“They said he tried to stab here—“ Brother pointed at the back of his own head.

“—but it missed, and cut along the head like this—“ he made a motion moving forward along the scalp.

“In fact, it was just like this—“ he grabbed the screwdriver from where it sat on the breakfast table and pantomimed the jab and cut.

“It was that same screwdriver?”

“Yes, this same screwdriver.”

I looked at it as he held it there in his hand. A normal standard-head screwdriver, long shaft, black and yellow rubber handle.

“We probably shouldn’t touch that. It’s evidence.”

“You’re right.”

He sat it down on the counter where I was making coffee. It landed right in the middle of my spilled coffee grounds.

“No, I mean, we should put that someplace clean. Like back on the table.”

“Yes, actually we need to put this in a plastic or something.”

He took it and put it back on the center spinner of the breakfast table. It sat there sadly on the lazy suzan, wobbling a bit from the weight of his hand.

That previous night, through the feverish haze of some dream, I had heard a knock at my door. I woke up thinking that I had overslept, “sorry, sorry”, threw off the mosquito net, stumbled towards the door, answered it with bleary and half-unseeing eyes. It was one of the aspirants.

“We are asking for keys.”

“Yes, sure.” I handed him the gate keys.

I closed the door and walked over to where my watch sat on my desk. It read 00:23. What the heck?

“They had found him around the tailoring classroom in the dark. The gateman was suspicious. He went to investigate.”

“He claimed he had just been watching the World Cup with the students, but no one had seen him. When they found him, the students were angry because people had been accusing them of stealing. They were shouting at him, ‘kabwalala!’, ‘thief’! Then they beat him.”

“There was another one there with him, but he ran. No one knows who it was.”

“Was it him that tried to stab the gatekeeper, or was it the other guy?”

“Yeah, they said it was him. That’s how he was caught. They said he tried to stab a student as well, but the screwdriver just went through his shirt and scraped him. He’s still claiming that he’s innocent. He’s just there in the jail. We took him last night.”

“You took him? Like, in the car?”

“Yes. We had to break the thing up. Then we just put him in the car. That’s why we needed the keys.”

When we passed through the courtyard to go to morning assembly, there were several people sitting near our garage, men and women. I didn’t recognize them. We returned through the courtyard several minutes later after prayers and announcements. “Father!” I heard one of the women shout. She started walking towards him. He stood there with the gate in his hand, half-open. It made me think of yesterday, when I had held the gate for Mr. H as he passed through in a black Tupac shirt. He had smiled and shaken my hand.

It’s not my business, I decided. I left Father there to receive her.

“It was his wife and family,” he says now. “They wanted to talk to me.”

I depart to teach my class. I catch Brother again in the hall.

“Man, I see him every morning. He always says hello, I always say hello.”

“Yeah, he’s always there working. He looks innocent enough.”

“I just can’t believe he would try to stab the gatekeeper like that. Screwdriver to the back of the head. That could kill someone.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

I’m sitting in the computer lab for 8:00 am lecture. It’s 8:53 and none of my students have reported to class.

“Quota Reset”

Sometimes my wifi quota reset service doesn’t run and I have to do it manually. Usually this is as easy as just ssh’ing into the Raspberry Pi and rebooting it. In the past I’ve had to walk my happy you-know-what over to the school to access remotely, but today I realize that I can send terminal commands to the school wifi from my bedroom if I angle my laptop just right.

I’m having my ChatGPT “personal operating system” analyze the previous lecture PowerPoints I made and create style guides, then route in a lecture outline to produce a new lecture in my exact style while I lay in bed with a headache and a fever. I cancelled morning programming class to go get malaria tested at the nearby clinic, but architecture is still on at 10:30–with the threat that I’ll take 10 marks off of anybody’s final paper if they choose to skip.

Every morning, my personal operating system sends me research reports, news, reading recommendations. At 20:30, I get sent my daily Italian lesson. I instructed ChatGPT to resend the lesson from the day before if I didn’t respond. It’s sent me the same lesson six times in a row.

I reach the clinic on the bike, where one of the ushers from the Church is working at the nurse’s counter. He says hello. He finishes working with the guy in front of me then pulls out the malaria rapid test with un-disinfected hands. He jabs the needle into the pad of my left ring finger and wipes up the blood with the excess paper wrapping of the test package. I watch the blood move slowly through the diffusion paper. It’s like a little pregnancy test—one lines healthy, two lines sorry pal you have a parasitic infection.

I don’t have malaria.

No malaria? Time to treat my body with reckless abandon!

I rip home on the bike and make it back to my desk with enough time to polish up the garbage PowerPoint that ChatGPT put out before 10:30 am architecture class. I find that my message to the students about missing the 8:00 lecture wasn’t relayed and none of them are there. I find Chanda walking around in an athletic fit. I remember today is “Sports” against Mwense Trades Training Institute. I find the rest of my students in disarray and agree with them to make up the lecture another time. As I am trying to sneak away to rest I am roped into officiating, coaching, and then somehow playing in the “Chess” competition between our players and theirs. I find myself playing three hours of competitive chess while the football and netball games go on in the background. My main opponent is a guy who shares my Bemba name: Mwape. Ambroise Mwape vs Bernard Mwape. Don Bosco wins.

As I sneak finally away (at 3:00pm) I am pressured into accepting a plate of food from the two Catechumens on staff. I look for where to wash my hands with soap. Not going to happen. I house my drumstick and chicken thigh. I’m already feeling sick when I start to eat and by the end I am severely nauseous. I realize that I ate meat on Friday and should do a substitute penance. I start to head back to the house and forget my backpack, which the Catechumens remind me of. I reach the house and hit the chapel for 9-hour late morning prayer. My stomach is in near-mutiny. I fall asleep while praying.

“Fetch-Decode-Execute”

I recently realized why some of my students weren’t doing well in my class: they were totally hiding the fact that they struggle with English. I would be saying something and my accent / speed of speaking would mean that they didn’t understand anything, and then they would pretend that they did.

Finally, I understood why simple questions (“The Instruction Register stores the instruction. If our instruction is 1010, what is inside the Instruction Register?”) would sometimes leave them completely baffled. It was because I needed to say “Instruction Register iikata ama instructions. Nga instruction yesu ali 1010, cinshi ali mu Instruction Register?”

I experimented with throwing some Bemba into my lessons. It was surreal. Normally when I spoke, I had the feeling that I was making perfect sense while my students were getting steadily more confused. Lecturing in Bemba, I had the feeling that I was getting steadily more confused while, to my students, it was making perfect sense.

