The stress is building...
Last week was paradise. We trucked happily to Ruaha, bouncing along in the back of the Green Bomber, singing merry songs and playing silly games and having a good time. We sat on porches in front of little stone chalets and watched hippos play twenty feet away in the river while zebra and impala and giraffe came down to water. We ate fine British meals and played bottle-cap poker while watching hyraxes scamper over the rocks. We went on game drives in open-air, stadium seated land rovers while sipping fine soda like Fanta Passion and Stoney Tangowizi. At night the hippos came up from the river and you never knew what you might run into on the path after dark...
Yesterday, we had our own church service, with two guitars and a banjo and an African drum and small clay pots. We played the Danes at soccer and watched a projected movie (a Masumbo first) where men in ultralights followed migrating birds. Today, we were tested on crocodiles and flamingoes babboons and the social life of the incredible naked mole rat. And we prepped. And tonight we pack.
Because tomorrow we leave at the crack of dawn for a little town, accessible only by Land Rover over a motorcycle track, an hour into the hills outside of Mbeya. There, we will split into pairs and walk off into the hills to meet our host family and begin our homestays with the Wasafwa. We will spend eight days sleeping, eating, drinking, and hopefully working and talking with our hosts, trying to make friends and cross cultural barriers and gather anthropological data. No professor, no cultural brokers, no schedules, no translators, nothing but you, your tentmate, and your new family.
Excitement and anxiety...but mostly curiousity. Who knows what the next eight days will bring?

Quick Update:
After a fast and furious week of classes and papers, including four lectures this morning (did you know that naked mole rats live in colonies with a queen, breeding "kings" who are deathly afraid of her, and workers? that some workers are genetically preprogrammed to break free and form new colonies?) we are taking a quick breather. Tomorrow some of us will hike a mile across the fields to a cement-and-thatch building to sing choruses and hymns in Swahili and hear Pastor Evony give the sermon (also in Swahili). The drums will pound and temperature will rise and we will be greatful for every cross breeze that blows our way; the smell of sweat and unwashed bodies packed onto cement pews has become the smell of church to me. But something draws me back every time: Pastor Evony's warmth of heart, the beauty of the praise choruses, the hospitality of the people...and the fact that every Sunday, underneath flowers and strings of styrofoam packing peanuts and surrounded by smiles and ordinary people, my heart is lifted up and I smile too.
Monday we leave for Ruaha, again; three days and two nights of bahaing in Land Rovers and watching for animals. After that, a few days of classes, and then the apex of our journey: we leave for a week-long homestay. We will live, eat, and sleep with our respective host families for the entire week: total immersion. God help my broken Swahili.
Then we go to Lake Malawi to recover on sandy beaches; a week of classes later, we are off for a final week in Zanzibar, and the program is over. So strange to see the end in sight...but very exciting. Because then the adventure of a wholely new kind begins: Travelling Tanzania by bus, working and observing development work in the field, and seeing what it's like to be, in a little way, on my own.

Back so soon in Iringa! It's a rare blessing. Everyone else in Tanzania is trying to be a cool American rapper, so it's time to give a shout out to:
Ben Howard, my hero, for finding me a house next semester. Love ya, bro...
All my housemates, the thought of whom brings a smile to my face. Hope your year is going swimmingly!
Cheryl Winter, for an actual real letter! Awesome! Things are swell, and COD is all over the place. Even used "posit" in a paper on brown hyenas the other day!
Becca Clark, Dave Truesdell, Ryan Alo, and all others who send the amazing valentines + Jolly Ranchers! I ate them all!
All those who take the time to post and write...those are moments of joy in a sea of junk email!
All those Houghton senior who I will not be able to see graduate...keep in touch!

And, a general news brief. I just bumped my plane ticket back until the end of May; so I will be hanging around in Tanzania post-program for a month, helping a local developer with the Anglican Church, returning to the Rukwa valley to teach English to kindergartners and show the Jesus film and maybe piki piki a little, going to Dar es Salaam to observe some new ministries to Muslims, and maybe even going to an Ethnomusicology conference. Maybe. Now all I need to do is rustle up some money for bus fares and such :) I'm super excited about being "on my own" for a little while (don't worry mom...I have good local contacts everywhere). At home or at school, I'm surrounded by friends and family and people my age. A month of wandering will be a good time to develop some perspective, see things through the eyes of new companions: Tanzanians, Muslims, Anglicans, missionary families, or just myself without all my familiar peoples.

I'll be leaving Dar es Salaam on May the 23rd, laying over for a day with a friend in London and heading home on the 25th. By June, I'll be in Houghton, writing my final papers and preparing for a summer leading youth into the wilderness for Houghton's STEP outdoor adventure program. So...for friends at home, let's get together really quickly while I'm home! And for friends at school...I won't be there for graduation...keep in touch. And for friends coming to Tanzania this summer...I might get to see you right before leaving!

Thought of the day, from Walter Wangerin: in Christ, we see ourselves as in a perfect mirror. In His death on the cross, we see the inevitable end result of our lives, laid bare in all its horror. But we also see resurrection. Christ came not just to pay the price of our sins, but to experience our lot so that He could lead us through to the other side. He shows us precisely how a grain of wheat is nothing until it gives up, and dies, and is buried, so that God may cause it to become something wonderful.

Dear Jeff, Josh, Nate, Chris, Aaron, Dave Hough, and Clarky, and all other motorcycle riding friends:
I have a sunburn. Do you want to know why? Because I spent last week as one of the only white people in the Rukwa Valley of Tanzania. The Rukwa valley doesn't have much of an infrastructure: one or two dirt doubletrack roads connecting villages, and a number of cattle trails. Between hills, dips, rivers, erosion, cattle, and encroaching thornbushes, they're pretty tough, rutted, muddy, bouncy roads. Why am I telling you this? Because last week, while you were no doubt ensconced in some school some where, buttoned up against the cold, I was riding a Honda XL125S dirtbike over these roads and through those rivers. It's a real pity you're stuck in snowland. :)

To everyone else: last week was spent on the road to Rukwa and back. It's an intriguing place: difficult to access (our amazing driver had a hairy time getting a ten-ton ex-military truck down the hairpin turns on the rutted swithback down the escarpment) and very undeveloped. Two missionary families are the only white people in a huge valley which stretches as far as the eye can see from where we stood on a granite slab four thousand feet above the valley. We had an amazing time exploring, going to the exploding native church, helping out at an outdoor evangelistic meeting, showing the Jesus film in Kiswahili, and interviewing some pretty incredibly missionaries. We also had quite a bit of fun tangling with their children...it was good to see American kids and goof off with them again.

I look at my hands and my feet and my legs and see a hundred different scratches, bumps, bruises, splinters, thorns, stings, bites and blisters, and I marvel. Each one has a little story to it's own, and each is precious to me. They are the accumulations of an active life, a full life. My muscles are aching and screaming from climbing a mountain and riding for two days over crummy roads. I don't think my fingernails will ever be clean again. I'm still spitting dust from riding the piki pikis. But there is a smile on my face. I think my heart is the same way. Some places are broken, some are sore, some are empty. Some days I feel alive and free and others I am tragically not. Eli Knapp, faculty and friend here, put it best: in our humanity, we are broken, and will never be whole. Some days we are vital and strong, and other days we are not. We gain ground, and we lose it, and gain it back again, and we will never be whole in this life. Only in this weakness can we be made strong.

Closing thought: from Sadhu Sundar Singh: You cannot live life without bearing a cross; if you refuse the cross of Christ, you will inevitably carry another. Pause, and consider: what cross are you carrying? Is it worth it?