DearMe: lost and found in Europe and Africa

Behind our house in Kikwit: the Kwilu River;  in the foreground the pointed pool umbrellas; and the groundsman. On this day ...  March 17, 1968 .  Dear Annie*, I was floating in our pool when your letter came.  I paddled over to the ladder and pulled myself up and yanked my towel off the sun umbrella, where it was drying lickety-split in the equitorial sun, and rubbed down. I was thinking, maybe a letter from you will help me.  These latter afternoons have been heavy on the spirit.  I teach till one p.m.  I’m happy in front of the kids.  But it’s a tug-of-war with the lead weight of the lethargy of the centuries at the other end. One example of the weight: most believe that the world is flat.  At one thirty our domestique , Baudouin, serves us the three-course European dinner.  The weather is now at its hottest, 85 degrees F.  That is not counting the humidity.  I want to retreat to myself then and do some writing.   But I hesitate and don’t want to really face myself so I hedge and ta

     On This Day Seven years before I wrote this letter, I was a senior at Lancaster Mennonite School and editor of campus newspaper.  Faculty advisor is Omar Eby, standing. I am seated, left. The invitation to teach came from the Dean.   March 18, 1969 to Lancaster Mennonite School.    Dear Bro. Good,  I was fore-warned of your letter by my sister Loretta.   She's in your German class.  She is half hopeful that I accept your offer although she "wouldn't want to be in any of my classes." I see my vocation as teaching in the broadest sense of the word, be it writing, preaching, or teaching.    Therefore, I plan to do graduate work in theology next year.   Perhaps  in a European university. Was it your infectuous love and facility with languages which gives me this desire?    I spent one year in Belgium and France learning French.   Prior,  I had thought that the Germanic tongues were my cup of tea.   B ut my love has gone to the Latins. I recall you saying to us incred

   My room at 4 rue du Conseil, Brussels, 1966-67   On This Day from my journal and mail 16 March 1967,  Thursday Dear Family,  You risk a lot having me as a son:    I think like a poet, write like a pessimist, speak like a prophet, take advice like the pope, pay my debts like the poor, date like a priest, and eat candy like a pig.    Moreover, my brethren, be ye followers of me as I am of Menno Simons and I guarantee you a happy life.  My letters probably give you a lop-sided view of me because my letter writing is for me a psychological recreation period.    That is, when something is irking me, I take to pestering other people.    So you miss all my composed, mature, pastoral moments.    They slip by unused across the pages of a book or are absorbed by the keyboard of a piano or just simply vaporize in the solemnity of my celibate room. Nobody is around to reap my pleasantness, so I learn to stand content reflecting the beauty of the universe like a flower unnoticed on the bare step

    On This Day The high school in Kikwit where I taught, 1967-68. Downtown Kikwit. The Belgians are gone.  Adieu. March 10, 1967: Dear kin,  I just learned where I'm assigned this fall--I shall go and teach in Kikwit, Congo, about two hundred miles east of  the capital, Kinshasa.  In 1964 the missionaries were evacuated and massacres killed numerous locals.  This is a city of about 14 thousand souls. Wayne and Susie Yoder are there, teachers in the same Mennonite program I am in.  The school is Mennonite Brethren and Congo Inland Mission.    I asked my Akron boss, Vern Preheim, for news from Lancaster County.    He said five bishops had sent an ultimatum to some committee about something—a coming split-off group called The Mennonite Messianoic Mission  (MMM). ...  These are probably the kind of things that convince Uncle Paul that he’s not so bad off after all in the bosom of the pope.    There is a Church-in-Myth and a Church-in-Realty.    The first has its birth in theology, Eur