I finally threw in the towel and started making my lecture slides in Bemglish. I had initially wanted to distribute these materials as an open-source course. If these hopes weren’t already dashed by the fact that I had repeated used “slaughtering a chicken” as an example of an algorithm, now anyone wanting to learn this stuff will have to wade through slides like “This is the Fetch-Decode-Execute Cycle, or as I like to call it, the Ukusenda-Ukumfwa-Ukuciita Cycle”.

I guess it’s worth it. My students demolished their practice exam. They looked at me like the questions were stupid.

"Mwata”

I was in the back of the truck with the new brothers headed to Kazembe. We found some girls from the school by the road that were planning on walking that way. Fr. Cao had pity on them and let them climb in.

“Freeeee transport!” Blessings was screaming and holding onto the window bars while the truck tore down the road. Thelma was sitting across from me laughing and wearing huge orange sunglasses.

We dropped them off in front of the parish there in Kazembe. There were people walking around everywhere and clogging the road.

“Be smart, don’t get drunk,” I told them as they were climbing out of the truck.

“We won’t!”

Everyone and their brother was in Kazembe. Workers had asked for advance pay. Young people from the village had come to the fathers to beg for money. Everybody who was anybody had to be at the Mutomboko Ceremony.

Once a year, Mwata Kazembe, the King of the Lunda People, puts on a ceremonial dress and swings a big knife and axe around a specially designed parade ground in Kazembe. It’s a dance that recalls the conquest of the region by his ancestor some hundreds of years ago.

The Salesians know Mwata very well. He’s a Catholic, or at least, used to be. When he became King, he used to come to the Salesian parish. He stopped one day. They say his advisors pressured him into it.

“‘Stop all of that, you’re mixing spirits. We have our own things going on.’ It’s like a religion, what they’re doing in that palace.”

Lufubu Mission gifts him a cow every year around this time. Earlier in the week, the farm manager and some workers had gone to deliver it.

“We want to come too,” some students had said. “We want to pay our respects to Mwata.”

Nowadays, Mwata is a recluse. He isn’t seen outside of his palace unless speeding off to some undisclosed location in the blacked-out backseat of a Toyota Hilux. I’ve never seen him in person.

We stopped in to the Salesian community and said hello. Fr. Joseph told me I should go say hello next door, since ten or twelve Polish volunteers had come to visit for the Ceremony. I walked over and did the best I could to talk to twelve people at the same time. They asked me if I was sticking around for the ceremony.

It was something I had debated with myself. Before coming to Zambia, it was kind of the one thing I knew about Luapula Province—that once a year some guy named Mwata put on a dress and danced around. I had been looking forward to it for months.

“No, I don’t think I’ll stay. Fr. Cao is headed back soon. I’m going to go rest. Maybe I’ll come later.”

“I’m not interested in all of that, either,” Br. Mark said, back in the Salesian house. “Dust and everything. Just too many people. Not really for me.”

Fr. Cao had given all of the brothers some pocket money for the day. They went off and got lost in the markets. Roadside markets had sprung up like mushrooms on all of the major thoroughfares. People moved in every conceivable direction. For a few days, Kazembe looked like Lusaka.

We rode in the truck back towards the main road, going slowly to allow the crowds to break around us. We stopped in at a drink shop on the roadside where Fr. Cao usually buys beer by the crate for the mission. We parked there by the roadside on the shoulder of the crowd. I hopped out and slung the empty crates over the side of the truck and went to take them inside to the counter.

I was there wrestling with them as a middle-aged couple passed by as part of the crowd. They wore souvenir T-shirts and big smiles—obviously from town.

“Welcome to Mutomboko,” the man said. They seemed incredibly sincere. I smiled really big and nearly laughed.

“Thank you, enjoy the day.” I felt like more of a local than they were. I slung the crates on my shoulder and took them inside.

As I hopped back in the car, the crowd suddenly gained energy in front of us. They were walking up the long hill that marks the approach into Kazembe from the direction of Lufubu. The whole road was full. There were bands, and dancers, and tall girls in matching outfits, and all of a sudden—policemen, soldiers in unmatching and over-the-top kits. They were making a human chain, linking hands and marching forward. Inside the little circle, a man could be seen riding on top of the crowd. He wore a tall headdress and a regal, disinterested expression, flicking the air around him with a small whip.

“Mwata,” Fr. Cao said. He passed onwards to wherever they were taking him.

We arrived back in Lufubu some minutes later. At that point, the dance had likely begun. I heard Fr. Hamweete in the living room watching the video on Facebook. Mwata could be seen there swinging his huge knife around the arena. I went and crawled in bed.

“4th of July”

Tonight, the community asked me to sing some American songs for the 4th of July. 250 years of American Independence. It was strange, morose. The national anthem caught in my throat. I picked a version in too high a key and key switched in the middle. Too low, too quiet. It ended and I did not know what to say.

“Sing to us,” they said,

“one of Sion’s songs.”

“Ivory”

Fr. Cao arrived from Lusaka with a Yamaha keyboard. Br. Joseph was excited. I heard him that night playing and singing in the chapel while I was preparing for bed.

The next evening, we sang the Magnificat while Brother played. Just as we reached the final stanza, the power went out. The keyboard shut off, and we were plunged into darkness. The rest of the stanza we sang a capella.

It finished, and we were silent for a moment. I turned on my phone flashlight, and we recited the antiphon. I looked down the page to the first intention: “The light shines out in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. Let us thank our Lord for bringing His light into our lives.”

“You Are a Paper at a Trainee”

The end of the term arrived unexpectedly. I had counted on four weeks of class in July. Due to unexpected events, I ended up getting one and a half.

My students ended up doing really well on the mid-term exam I gave them, which I had designed to intentionally emulate the TEVETA style—non-sensical situational openings, poor wording, heavy use of “define this”, “explain that”. I realized that maybe I had gotten too carried away with my own joke when I read back one of the situational problems I had written:

On the last day before holiday, I proctored exams in the main hall. The whole morning was a lot of moving around as different students asked for scratch paper, requested to borrow rulers, and tried to cheat off of each other. That afternoon, I rode a bicycle 12 km there-and-back to Kazembe to go to confession with Fr. Joseph. Afterwards, I packed up my crap and prepared to meet the bus at midnight.

Fr. Hamweete and I arrived by the roadside at 11:30, then sat for two hours waiting until our bus arrived. We bought tickets there through the driver’s window and didn’t wake up until we were in Serenje.

