ralph Nader. You’ll watch their debates. Maybe you’ll watch the world series, too. I thought I’d be bummed about missing it, but the Tigers won’t be there anyway. So, for those of you who don’t know me, now you at least know why I’m going.

If you’re here because you do know me and followed a link from facebook, or read my other blog, or got one of my support letters and typed it in: Thank you. I’m glad to know that you’re interested. The very fact that you checked this out lets me know that you’re interested enough in what’s going on to know more, or at least to skim this and get the details. I can tell you much more here than I can in a one-page support letter, and I hope to do it well.

I went to Tanzania three years ago to serve as a youth camp counselor (following two summers as a camp counselor in the States). That opportunity arose because someone stepped up and encouraged me to check it out. Brook, who serves as a missionary primarily to youth, was visiting my church and a friend told me to talk to her. I didn’t want to go - I didn’t know anything about Africa, never considered spending any time there, didn’t need to see lions or eat ugali or catch malaria. But God worked through others and in a few months, I was on my way. There, I saw lions and ate ugali, but did not catch malaria. I also slept in villages, shared the gospel, sang the songs, and met Steve and Barb Sherman.

I came home, finished college, kept a job as a pizza delivery guy and got another as a part-time editor with a magazine in Grand Rapids. All along, I thought a lot about Africa, followed its news, talked incessantly about it and annoyed my friends and family, and tried to find the opportunity to go back. Last fall, Barb Sherman called me (I talked about this in my letter. If you read that, you can go onto the next paragraph. I won’t mind.) and told me she had an opportunity. She said they were looking for someone to join them in the summer/fall of 2008 to help for a while as her son, Trevor, planned to show the Jesus film and needed some adult supervision. There’s no shortage of work to be done in Tanzania, and they could use a hand around there anyway. Steve later told me they wanted to start a newsletter. That’s something I know how to do – I can run the software, I can write the articles, I can plan the layout and get the thing rolling.

As for what else I’ll be doing there, I’m not entirely sure. There are opportunities to help teach lessons for the Sherman’s children, Trevor and Stefanie, as well as to teach English in the pastor’s school there. And, like I mentioned, I’m going with the faith that there’s no shortage of work to be done.

Writing is my outlet. This is how I sort things out and make sense of the world. And I hope you find it worth reading. I’m going to try to update this weekly to keep you posted on my thoughts as well as my needs, and I'll share some of the things I learned last time I was there and since I’ve been back. Tanzania is only one piece of a large, diverse continent, and I’m not about to act like I understand it. But I can sure wonder about it, and there will be lots of stories to tell.

Thanks,

Jim