[a recent update letter to my fellow Tanzania students]

Hello, fellow wanderers.

Allow me to reintroduce myself, for I have not seen some of you since a certain springishly-April day seventeen months ago when I waved and watched goodbye as a charmingly beautiful green monstrosity of a Mercedes military truck bounced away on a dusty red doubletrack with all Tanzania's scrubby pretentious little acacias-pretending-at-trees and a million rocky hillsides for a backdrop.

So our seasonal migrations too different routes, and the young wildebeest with the wildy explosive morning hair and wildly electric manskirt set off on an odd journey of his own: a journey replete with expansive everything: subtly unveiled sunrises melding into sunny expanses of daytime over vast expanses of scrubby bushes, tall grasses, massive boulders and hills that would be mountains; and those expanses bathed in massive sunshine or draped in deluges of gentle never-too-cold rain, and all flowing into sunsets shot or settled across that massive expanse of Africa sky. I think I miss that the most about Africa: standing still in front of something so very big and slow and beautiful even while walking or driving or running or sitting at a kopje-top bar and sipping Stoney Tangowizi.

That journey led to more journeys less restful and contemplative, and those led to more journeys, and this is email, not autobigraphy. Yesterday I was taking some shut-eye in the passenger seat on the return trip from Jamestown because it was the end of a long work week and I was tired of western New York and the monotonous emptiness of gainful employment. Patrick looked over at me and said "Holcomb [this is part of the reintroduction thing--pay attention now], where are you? off kayaking somewhere?" I startled awake and told him no--I was on top of the Green Bomber, on the long red road to the Ruaha that stretches out and downhill and away and empty for ten or twenty or a hundred kilometers through the acacias and baobabs until the road becomes just a point. The wind was in my hair and the sun was on my face and the hali was nzuri in a way it only is in Tanzania.

A way that it is distinctly not in the mundane or oppresively exaggerated climes of Buffalo, New York, to which we were returning in a rusty, particularly loud and unrefined ambulance, painted poorly in a sick-emergency-neon-green and white. A poor match for the Green Bomber, may she roll on cheerfully in her happy, refined German way for as long as students need classy conveyance in Tanzania. A poor match, too, in drivers, for Ejedi was always good for interesting conversation, pole commentary on passers-by, good cheer and good will and good common sense. My current partner is somewhat lacking.

Which is a pity because we are both rookie EMTs (that's Emergency Medical Technicians for those of you not endowed with that blessed gift of parsing out acronyms from scratch) and we spend more time with each other than...well, than he spends with his spouse and I would spend with my spouse were I so inclined/endowed.

My heart returns often to Africa of late. Last month my brother and his budding family relocated to Moshi, TZ to teach at an international school. He wrote about the excitement and fear and exhaustion and exhiliration and shock of it all: the pain of leaving the familiar and the tears his little daughters shed at the airport and the excitement of driving Land Cruisers and running barefoot and teaching the little ones to count to ten in Swahili.

Last week I saw a tall, slender man at Children's Hospital who must have some Masai blood in him. Yesterday I watched The Constant Gardner. My flatmate Mike and I spent an evening over Yuenling and Pizza and The Postal Service sharing feelings of displacement as he readjusts from a year in Paris and I readjust from twenty-two years of irresponsibility and four years of Houghton into a real job and a real checkbook and real bills and the complete and utter unimportance of my feelings on the beauty of people and cultures and art movies.

So, here I am in an upstairs room in Buffalo, with a battered old Houghton computer and Iron & Wine in my headphones, thinking of Africa. My flatmates are puttering around, and the smell of cigarette smoke is in the air. It's odd that that scent is beginning to smell like home to me. It's odder to feel a sense of satisfaction at mundane things I used to scorn, like renting my own room, shopping for my own groceries, paying my own phone bills and balancing my own checkbook. I'm supporting myself--the hunter-gatherer equivelent of leaping out of a tree and wrestling my first waterbuffalo to the death and the outdoor-rec equivalent of starting a fire without matches. Unfortunately for me, there is no waterbuffalohide skin with which to make a cape and commemorate this accomplishment. Pity.

