Journeys of the Heart

August 1, 2008

I have learned that journeys of the heart cannot be measured in days or miles.  I have just returned from nearly two months of traveling and teaching in Tanzania and Mexico this summer with volunteers for Concordia College’s Global Language Villages (GLV).  According to my itineraries, I traveled 3852 miles to Amsterdam; 4288 miles from Amsterdam to Tanzania; and 2114 miles to Mexico City, a total of over 20,500 miles roundtrip.  I brought back remarkable  images, sounds and feelings  that I cannot forget.  I hope I will never be the same.

Just before I left, my nephew Dan set up a blog for me. However, as  internet access was very limited and unreliable on these trips,  I reverted to a pencil/laptop diary.  It is from those entries that I will create my blog.

June 2008

It seemed as if I would have plenty of time to prepare and pack, but my list of things to do kept growing longer, time slipped through my hands, and I was beset with technological woes. It was not until 2 am on Monday morning June 9 that I finally tumbled into bed. After 4 hours of sleep, I headed off to work for half a day then to the airport for my overnight flight to Amsterdam where I met up with the other 11 members of our GLV teaching team.

It was to be another eight hour flight before we would land at Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA).  We flew over Dutch windmills, cultivated fields of France, Italian snowcapped mountains, the blue Mediterranean, to the desert shores of Africa.   Then for several hours there were only the desolate and endless deserts of Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia, occasionally broken by an empty road or a spot of green beside a river that quickly disappeared into the sands.  Somewhere, over that unmarked territory,  the tensions and frets of the past weeks disappeared, their traces covered in desert dust.  It was dark when we arrived at Kilimanjaro,  nearly 24 hours after I left.  We were greeted at the Kia Lodge with the traditional fresh fruit juice (pineapple) and a cool washcloth.  I heard again the joyous Swahili  greetings of “karibu” (welcome) and “jambo” (hello).  In a strange way, I felt I had returned home.