So what's this journey to Africa all about?

I guess with this first posting, I'm now a blogger! Always thought that was for other people, and wasn't (still am not) sure I had all that much to say. But I'm getting ready for a unique experience, and I not only want to be able to share it with others, but I really want to create a space where I can process the experience for myself, too.

I'm going to Africa. For a month -- the month of May 2008. I have wanted to go to Africa for a very long time. I've been lots of other places, seen a lot of the world, done exciting things -- but this will be a first for me. I've had many, many African friends, many of whom have invited me to come to Africa, and I have wanted to do that. But it just hasn't been the right time, or I just haven't had the right excuse to go.

And I have never wanted to be just a curiosity traveler to Africa, either. I knew that if I ever went, I wanted to spend a significant amount of time, be with real people where real people live, work, and breathe. A safari just wouldn't be the right thing -- at least not by itself. A one or two week mission trip would feel like it served more my desire to say I had done it than anything else. And I knew that I probably wasn't called (at least as far as I know at this time) to live and work for an extended period in Africa as some of the people I have admired have done.

So it all came together for me when three or four different opportunities presented themselves to me right about the same time, and I could resist no longer. Here they are in a nutshell:

Rwanda -- I was invited to participate in a conference on reconciliation in Rwanda. Wow. Having been a graduate student of conflict resolution at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the years following the Rwandan genocide, this was an experience I immediately was drawn to when I first heard about it. I will be there as a participant-observer, while Hutu and Tutsi Rwandans, together with people from various parts of Africa who are working on conflict resolution, restorative justice, truth and reconciliation issues, put their heads and hearts together to find new ways of bringing people together and healing the wounds that are still there. But it's about much more than Rwanda, of course, too. It's about all of us, our roles both active and passive in violence and injustice -- and how we move beyond them to new ways of thinking about and forming community. I'm eager to learn what I can from the people who are facing into their own history and in some cases their own complicity in the tragedy that was the Rwandan genocide.

Kenya -- ah yes, my friend, Martin Masumbuko. First met Martin while at the Fletcher School. Our friendship has grown over the years. Never know where he'll pop up actually. Sometimes his emails have come from a refugee camp in Chad on the Sudan border. Another time they kept coming from Congo (the DRC) on the Rwandan border where he was working for Save the Children (UK), working to rescue child soldiers from government and rebel militias. Yes, sometimes standing face to face with warlords negotiating for the release of their "soldiers." He's currently working in a refugee camp in Kenya on the Somali border. Martin is an amazing person. He's been after me to come to Africa for years. He wants to "show me the bush." Take me to places where most non-Africans never go. Just what I want to do. We'll be going to some of the places where he has lived and worked -- including Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, which is where the so-called "Lost Boys of Sudan" arrived and were rehabilitated after their years-long wilderness experience, and from where many of them later left to come to the United States. Martin is one of their heroes. He helped them get the care they needed when they were skin and bones. He helped them do the very first thing they told him and the others working in the camp that they wanted to do, which was, "we want to go to school." I'm going to be in Martin's hands for about two and a half weeks of travel -- through Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo. And we'll ride on trains and buses for much of it, instead of flying in and out of places on planes. (Apologies to Denis Fynch Hatton).

Also in Kenya, we will visit The Beverly School of Kenya. My good friend, parishioner, and fellow board-member of the Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is working with Kenyans to start this residential school for Kenyan children, many of them AIDS orphans. Tom is another amazing guy. I admire his drive, his competence, and most of all his compassion. Tom is a Matthew 25 Christian -- "when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me." I will be privileged upon my arrival in Nairobi to meet with Tom, and Alice Mudiri, the amazing woman who is the Head of the Beverly School, and to stay in the house where Alice is living for my first few days in Kenya. I'll have more to say about the school, all of these wonderful people, and this experience once I'm there.

Martin and I will also be traveling to Kisumu, Kenya, where we hope to visit St. Philip's Theological College in the Diocese of Maseno North. Bishop Shaw has asked that I go there to help encourage our continuing relationship with this part of the church in a part of the world where American Episcopalians are not always welcome.

Sudan -- Again, going back to my Fletcher days when I spent a good amount of time and energy studying and writing about the history and politics of this fascinating and frustrating place, I have longed for the right opportunity to travel here, with the hope that even if I could not be the Burgess Carr or Jack Danforth to the Sudanese (both of whom are Episcopal priests who have negotiated peace agreements for Sudan), I might at least do something to help build bridges and mend the fabric of the human family in some small way. Last year we became acquainted with the New Sudan Education Initiative (NESEI) and hosted Panther Alier (one of the Lost Boys) on a Sunday morning at Christ Church, Andover, representing NESEI and their efforts now underway to start secondary schools in South Sudan. When the teens at Christ Church decided to donate $2000 of the money they had raised to the first NESEI school, we challenged the adults in the congregation to match what they had done. So we gave nearly $4000 to a school that will open.... the first week in May! And I'll get to be there (God willing) within days after it opens. I can hardly wait.

Well, these are some of the things that have drawn me -- finally -- to Africa. And they are opportunities I have longed for. I harbor no illusions about making some huge difference in the lives of people in any of these places. But I can hardly wait to let them know that I (and many people back home) want to know them, and to share our lives with them, and to do what we can to work through the things that keep us living in such different worlds -- in spite of the fact that we are fellow travelers through time and space on this one small planet Earth.

More about it all later!