The alarm clock is more of a reminder; we wake up naturally, with the sun around six am. The buzz catches us stumbling into shorts and socks and shoes and ducking into the warming morning air. The dew soaks our shoes within steps as we head for the trail. Our morning run is uphill to the road and back (mileage? this is Africa..."a few hundred meters" might be a mile and might be three). The red dust coats our wet shoes as the sweat pours into our eyes and makes us squint. I have forgotten my glasses, so the mountains are blurry green and grey patchworks in the distance, and the rolling hillsides and fields and rivers are a bit indistinct. We run on the outsides of worn doubletrack, avoiding the ruts and potholes dug by passing landrovers. I jump over one such rut to avoid the acacia branch that reaches into the road with inch-long thorns, begging for a piece of my flesh.

The return is reward for the determination it takes to get to the top without stopping. Downhill is bliss and through a gap in the low trees I can spy the Ruaha pouring through massive boulders upstream of the campus; the sun is just rising over it. We have time for a quick shower and sun-dry before the old cowbell rings for breakfast. Josef and the wapishi have cooked up a special treat: pancakes, devoured quickly with imitation syrup and pineapple jam. There may not be many maple trees in East Africa, but there are plenty of pinapples!

The nine o'clock class bell finds some sitting on logs, reading or scribbling in their journals, while others make small talk over coffee or simply sit and enjoy the morning. I am busily building callouses on my fingers: the one blessing of not having a drum is that Michael has taken it upon himself to improve my guitar playing. The song of the day is "Jesus, Be the Center," a cry that we are learning comes not just from the peace and unity of its simple chords but also from the jarring confusiong of the minor chords that I am hammering from a guitar that Tim has tuned to mimic a banjo.

Dr. Arensen, unless interrupted, like yesterday, by a neighboring biologist carrying a vine snake (poisonous...no antidote, either. But being back-fanged, it has to chew on you a little to deposit its venom...) will lecture for an hour (or two...this is Africa time, event time) on zebra social structure. Tea and pineapple (or mango...your choice) break follows, and then Eli will entrance us for an hour or so with ornithology and our native Swahili teachers will try to explain how each noun belongs to a different class, and each class has different subject and object pre- and in-fixes to be attached to verbs, ad infinitum. We will learn to enunciate properly, because the difference between "I understand" and "I am completely drunk" is the difference between Nime-elewa and Nime-lewa, and Hujambo means "Hello" while Hujamba involves passing gas. That's right...the Jamba Juice coffee houses in America don't sound so appetizing anymore...

Classes break in time for chakula cha mchana...the afternoon meal. The horsemanship people will head off to the farm, while the rest of us will swim in the river (just below the rapids and upstream of the hippo prints we found two days ago), explore the hillside through endless paths, or venture out into the local villages to make friends and practice our kiswahili. Often the local children will come in the afternoon to play net(volley)ball, futbol, or duck-duck-goose (we have enculturated this game into twiga-twiga-fisi [giraffe-giraffe-hyena] and feel proud of our translation skills).

The evening might bring folklore class, or storytelling around the campfire as Bwana Jon shares his African childhood with us, and the folklore students tell tales they have gathered throughout the week. The night will burn on as some play games while others read to the accompaniment of aspiring guitarists. Tonight several of us will gather to read How People Grow aloud. Our college journeys have led us to common places of questioning, discouragement, and doubt, and we are leaning on each other as we try to make sense of both the hope and hopelessness we see everyday.