The bus ride feels a little more familiar each time I take it. Lowlands, forests in northern Luapula, marshland in the middle. Rolling hills, large farms near Mkushi Boma. Everything past Kapiri Mposhi is practically urban. A tip toe though Kabwe, Salesian Novitiate visible through the right-side window. A few minutes to run and buy a scone at the bus station. The ladies insist on warming it, then refuse to pull it out of the microwave early, so that I finally give up and run to hop on the now-moving bus that is in the process of leaving without me.

We arrived in Lusaka around 3pm and split a taxi to the Provincial House, then hit the chapel for the Mass both of us had missed. I met up for dinner with Noreen (Irish Volunteer) at a strip-mall restaurant whose menu looked like it was generated by having a language model imbibe several Greek, Indian, and Italian cookbooks. We sat there for a long time talking and swirling coffee, venting and thinking out-loud.

In the morning, I entered a car packed with four Salesians to drive to Malawi, had my sweet behind bailed out by the Provincial Economer when asked to pay $50 cash for a Malawian visa, and arrived in Lilongwe after dark. The Hilux wobbled down a dirt street bouncing uncomfortably until finally reaching the gate of the compound under bright stars. The community welcomed us, and I collapsed onto a cot in Stefan and Alma’s mosquito-filled makeshift-kitchen (portable gas burner on a wooden desk).

Out the window of the volunteer apartment, I saw the spiny outline of the mission Church, huge as it sat on a swath of cleared ground. Light from lamps and cookfires illumined the foot of a broken, jagged mountain across the way. A pale moon and stars moved in the vault above.

“Lilongwe”

After morning Mass, Stefan, Alma, and I found ourselves with a free day and set out for city center. We walked out of the mission compound towards the Area 23 bus station along a dirt road with a giant rain ditch (more like a 2m deep canyon) running through the middle of it. Kids shouted out: “Stefan, Emma!” (“they can’t say my name correctly…”), Stefan stopped in to the neighborhood store to buy a coke zero, and we found ourselves in the back of a minibus headed for town.

The minibus dropped us at Devil Street, and we walked a short distance to arrive at Devil Street Market. Entering here, one finds themselves in a labyrinthine winding of covered stalls, overhanging tarpaulins, cavernous trading rooms concealed behind downward stairs. Women sat before piles of nuts and seeds and greens and leaves, piles of spice and cumin, families sold fresh honey with the bees still buzzing around open buckets, children asleep in arms, bees buzzing around and gently touching their faces, landing on their clothes, their hair. There were wood carvers, produce merchants, butchers, soap salesmen, electronics shops, motor-repair technicians. In the subterranean vaults, cloth sellers with chitenge arranged in towers, every pattern unique, each time something you’d never seen before.

For lunch, we ate garlic naan in silence, then found a minibus that took us back to Don Bosco. We arrived right as the youth center opened.

Love turned up to the basketball court wearing a bandana, basketball shoes, and a t-shirt. She made every shot she took, moved the ball like a wizard. She would even guard and score on the youths that were with us, muscular dudes probably 19 or 20.

The kids asked me my name, and I told them. Then I asked all of theirs. She told me her name with a smile. “Love.” A few minutes later, she asked me: “What’s my name?” pointing at herself. I remembered. She smiled so big she got embarrassed and turned away.

“Poverty, Chastity, Obedience”

Today, Br. Chris made his final profession. I went to the Church early to pray, remained for about an hour as the pews filled up around me. While I sat there in a reverie, I heard a voice whisper-yell from behind me: “Ambroise!”

I turned to see Stefan there in a grey suit. “You’re sitting on the women’s side!”

I looked around and confirmed that I, indeed, was sitting on the women’s side.

A few moments later found Stefan and I more masculinely positioned and in the back of the Church. The Mass began with an eruption of voices, choir of two-hundred souls singing Alleluia while a towering statue of Mary-Help-of-Christians looked on, Christ in-hand, casting her kind eyes on a congregation of women in bright blue and yellow and orange chitenge, men in suits, their voices ringing in the yawning vault.

The priests of Christ entered—ten of them—kissing the altar, incense, smoke rising as the prayers of the faithful to God. And the people sang! Hymns and songs of praise, quiet and true, gentle voices, bells never stopped ringing!

They sang the litany of the saints. Stephen and Ambrose were in there, just as Stefan and Ambroise sat next to each other in the back of the church. Br. Chris lay prostrate on the floor as the names came, one after another: “Dominic Savio, pray for us. Maria Mazzarello, pray for us. John Bosco, pray for us…”

They prayed for him—his brothers, his family and friends. Memories flashed into my mind of him playing basketball with me in Lufubu, sharing papaya with the aspirants, speaking to the mammas after Mass.

“Grant him poverty, obedience, and radiant chastity…”

After the ceremony, I went to shake his hand. That evening, he magnanimously re-gifted the bottle of Jameson I had given him to the hosting community. Everyone spent some time celebrating together in the common room, drinking some beer, watching football. I played chess with the Provincial and lost.

“The Idiot”

Stefan and I decided to go walking around Lilongwe. We had some basic ideas about an itinerary, but the plan was mostly “wing it”.

A minibus took us to town center, and we passed Devil Street Market and the Bridge of Thieves (“keep the pack close”). We stopped in at DAPP (Development Aid from People to People), then looked for an ATM. Stefan had been bankrolling me for the past two days and I was starting to feel like a freeloader.

We passed the mall, where I found a line of at least thirty people at the one working ATM. Luckily, there was another in a smaller development along the way to the café (“the one café in Lilongwe…”), and I stopped in long enough to get reamed on exchange.

At the café, I ordered a croissant and a “plunger coffee”, correctly guessing that they would give me a French Press (and not a bathroom instrument). We chilled while I sipped the joe and thought about nothing.

As we hoofed it in the general direction of the WWI memorial, we passed through Lilongwe’s international zone. I was struck with an uncanny feeling of homesickness. I decided to ask Stefan if we could go to visit the American embassy. He said, “sure”.

I imagined myself going in, meeting some sweet madame secretary with a southern accent, maybe even getting invited to coffee or something by the Ambassador. Call it naïveté or an outsized trust in American hospitality, but I walked right up to the barbed gates and proudly announced myself as an American citizen, hoping to receive a tearful welcome.

Instead, the gatekeepers were sussed out almost immediately. They couldn’t fathom someone just coming to say “hello” and started asking all kinds of questions. Stefan started to get nervous, and we on-the-fly flubbed together a story about wanting to see the “Cultural Center” which Stefan had mentioned some Malawian scouts had been at earlier. I misunderstood and thought that oratorians had gone, then he contradicted me in front of the security, and the whole thing started to feel like when nineteen-year-old me had accidentally disclosed criminal activity on a security clearance questionnaire and panic-dialed a lawyer.

