DearMe: lost and found in Europe and Africa

   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...

    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-...