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