They beeped around on the intercom and some guy finally came out to meet us. He basically told us to get lost and we walked away feeling lucky to not be in custody.

As we left the parking lot I was steaming—what kind of garbage was that? Stefan assured me that at the Austrian embassy we probably would have received some kind of welcome—heck, the Chinese embassy would probably have poured us tea.

“Two guys literally just coming to say hello! They couldn’t fathom it.”

“Once they realized we didn’t want anything they probably thought we were like, idiots.”

“I feel like Prince Myshkin.”

“The Bishop”

Walking down the sloping hill towards the mission sprawled out before me, I notice a brand new Hilux crawling up the broken road. The right-side window rolls down as it passes.

The Provincial is behind the wheel in a Salesian baseball cap.

“You are praying?”

“No, just walking.”

“So you are praying.”

“Yes. Are you leaving?”

“No, I am going to see the Bishop.”

“Oh, ok, tell him I said hello.”

“Do you want to come to Dedza?”

“Where is that?”

“It’s where the Bishop is.”

I look in the car and see Fr. Godfrey and Deacon Peter Bengo inside as well. I think about it for three seconds and say yes.

The Provincial is flying down the road in the Hilux. Fr. Godfrey holds a packaged monstrance on his lap in the seat next to me. Out the window, two guys are riding an ox-drawn cart, kids push hoops with sticks. A Romanesque bridge crosses a river with mamas at work washing underneath.

A police checkpoint can be seen on the road in front of us. “Do you have your papers?” Father Provincial asks me. “No.” “Oh sugar.”

The policeman comes up with a big smile. “Muli bwanji?” “Bwino ka ino?” They’re talking with the provincial. They see that Fr. Godfrey is carrying a giant gold thing on his lap. “What is this?” They ask. “It’s a Monstrance, for the parish.” The policeman looks happy. “Ok! You can pass.” We go and the police are smiling. Father Provincial is laughing. “I didn’t tell him to bring his papers.”

We arrive in Dedza, home place of Deacon Bengo and Fr. Godfrey. There’s a waterfall flashing against a jagged knife’s-edge of a mountain. White-painted tree trunks sit in rows in a forest, pines crest in waves over distant hillocks.

Fr. Godfrey exits near the roadside—“Just going to quickly visit my grandmother”—and we continue on to the bishop’s residence. It’s a large compound, motorbikes parked at the gate, Church under construction, just a bunch of dudes hanging around—Fathers, brothers. They give us lunch.

Afterwards, we are standing around waiting for the Provincial to finish his meeting with some of the Bishop’s advisors. He exits the building and comes towards us.

He looks at me. “I think you need to meet the bishop.” “I would love to.” “He might even ordain you.” “Ahhh, I think I would need some formation first.” “Formation? He’s serious.”

We walk towards the bishop’s residence—a simple man emerges. I stumble over the greeting in Chichewa. He laughs and takes my arm as I realize that he’s the bishop. He takes the time to give us a tour of his house, a history of the diocese. After the tour is finished, the Bishop suggests: “Let’s go for some tea.” This turns into three bottles of wine.

“Take this Malawian beer. See, this is really water. Only four percent.”

“It is rude to refuse a gift. You have come to visit our country, you should abide by our customs.”

Fr. Godfrey arrives a bit late. “Your Lordship, excuse me. I was visiting my grandmother.”

It seems they’ve never met before. They speak together, talk about Dedza, the diocese, some recent happenings. The bishop asks if he likes the place.

“You know, I’ve passed this restaurant many times. But this is my first time ever being inside.”

It’s getting dark. People take turns using the restroom before leaving. At a certain point, Deacon Bengo and I are there alone.

“Ambroise…”

“Hey Deacon. You know, we’ll be together in Lufubu soon.”

“Yes, we will.”

“You realize you’ll be my boss?”

“I realize. Lufubu… tough place.”

“For a first assignment, sure. Lots of work to be done.”

“Sure.”

He looks off behind me into the mountains.

Deacon Bengo stays with the bishop that evening to discuss plans for his ordination. The rest of us return 100 km in the pitch dark to Lilongwe.

“Brother, are you ok? Do you need to eat anything? We want to make sure we don’t scandalize you.”

“I’m alright, Father Provincial.”

“Area 23”

Area 23. A teenager named “Sludge” in a red Elmo ear-flap hat tries to ask you for money, you ask him to give you something instead. He laughs and shows his pockets—empty. An eleven-year-old girl in a bandana dribbles a basketball through your legs and makes a layup, girls run in weaving S-turns down the length of a storm drain.

Out of Don Bosco, down the walkway between the red-brick walls between compounds. Stefan, Alma, and I are headed for that jagged mountain I see outside my window every morning. Boys are there on the downward slope of the hill playing football, girls are there walking next to a stream.

There’s a little square where the winding roads meet. Women in headscarves pass on the backs of motorbikes, a nice restaurant is open with men outside eating. Older ladies sit and sell popcorn and peanuts, frying potatoes in little dishes with a divot over charcoal fires.

The village starts to creep up the hill, there at the foot of that iron mountain. The path snakes under trees, up through a rain-washed chute, opening out onto a view of the backside of the massif. On the face of the rock, artists had painted their names in shades of off-white, along with pictures here and there—a tiger, a man in sunglasses. Kids follow us as we climb up now, scurrying up a divot, coming out onto a flat escarpment.

The mountain is hollow in the center where it has been blown away. There’s a lake down there after a hundred-foot drop. Kids play around, people are hanging out. Some guys are visible across the gap—on top of the jagged peaks across the divide.

Lilongwe is visible all around. Don Bosco sprawls across the hill in front of us. Paths weave between compounds, small motorbike thoroughfares going here and there. Cell towers jut into open sky, domed mountains in the distance.

A guy wearing a flashy gold chain is shouting behind us, coming our way. He’s shouting up at some dudes on the rock in front and above, where another shoulder of the mountain rises. He walks past us, still shouting, then proceeds to climb the probably five-meter, near-vertical rock face in literally seven seconds by jumping up in little hops using his feet only and no hands.

“You can do anything if you’re drunk.”

Stefan: “When in your previous life you were a Skyrim horse.”

We return to the youth center. I play some basketball with Alma and her friend Promise. The boys are jumping and laughing. Alma is there afterwards talking to the niece of Br. Chris. She leads us out of the compound through the winding alleys of Area 23.

