Give me patience, Lord -- and fast!

Life operates on a different kind of clock in Africa than it does at home. It's not uncommon to see someone standing by a tree along a road. They are waiting for someone who said they would be there to pick them up -- sometime late morning or midday, let's say. Eleven o'clock comes -- nobody. Noon -- nobody. Finally at one, the person shows up, and all is well. They explain that the traffic was bad, or that they had to stand in a queue at the bank. Everything's fine. No one is upset. There are no "you could have called me" or "that's the last time I'll depend on you!" kinds of comments. Everybody's pretty relaxed about the whole thing. They understand that stuff happens. Stuff happens all the time in Africa. You can spend a whole day going around to pay three bills, which you still have to do in person in many cases here, in cash, and you have to stand in a slow-moving line at each of them. Ugggh.

I've spent the last three days waiting -- waiting for Martin. I'm too far from the city to do anything on my own (apart from going to the museum yesterday). And I don't really want to stand in line with Alice to pay the bills. So, I've been hanging out here at the house, nursing my (mild) cold, and waiting. It's a very different pace than the one I am accustomed to! Of course, there's plenty to do while you wait. Fortunately, I brought some good books -- some related to the experience I'm having here in Africa, like one I spent a good deal of time with today on Rwanda called Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, written by Peter Uvin, who was one of my professors at Fletcher. It's a fascinating treatment of the conditions in Rwanda -- economic, political, historical, ethnic, etc. -- that led to the creation of an environment in which genocide became possible. I've had this book for months, planning to read it before I came so that I would be knowledgable about the situation I will encounter in Rwanda. Of course, I never got that time, so the book went in the bag with me. I'm also very interested in what's happening among certain evangelicals who are taking the challenges of our post-modern reality seriously, and engaging their minds, their lives and ministry at a new and deeper level, forming a new consensus that gets beyond the old denominational and conservative/liberal categories -- the so-called Emergent Church (or Emerging Church) movement. It is their conference on reconciliation I will be attending in Rwanda and Burundi, so I've brought along a couple of Brian McLaren's books (one of which I mentioned yesterday) so that I can have a better idea of where he and others in the movement are coming from. I'm liking what I read and wish I had written it myself. I look forward to my conversations with Brian in Kigali. I also brought along a novel of Gail Goodwin's, Evenings at Five, which also provides a nice diversion.

It has been tempting today to feel impatient, however. Too much sitting around, waiting! Argggh! Boring! But it has opened up a space for other things -- time to read, time to pray, time to nap, time to live life at a different pace. I think that might be part of what I'm supposed to learn in Africa.

Martin is back in Nairobi, finally! We've been on the phone all afternoon making flight arrangements for the next few days. Tomorrow at noon, we'll leave for Lokichokio in northwestern Kenya. From there we'll take a taxi to the Kakuma refugee camp, where we'll spend the night and part of the next day. I think that's where I'll be going to church on Sunday morning this week. All Saints' Cathedral in Nairobi one week -- a church in a refugee camp the next. Wow. We'll come back to Nairobi on Sunday evening, and head the next day for Entebbe, Uganda, on Lake Victoria, where we'll spend the night at Frank's Tourist Hostel (I'm not joking!), then fly to Yei, Sudan, on the 13th, where we'll be visiting the newly opened school of the New Sudan Education Initiative. I look forward to seeing kids wearing all those backpacks we sent from Christ Church!

Well, that's the news from Lake Victoria (almost). Three countries in three days. It's Tuesday, it must be Sudan. I know, I know. It's not sounding very much like a slower pace of life.

Oh well, I'm trying.