The first thing I did to the empty walls of my room was to put up a world map and my blue "I-climbed-Mt.-Uhambingetu" bandanna. It reminds me of the bigger world. I often feel like I'm killing time, punching in and punching out, going to movies by myself in a strange town full of strange people who I do not understand and to whom I am an unimportant enigma. It reminds me of travels past, and travels to come, and six billion people living in their tiny communities and tending maize or watching cows or driving ambulances so they can come home at night and have a beer with their neighbor and laugh with their children and dream about tomorrow.

In the meantime--I'm gainfully employed in Buffalo NY as an EMT--I drive ambulances and take blood pressures and ask where it hurts and what an infarct is and splint brooken bones and spend a lot of time in nursing homes and maybe someday I'll get to save a life. I ride a bicycle around to save money and have fun and get to explore the city, and because I don't have a car. Sometimes we get lots of downtime on ambulance shifts and I get to read Time or the Economist or the books on postmodernism that just came in the mail so I can finish that senior seminar paper and graduate. When I can, I visit Houghton, and when they can, people come up from Houghton and visit me. When I'm not studying for work and memorizing protocols, I think about how I can find a place in Africa or the Middle East or the Far East or Latin America, and whether I should go back to school for politics or sociology or Arabic or development or become a nurse or skip school altogether and become a paramedic, or even write a book or join the Coast Guard and jump out of helicopters and rescue people. I talk to flatmate Mike about travelling to Paris and Morocco and visiting my brother in Tanzania.

And I get all excited about September the 22nd, when my benefits from work kick in and I get dental insurance and I can finally get my wisdom teeth pulled and my eyes examined and not be terrified of getting sick or breaking a leg while doing something stupid. And that is definite sign that I am officially an old person, and perhaps in grave danger of becoming a responsible, old person as well. And that is the most significant aspect of me now: the transition (without even a decent euhneto ceremony) of a young reckless idealistic warrior into a young, reckless, wary, and practical businessman-warrior. Does that work?

I miss you all, and Tanzania more, and our sojourns and conversations there even more, and being served complimentary alcohol and those delicious worcestershire sauce pretzels while surfing between movies on my own personal TV screen on British Airways even more than that.

Cheers

once more...

my amazon shipment came today. last time I picked up a David Dark book, i tried to blog about it and found myself wanting to quote entire pages. lots of entire pages. i despaired. now i have to say it again. David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse and, it appears, The Gospel According to America are simply some of the best things you can read if you're into reading. if you grew up a Christian in America, then these can form a valuable part of your redemption.

and...the man writes with the vocabulary and passion of G.K. Chesteron, with a refreshing lack of consideration for restrained pacing or gentle introduction to topics. he's a literary whirlwind and completely unpredictable.

"An emotional disorder has settled upon us, a habitual anger that passes itself off as normalcy, and it isn't just directed at whatever Democrat or Republican might strike us an appropriate scapegoat for all of life's problems. We eventually feel it for people (neighbors, coworkers, relatives) whose opinions fail to coincide with our own and strangers who don't drive the way we think they should, an impatience that makes clear of generous thinking difficult...I don't want [future generations] to inherit a militant ignoracnce that confuses anger for strength of character or the momentary silencing of somebody else with victory...As the witness of the Jewish Christian tradition makes clear, the anger of human beings against what they percieve to be evil and unjust will never produce the righteousness of God (although, as anger goes, it usually feels terribly effective when it has hold of us), and confession is the only hope for minds whirling with contradictory impulses and filled with thoughts of courage and honor and freedom but increasingly incapable of connecting dots or adding two and two together...

"Like discipleship, the practice of democracy is a widening of our capacities for moral awareness and an expansion of our sphere of respect. If we have a steadily narrowing vision of people to whom we're willing to accord respect or if the company we keep is slowy diminishing to include only the folks who've learned to pretend to agree with us, we can be assured that we're in danger of developing around ourselves a kind of death cult, a frightened, trigger-happy defensiveness that is neither godly nor, in the best sense, American."

and...there's lot's more. :)