There are trees overhead, gardens visible in wide clearings. We are received into her home, sat in comfortable chairs. We admire pictures of parents, siblings on the walls. She brings us chips, we speak with the family, eat politely.

After some time, we take our leave, make our way back by dead reckoning, split off: market, Don Bosco. Stefan and Alma are headed for ingredients, one final Austrian meal before departure. I return to the youth center.

The only one there is Promise. She comes up to me and talks to me. Leads me over to where people are sitting listening to the good night talk.

She’s a netball player, which is serious business around there. The best netball players in Malawi train on Don Bosco’s courts—and Malawi is always considered pretty good. She gets called over to the netball coaches and players but returns later to sit by me. We shake hands goodbye.

“We’ll never see each other again.”

“No, you’ll come back.”

I walk around a bit. Promise is still there. “So, still haven’t left?” We say second goodbyes.

I return to the house and Mary is outside cooking ground nuts. She’s Stefan and Alma’s neighbor, recently given birth, holding her little daughter. She offers me a ground nut. I say hello to the baby. Stefan and Alma return with ingredients for supper, we eat. I shower in the cold and dark.

As we stay up into the night, women from the parish become visible through the apartment window. They’re there on the road in front of the church welcoming a busful of visitors at midnight, dancing and singing in matching chitenge outfits. Beyond them, I see the same jagged mountain in the distance, light from lamps and cookfires illumining the foot of the hill.

“Neither Here Nor There”

Autumn colors, broken foliage of Luangwa winter, vistas stretching off into rolling hills obscured by haze, mountain hamlets with market stalls selling dried fish, small fruits. Immigration police in smart uniforms board the bus and check passports, a guy complains that there was no courtesy warning. Mozambique visible off to the southeast.

Lusaka is a bustle of activity at 19:00. I’m standing outside the “Just Chicken” restaurant with Brother Precious waiting to be picked up by the rector of the Philosophate.

The bus station seems simultaneously less and more orderly each time I see it. Maybe it’s something like: the internal logic of travel in Zambia has started to make sense. One might say that moving from point A to point B around here belongs to individuals more than organizations. Bus drivers wear funny outfits and have bigger personalities. Business is cash, person-to-person, and not abstracted behind a screen or a company logo. The guy on the street selling plungers or whatever actually becomes useful to you when you’re headed 1300km into the bush where there aren’t stores.

When I arrive at the Provincial House, I am greeted with several unexpected guests: Noreen, Daniella (the other Irish volunteer), and Noreen’s brother and sister. We hang out and eat Hungry Lion.

Sunday finds us in Chawama Parish. We’re captured in close-up shots all over their parish livestream and then get swept up into being part of a guy’s political campaign in the parking lot afterwards. He takes pictures grasping hands with us like we’ve just dedicated a bridge or something.

Chawama is a neighborhood of labyrinthine winding streets that sprawls out behind the Provincial House. Lots of the kids from the Oratory and most of the youth volunteers grew up there. Noreen has become a familiar sight for most of them. She spends a lot of time in Chawama moving between people’s houses, charities, tailors, markets, etc. Today she brings us along to the tailor to have a dress made for her sister. It seems as if everyone knows her. Some kids are hanging out there in the street and she has us stop and play football with them.

I spend the next couple of days shopping for mission supplies. On the evening before my departure, I am brought along to a dinner put on by some visiting German donors. Afterwards, I am driven in a car packed with well-over-a-safe-number of youth volunteers to the bus station. They see me off with well wishes, and I reconcile myself to the fact that I’ll never see any of these people ever again.

The bus station is busy at 22:00, with everybody and their brother milling around, buses spinning in circles trying to change direction, stands on the side selling food and other supplies. Waiting to stow my bag, I notice a religious sister also waiting there with about ten different large items: poles, speakers, huge pots, taped boxes, etc. I ask her if she needs a hand, then wait with her while she makes sure the loaders cram all of her items into the available space.

“Not above the wheel! Danger of breaking the things…”

We sit together, she tells me her name—“Sister Mary”—and I immediately fall asleep.

In the morning, light breaks through my window. I see dry marshes, black and yellow flats extending for miles. There are erstwhile islands turned into hillocks and tufts of taller grass, palms wavering listlessly, pathways, little causeways snaking between islands off to distant grass walls.

When I wake again, we’re already past Mansa. I look out the window to see a guy propped on a motorbike. He looks cool with a red beanie and shades flipped up on top, bright red fluffy sweater covered in little frolicking dogs and paw-prints.

Sister Mary is talking to me. We’ve talked a lot about each other—our lives, our work. “I see your vocation clearly,” she says. “Only, I feel bad for your mother…”

Back in Lufubu, I walk and pray a Rosary with the children. We make circuits around the Marian Shrine as a bushfire burns in the graveyard, casting morose light on the mounds.

Amid the unmarked graves, there is a simple concrete sarcophagus:

I spend some time cooking and laughing with Fr. Cao and Br. Joseph. We sit around the table, most of the chairs empty. The house is quiet once again.

I keep using the sink that gives me mild electrical shocks because it hasn’t killed or injured me yet. I accepted it without fanfare when I had to cancel class because I was stung on the face and neck by swarming bees. I didn’t even mention it to the community when I was struck by lightning that hit the roof of the house and then arced to my body from the improperly-earthed bathroom piping. “What’s the problem? I didn’t die.”

I am speaking more Bemba now. Actually, I’m also speaking English like it’s Bemba. I can have basic conversations with the kids at the oratory. My students aren’t confused when I talk to them anymore.

People have stopped asking me for money or sweets or for the watch off my wrist as a “remembrance”. They know I’ll just ask them why they don’t give me something for free themselves. It reminds me of a great line I read in Harry Murray’s sociological study of the New York Catholic Worker. Murray was talking about how a lack of meaningful indicators of separation between “Workers” and “guests” fostered a less sensitive, ultimately more personal space of encounter:

One Worker told me of a time when he was arguing with a helper who had a history of mental problems. The helper screamed at him, "You're crazy!" to which the Worker replied "I'm crazy? You're the one who's crazy!" In general, Workers would argue that the way one interacts with a person, and the fact that one is willing to live with that person, is more important than the terms one uses.

When that Worker screamed at the guest and called him crazy, I think it was a transfiguring moment. It shows that the divide between them had been closed. The structures which defined their interaction—“homeless” person and not homeless, social worker and client, aid-giver and aid-receiver—are replaced by something raw, more human. They are no longer locked in a role-play of service. They start to become something more dangerous, more vulnerable.

They start to become friends.

