It was ten years ago yesterday that our KLM flight touched down in Amsterdam for a four hour layover. I was with a fairly motley crew: my father, my uncle, two of my cousins*, and a youth minister friend. We were on our way to a remote area of Zimbabwe were the Nhowe Mission had been established some 30 years prior. The mission had a school that was thriving. If memory serves me correctly, there were around 1,000 students at the school.
My uncle, Steve, had been involved in supporting the construction of a hospital on the mission grounds, since the nearest hospital was around a hundred miles away. That summer was the beginning of my love affair with Africa. I had spent several summers selling Zimbabwean art at a little boutique that my mom owned in south Tulsa. I spent the early part of my summer reading colonial and post-colonial literature from Africa one-on-one with a Zimbabwean professor at the university of Tulsa. I would spend my mornings at the gym, go home and read Chinua Achebe, Conrad, Dineson, Doris Lessing, Ngugi, and Chenjerai Hove, among others, for hours, and then sit for several hours a week to dialogue with Dr. Isabella Matsikidze, a wonderful and insightful reader of these texts. It was amazing to see the power and passion that came through the reading of a woman who read these works through with lenses so different than mine. That term only heightened my longing to board that plane in Wichita, Kansas, and head across two continents, an ocean, a sea, a desert, seven time zones, and several hundred years of western "progress."
I thought I loved the people then, but I had no idea how they would capture my mind, my heart, and my imagination during my (far too short) two week trip to Zimbabwe.
Over the next couple of weeks I think I will try to recapture some of my thoughts and experiences on that trip by re-visiting some of my journal entries from our sojourn. I hope that you will in some way enjoy this small glimpse into my past.
*For those of you that don't know me very well, the cousins with whom I made this journey were Brian and Chris. We all fell equally in love with the people of Zimbabwe on this trip. Over the next several months, Brian, who was entering York College as a freshman, and I chatted about our dreams to head back to Africa together. In February of 1997, Brian's life was cut tragically short when he was killed in a car wreck on his way back to school from a weekend at home. As I reflect on this time in my life, there is a great joy mixed with the pain of his loss. These were some of the best and last memories that we had together, the gift of two weeks in Africa for which I continue to thank God.
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