Dear friends, February 16, 2001

Once again, greetings from Africa! It=s been about two months since my last travelogue letter, and unanswered e-mail are once again piling up. So I have decided it is time to write again.

Thanks be to God, I am still quite fine. My recent two weeks of meetings in Rome was a wonderful chance to regain a few of the kilos I had lost during my first 4 months here. I found some of the simplest foods like bread and pasta, wine and cheese to be the greatest treats. And for however much I may grumble now about having to go to Rome for these *&^##%! meetings, I am sure by the time next January rolls around I will be quite ready to go!

My health remains sterling. Still no typhoid, no malaria. If God or the gods are reading this letter, please be aware that I am not boasting. I=m only reporting. I knew before I came here that it is never a matter of IF I will get malaria in Africa, but only of WHEN I will get it. Till then I notice and enjoy each healthy day. And I am extremely grateful.

We began our second semester the second week of February. The details are still shaping up. For sure I am teaching a class on the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology); an elective on Karl Rahner; and one Scripture course. It is listed in our handbook as AIntroduction to the Bible@. But I had all of these students in AIntroduction to the New Testament@ last semester, and they are simultaneously enrolled in another course called AIntroduction to the Pentateuch and Historical Books@ (roughly the first half of the Old Testament. So the content of my own incredible shrinking introductory course continues to disappear. In another few weeks we will see if there is anything left of it at all.

One of the duties as Formation Director I must say I never expected is that of driving instructor. It so happen that our third and fourth year theologians had never been encouraged to drive. Quite the contrary pervious formation directors had seems driving as a privilege they reserved to themselves. For me driving around Africa is a great bother. In addition, I ask myself, what good to the mission is a deacon or priest who can=t drive? So these last few months I have been introducing as best I can two Tanzanian and three Indian scholastics to the fine art of defensive driving. All in all, it is really great fun and I enjoy the one-on-one time with them. But this last Wednesday=s drive was something to write home about.

In my scale of road trips from hell, there are a number of criterion: driving in a foreign country where you don=t speak the language fluently, on treacherous mountains roads you have never seen before, being lost; running low on fuel with no gas stations anywhere in striking distance (and without a wallet) while at the same time the sun is setting, you are still far from home and it begins to rain. I had all these at once PLUS an Indian student driver with just slightly more Kiswahili than I knew.

Once we began seriously to doubt that the dirt road we had been on for over an hour wasn=t leading back to the blacktop highway as we had hoped, my student driver and I did have the humility to stop a man walking along the side of the road to ask in our halting Kiswahili whether this road led to Morogoro. The man was very talkative and seemingly helpful. While climbing uninvited into our landrover he warmly assured us we should just go straight ahead. So we resumed our trip. But as the man=s breath began to fill the cab of our car we began to realize the seriousness of our mistake. He was pretty drunk. But not so drunk that he wasn=t able to direct us right to his house, another 10 kilometers further up the wrong road. At the next village we humbly asked directions again, and to our inquiries about the road to Morogoro, the more insistently we pointed ahead, the more adamantly they pointed in the direction from which we had just come. So there was no alternative but to turn back.

By now it was getting dark and our fuel was seriously depleted. Retracing our route we passed for a second time a group of men sitting next to a disabled truck packed to the sky with bananas. They waived for us to stop. Now it is a serious rule in Tanzania these days not to stop for such people. They could be bandits, especially along the more heavily traveled roads. But this was the middle of nowhere that any self-respecting highwayman could make a living. In any case, I thought it would be better to have one or two of them with us in the car if we ran out of gas in that lonely place in the dark than to pass them by in smug false security. They would be more likely to know what to do then we would. So we stopped. They were ecstatic and asked for a lift to the Dar es Salaam highway. We agreed, and in the blink of an eye they had opened the back of the land rover and proceeded to load at least eight huge, handwoven baskets full of mangos to take to market in Dar. Each basket was so big it took two men to carry. Once the mangos were completely loaded two men squeezed in among the baskets and we were off again.

Then the rains began...just sprinkles at first but it was one more thing to consider. I tried to weigh in my mind whether the extra weight of the mangos and the two men was an advantage or a disadvantage. I knew we would now use more gas, but the fully weighted car handled better on those bumpy roads. There were two arguments that won the day for me. One was a Marxist analysis of human nature: that with all those mangos in the car these two men were not likely to abandon us if we ran out of gas; and the second was a Stoic appreciation of fate. If we were going to run out of gas, then we would run out of gas. There was nothing we could do but keep driving and stop worrying.

The low point of the return trip was probably the moment when Sunil, the Indian student driver (who really is very good) stalled out on a steep incline just before a blind curve on the worse part of the ascent up the highest mountain we had to pass. With the nose of our landrover pointed heavenward like a prayer, Sunil was unable to find first gear. With each attempt we rolled back a few more feet toward the edge. Now the men in back began to grow restive. But to his credit Sunil never gave up (even though he later shared with me a story of a similar near death situation he had survived in India...a situation he was mentally replaying as he valiantly searched for first). He never called it quits or asked me to take over (thank God). Somehow he discovered the gear, the car lurched forward, and the worst was over (although we didn=t know it then).

We reached the blacktop road safely but in complete darkness (we couldn=t risk stopping earlier to figure out how the British had engineered the headlight switch). After dropping off the mango men I took over driving and we made a beeline for home, the fuel gage blinking its furious warnings all the way home. But we made it. We were both surprised and grateful. We had had an adventure. Something we could both write home about.

So that=s another brief taste of my life in East Africa. It=s really never dull. And I continue to thank God each day that his loving providence has lead me here. I continue to keep each of you in my fondest thoughts and daily prayers. As ever, Fr. Dan