Here’s my favorite part of that Murray piece:

Social workers are distinguished from [clients] by numerous social cues. Social workers have offices, or at least desks. They are better dressed than clients. They have an air of authority. Even an inexperienced outside observer can distinguish the social workers from the clients after a few minutes at a welfare office…

At St. Joseph’s [Catholic Worker] none of this applied… An observer can be at a house for days and still not be absolutely sure who is Worker and who is guest.

Here in Lufubu, it might be a little more obvious who is Salesian and who is student / oratorian / parishioner, but the principle still applies. We might be the wealthiest people in the village—three meals a day, running water (sometimes…), a TV—but we are still in the village. We share the same food (out of the same pot with the same hands), suffer from the same occupational hazards (mosquitos, snakes, scorpions, lightning), do the same work (slashing, digging, scrubbing, cooking), shower out of the same bucket.

Spend enough time in proximity with someone and the gap between you will become smaller. Distinctions will start to disappear. As you come to share in the lives of those you serve, they will start to see themselves reflected in you—and you in them. It allows you to understand them in a way that others do not.

I remarked to my cousin recently that the people I spend time the most with—those I consider my friends—are the same people that most Americans only see in advertisements and fundraising campaigns—impoverished single mothers, hand-to-mouth subsistence farmers, beneficiaries of USAID and UNICEF feeding programs, the “hungry kids in Africa” parents use to guilt-trip children into finishing their food.

What those advertisements miss is not the poverty, the food scarcity, or the need—all of which are surely there. It’s the fact that these people are real, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood individuals—with real joy, real humor, real hopes, real dreams, real lives. They are not reducible to mouths and stomachs. There’s a lot more to them than their need.

If you spend time with them, become friends, and acclimate yourself to your mutual differences, you find that the drama of their lives is just as complicated, just as interesting, just as valuable, just as real as anyone else’s—and that they don’t go around thinking of themselves as the “poor and helpless Africans” that first-world condescension turns them into.

There’s a great quote from Cardinal Arinze (Archbishop-emeritus of Onitsha, Nigeria) in the John Paul II biography I’ve been reading. He was reacting to the media backlash against the decision to hold the 1993 Africa Synod in Rome, rather than an African country:

“If it had been in an African country,” Arinze said, “the media would have shown the Pope coming down from the plane. And after that they would have shown the woman washing the baby in dirty water in a village, and the children playing in trees, and monkeys in the forest, and some primitive people. They tell us precious little about the Pope’s meeting with intellectuals at the university. They show only things they think are funny and enjoyable for Europeans. We want to be taken seriously. We have much more to share than that.”

A visiting cameraman in Lufubu might just focus on the woman washing the baby in the river, the kids in the oratory climbing the mango tree. They would probably miss the Computer Architecture class where my students are designing circuits with logic gates:

The needy persons here in Lufubu are not characters in an advertisement—these are real children, real young people! Who have the wherewithal, intelligence, and self-awareness to joke about their condition, about the hardships of their lives—and who accept their lot without complaint and without fanfare. One might think that a young person born into impoverished conditions would be bitter, envious, grasping. Instead, you find that, as almost a general rule, young people here are humble in aspect and aspiration, happy with what they have, only seeking the basics of a livable life to be happy. The dream of a young person in Lufubu is to find enough success to build a small house, grow enough food, have the resources to marry and have children, and have enough surplus to give back to the Church. That’s it! There is no grasping spirit, no hoarder’s mentality, no McMansion-envy, no desire for cars, boats, helicopters, fancy things, technology. Young people here would be happy with a decent phone, wearable clothes, and meat in their diet a few times a week.

For our students, most of whom come from other parts of Zambia, the story is the same. Usually, these young people are coming from places that are a bit more developed than Lufubu. And yet, their humility is the same. How badly would your average American college student complain if their university didn’t have a dining hall, or a gym, or a library? Our students live ten to a room, fetch water for bathing in buckets, cook over charcoal fires, survive for months on the equivalent of $30 USD. And man—they’re learning how to code! To the eighteen-year-old Ambroise who slacked off in Jay Brockman’s Logic Design class—what’s your excuse?

The young people are not at all “sensitive” to their plight—nor do they make excuses or complaints about it. What these young people need is not “sensitivity”. They don’t need pity that doesn’t encounter them, aid that doesn’t challenge them, or service that doesn’t accompany them. They don’t need a plane dropping cash from the sky, or food whose donors are invisible. They need relationships—real love from real people who are willing to share with them in the vicissitudes of their lives. Pity that reduces someone to a hungry mouth does not meet them at the center of their need—which is and will always be in the heart of the human person.

One day, I was confused by something I heard from one of the Small Christian Communities. They were asking Fr. Hamweete for more of “that Starvée”. “Give us more of that Starvée! It’s nice…” It took me a second to realize they were talking about the bags of donated rice labeled “Feed My Starving Children” that have the likeness of a malnourished child on the back.

They had eaten some together after one of their meetings and thought it was delicious. Speaking exactly zero English, they were unable to read the writing on the “Feed My Starving Children” packets, which somewhat patronizingly describe themselves as fortified subsistence-food for those who are experiencing malnourishment. For the donors in America, it was pity. For these Christians in Lufubu, it was lunch.

People here in the village are not sensitive. You can have a little girl come up to you and hold your hand and it will be as calloused and rough as a bricklayer’s. A kid will tell you without a flicker of emotion that his parents “are died”. You’ll go to the clinic to get a cyst drained and they’ll just directly pull out a scalpel to slice it open:

“No antiseptic?”

“No.”

“No anesthetic?”

“We don’t have…”

American or European ideas of polite nicety are utterly superfluous. People will unflinchingly call someone “fat” to their face, or refer to a mentally ill person as “cracked”. They’ll say things like “all Tongas are cheap”, or “all Congolese are crooks”. Someone who is not traditionally masculine is “like a woman”. A person with a drinking problem is a “drunkard”. Anyone slightly odd is a witch.

There is no room here for dancing around sensitive subjects. People in Lufubu bathe in a river, work the dirt with their bare hands starting from the age of four or five, eat whatever they can grow, gather, or scavenge. They might experience racism, sexism, ableism—but they wouldn’t name them with such academic precision. If it isn’t as immediate of a problem as living, taking care of their children, putting food in their mouths—they don’t have the luxury to worry about it. Over-academized moral scrupulosity falls by the wayside, as do seat-belt or motorbike-helmet-wearing, knife-safety, electrical safety, modern germ-theory, going to the clinic for facial wounds that could really use stitches, etc. etc.

