Thank You And Last Look

I've realized that, in beginning this last post from Congo, a grateful posture is the most natural to assume. I hope that you can understand the incredible change that you've helped to enact in my life. You've sponsored an invaluable season for me. Thank you.

Before my arrival in Congo, I really didn't have many expectations of what the six months abroad would look like. I was too consumed by the fever of adventure to dwell on uncertainties of the future. I believe that I may have been running away from more than I was advancing towards. Nonetheless, I did advance into Congo.

Of course, nothing could have prepared me for the world that I found here. A place saturated in desperation. I was an unfortunate fortunate, walking streets thronged by disgruntled "have-nots". I became newly and painfully aware of my inherent wealth, as a Westerner.

Those first few months, I was locked inside of my guilt and denial. The gurgling and yawning jungle green and Kivu and Tanganyika darkened unto me. Congo's breath-taking Eden became my suffocation, and I lived in monotonous singularity. It seemed impossible to face another petitioning tongue, another protesting pocket.

What happened to carry me from then into now is quite simple. I parted the curtains of my prison, beheld a beautiful world, and finally ventured into it.

That is all that can be accredited to my own effort, here. Everything else has just happened to me, unpredictably, so that I came to rely on strange twists and wonderful oddities, almost every day.

Now that I've had a chance to reflect a bit, retrospectively, I see that my final state in Congo was akin to the first. Loneliness -- originally cursed, yet ultimately harmonic-- defined both the beginning and end of my stay. Congo humbled me. It caused me to take my own kindness seriously-- to give others a real place in my life, if only a small one.

I became able to live alone, purposefully and happily, in a place that seemed an impossible pit of condemnation, just a few months before. Momentum was given to me that won't be lost, but multiplied time after time. I carry it with me from this faraway heart of Africa with a greater faith in life's possibilities and a renewed courage to take first steps.

There are many other, perhaps more practical lessons that I've learned. All of them, however, owe their existence to the one that I've just described-- which of course owes it's existence to your support.

That is my simple story of minuscule action and giant reaction in Congo. Thank you for all that you've given. I am extremely excited to see you all, soon.

(Written in Bukavu, posted from the airport in Nairobi.)

Nearing The End

Hi, friends!

It's February, all ready! I'm scheduled to fly out of Kalemie (my true Congolese-hometown) on the 17th, and will spend a week in Bukavu, before my voyage home.

Other stuff:

I got my yellow belt in Shotokan Karate, this morning! And I'm quite bruised an battered, after having to fight the other two students and Sensai Sable.

Things at the schools have gone wonderfully! Next week will, of course, be my last week teaching.

I've started learning Swahili. A bit late in the game, perhaps, but I'll continue online studies when I'm in the US. It's a fairly simple language-- the grammar is easy. The hard part is, every word is new. So I'm doing a lot of memorizing.

I'm currently seeking scholarship opportunities, as I am planning to enter CU Boulder as a Linguistics major, this fall. If anyone has any suggestions or relevant connections, please send them my way!

Well. I'll see some of you, very soon!

At my friend Raphael's house.