We had a cow die on the farm. It had just been given some vaccines, so it was considered very unsafe to eat. The farm manager decided to bury it. There was uproar in the village.

“What you did is very wrong, Father,” an old farmer told one of the missionaries.

“Burying food! You should have given it to us to eat.”

It didn’t matter how much it was explained to the people that the meat was unsafe, and, in any case, already buried in the ground. There was already talk beginning that people from the village would simply steal the carcass.

One of the leaders of the Small Christian Communities, Mr. James, said: “These people—they know how to prepare these things. They know how to remove that medicine. You’ll find tomorrow that the cow is stolen—and, on Sunday, the ones who did it will be dancing in the Church!”

The next day, the cow had indeed been dug up and stolen. And that Sunday, there were many people dancing in the Church.

I have thought to myself several times that if one would simply take a seven or eight year old kid from Lufubu—who at that age already cook for themselves, kill snakes, negotiate their own school sponsorships, walk 12 km to travel to market, bind up their own wounds, get sutured without anesthesia—and put him or her in decent American education, they would become an unstoppable force. And yet, the same conditions that make them so hardy also totally handicap their potential. Malnutrition means that many of these children will struggle with mental development. Poor village habits and fatalistic mindsets mean that these kids are swept up into patterns of early marriage and childbirth, perpetual subsistence farming, never upgrading from a dirt-floored house. They simply have not had the examples in their lives to show them how to dream beyond what they see before them—and what they see before them is sometimes ugly in its self-paralysis and defeatism. “We are this way because we are poor,” or worse, “We are this way because we are African.” It would be hard to think of a more stagnating, poverty-perpetuating mindset.

To me, this is the meaning and the necessity of evangelical poverty. The meaning is that, as we voluntarily take on hardship and scarcity, we come to parity with those whom we serve. The necessity is that, without sharing that parity, they would only ever see us as silly, rich, and clueless outsiders trying to impose ideas on a culture they don’t understand. It allows us to speak in a way that well-meaning others are unable. It allows us to move past sensitivity and get on to solidarity, which is what people here actually need.

One-sided, transactional, aid-given-from-a-distance is not actually best for the people that we serve. What engages and elevates them much more is entering into their lives—and not shying away from the challenges, jokes, and rawness that ensues.

This idea is contrasted to most of the standard models of aid we see in the world today. American and EU governments dump billions of dollars into the hands of developing governments who are not poised to make use of it. Truck and boatloads of food, supplies, equipment are just sort of thrown into underdeveloped communities without any kind of on-the-ground follow-up. How would these donors react if they found (as I have…) pristine equipment simply unused, sold for immediate cash, or banged up and broken from misuse? If you want a man to eat for a lifetime, you can’t just give him a fishing rod—you have to teach him how to fish.

I would say that aid sometimes does more harm than good—and I’m not alone in thinking this (c.f. Dead Aid). I actually think it would give more help to an underdeveloped community to have a dedicated volunteer on the ground for a year than to just hand them cold hard cash. Someone might disagree with this. They may ask themselves:

“Isn’t it better to just give them cash so they can buy what they need?”

“Wouldn’t it be better to just send them food so that they don’t go hungry?”

“Isn’t it better to give impoverished people supplies and let them decide for themselves what to do with them?”

Well… take it from a friend of mine that works for UNICEF. She said that one of the first case studies new international aid workers are asked to examine is a cautionary tale that occurred (among other locales) right here in Luapula Province, Zambia. Several western countries collaborated to distribute millions of mosquito nets in the area to combat malaria. The two main results were:

1. Local mosquito net makers were put out of business

2. People started using the nets for fishing, damaging river and lake ecosystems and adding carcinogens to the water supply

Moral of the story: sometimes it isn’t best to just throw stuff at people without any follow-up.

Here’s another cautionary tale—one they probably won’t teach you in school. It’s not exactly “sensitive”. It’s a hard truth nonetheless.

If people grow used to receiving things in charity, they can forget how to provide for themselves. Not immediately—but compound constant, uncritical aid over generations and you end up with, well, Lufubu. Cycles of poverty that never end. Cultures of dependence that stifle progress.

Young people are especially vulnerable to this. If you grow up with everything being provided for you by entities with whom you have no relationship—government programs, NGOs, international aid initiatives—you start to see assistance as something that basically just falls from the sky at fixed intervals. And you start to feel entitled to it. Once this happens, you’re hooked—dependence.

The Church is not innocent of this. There has been a mission in Lufubu since the White Fathers (Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique) arrived in the 1920’s, were granted ten hectares of Crown Lands by HIS MAJESTY King Edward VIII in 1936 (according to the title deed Fr. Waldemar keeps in his office), and immediately threw up a beast-mode brick church that still stands today—and gets used every Sunday.

What have one hundred years of mission accomplished? Plenty, for sure. But one of the biggest stains on this legacy is that many in Lufubu have been aid-without-relationship’ed into generational poverty. Huge sums of money were poured into the village by the Salesians to build up Lufubu Mission—cash paid directly to local contractors, farm-workers, timber merchants, stonemasons, etc. Looking at the state of development in the village, you would think it had simply flitted away. You would never guess the amount of money that had flowed through the place.

When people start to rely on aid, they can sometimes forget that it’s not guaranteed. If they never develop self-sufficiency apart from it, they’re left with no idea what to do if it stops.

I’ve seen this with my students in clear detail. A student will receive a “food allowance” (just cold hard cash) from the government meant to cover their eating expenses for the term. They’ll waste some of this money on frivolous things (especially alcohol). When it runs out, they’ll have no other option but to go around begging someone to support them. They’ll do this several times in a single year because someone is always there to cover their mistake.

What you end up seeing a lot around Lufubu is this—people are more willing to degrade themselves by begging than take simple measures to ensure self-sufficiency. How can this state of affairs not erode human dignity? And yet, how can you blame the people?

People will misunderstand this. They’ll think that it’s best to just always give people what they want. Yet, what I have found, is that if you truly want people to progress, sometimes it’s necessary to challenge them as a friend, rather than provide for them as a stranger. And this is the kicker: it’s impossible to do this without entering into their poverty.

“No” heard from the rich outsider who lives behind his compound wall, who throws food or cash over the top out of pity but not yet out of friendship—will only ever be heard as selfishness. “No” heard from a guy who knows your name, spends time with you, shares the same hardships as you—that can be transfiguring.

When I was in Lusaka I had a wonderful opportunity to spend time with some UN and UNICEF workers at a dinner my friend Noreen (fellow Salesian volunteer) invited me to. While they were great folks, it was a glimpse into an utterly different world. We ate at Onoma, an incredibly nice Mykonos-imité Greek restaurant that flies in their ingredients and caters to the UN-NGO-Diplomat circuit of (mostly) white people. After six months in Lufubu, I was like a visitor in a foreign land. My head spun listening to discussion about UN meetings and office drama and the drink preferences of various diplomats. I found it really funny when they referred to my teaching in Lufubu as “field work”, or when they were super intrigued by the fact that Noreen and I “lived with priests”.

This is not to criticize those people in particular. Actually, I really liked all of them, and respected that they were trying to do what they believe is right—even if the world they inhabit is completely different from mine. Charity in the modern, secular world is a kind of anomaly, a kind of serious eccentricity. I certainly would not have been in their shoes if I had never had a religious conversion. I probably would have laughed if you had suggested international aid work to me then.

In any case, the point I want to make here is that, if one isn’t careful, one might spend time, even a whole life, living in an impoverished place without feeling the real sting of poverty—and thus, without adequately entering into the lives of the people you are trying to serve. This isn’t a problem exclusive to the UN-NGO-diplomat circle. You can fall into the same trap anywhere, even in Lufubu. It’s possible to serve the poor without ever overcoming the distance that separates you. It’s possible to work on someone’s behalf while being completely out of touch with the details of their life. I think this is the risk that any voluntary service runs—nobody really likes poverty. Nobody really likes “smelling like the sheep”.

When you share life with people, without walls between, you realize that “sensitivity”—the kind that prevents the back and forth, humor, and blunt honesty necessary to form authentic relationship—can actually be a barrier to solidarity: living alongside, eating alongside, working alongside the people you desire to serve.

It’s the same lesson I learned this past summer at the Catholic Worker. No homeless person is the kind of shrinking daisy that will wither up if you make some joke with them. Actually, a lot of them appreciate that kind of gallows-humor. They live on the street, man. They would prefer you became friends with them and smoked a cigarette together behind the gas station instead of throwing five dollars at them from behind your car window and then very gently discussing them when they’re not around. At the end of the day, you’ll find that you’re very sensitive, and the people you want to serve are no better off.

And yet, the blessing, and the risk, in authentic solidarity is that one begins to become like the people they serve—in their strengths as well as their weaknesses. It is good to move beyond an excessive sensitivity that causes barriers, but eschewing all sensitivity to the point where you no longer recognize the difference between village hardiness and dehumanizing poverty—that’s a recipe for making the lives of the people you serve even worse.

People in Lufubu are not sensitive. This lack of sensitivity is not all endearing. Seeing parents let their small children run around with knives or whatever is usually pretty anxiety inducing. For several kids that come to the oratory—maybe no older than four or five years old—I’ve literally never seen their parents. I see the kids all the time, wandering here and there around the village unattended, but never the parents. I know they’re around. I even know who they are. But I’ve never seen them and their children in the same place.

Young, unmarried fathers will often leave the raising of their children to the unsupported mother. Kids will run around poorly clothed and underfed while their parents are at home drunk. Feuds between people in the village will result in one party going to the witch.

There is a rampant fatalism here. A real indifference to life and death that can seep into the people and infect all of daily life. Local electricians will work on live power while drunk and with no safety equipment. Broken power lines will just be left lying around on paths where people are walking. Live sockets will be left open with wires sticking out where people are moving and working. Jagged construction wreckage will be left around where children are playing. Huge ankle-breaking holes will be left open on the football pitch. Fifty-plus people will be stacked on top of each other in the bed of a pickup truck driving at sixty km/hr. Soldiers will be walking around with loaded AK-47s pointing the barrel at everyone that passes. Basic operations at the rural clinic will be done with no antiseptic and no anesthesia. Small children will be running around unattended with infected wounds leaking pus.

“What’s sad is that people will keep doing it like that, and then somebody will really die. I’ve seen it happen,”—one of the missionaries in Kazembe tells me.

People here sometimes seem to have given up on themselves. I was in Kazembe trying to get an issue with my SIM card fixed. The guys that ended up “fixing” it for me totally ripped me off (they didn’t actually fix anything at all), but that wasn’t the interesting part of the story. One of the local drunkards came up to me to ask me for money or food or anything I could give. “Man, I’m starving! Give me food.” I handed him a roll I had just bought from the bakery. “Man, I can’t eat this! This is African food! Give me some real food!” Everyone standing around us laughed.

“We are Africans, bwana,” Br. Philip tells me as I ask him why people in the village will refuse to take antibiotics, or will not care enough to wash bat droppings from a plate, or will walk around with huge open cuts and wounds that could very easily be stitched up. I know Brother is joking, but it belies a real sentiment—people in the village will sometimes convince themselves that nothing will ever change.

“People in Lufubu are different,” one of the aspirants says. “People aren’t like this in the rest of Zambia. It’s just here. They can’t organize anything, they can’t make a program in the Church. They can’t do anything for themselves!”

I don’t know how true that is in an objective sense, but it might be more true than people here would care to admit. Driving through the Southern Province of Zambia, one might see nice roads, nice houses, nice farms—development. In the Copperbelt, there’s lively civic culture, intellectual exchange and debate, accredited universities, multi-billion-dollar mining operations. In Lusaka, a walk through Woodlands will take you through nice, leafy-green neighborhoods, incredible restaurants, malls, art exhibits.

Luapula Province, and Lufubu in particular, seem to have been forgotten by all of this, left behind when the rest of Zambia achieved development. Politicians will get elected promising roads and schools. When they get in office, they’ll pocket or block development funds, then resign in the middle of their term to seek re-election elsewhere. Roads are haphazardly patched up maybe once a year. Schools are understaffed and underfunded. There are no universities here.

There are plenty of bright young people that have come out of Lufubu. And that’s the key phrase: “come out of”. Very few of them ever come back.

One of the brightest girls I met here—Kenna, the youth chairperson for the parish when I arrived—is now in Lusaka studying nursing. Her brother, another brilliant student, had an opportunity to go to Israel three years ago for a six-month course of study. He somehow has managed to stay there working until now. He sends home money once a month.

Most people who find success in Lufubu use the opportunity to go elsewhere. Many of them only return to die.

An old man passed away in the village a few years back. He had spent a lifetime as a successful businessman outside of Lufubu and only returned in his last months to die where he had been born. When it came time for the funeral, a bunch of nice cars—big, beefy Hiluxes, Land Cruisers—turned up at the parish. They had come all the way from Lusaka to pay their respects. On any other day in Lufubu, one would be surprised to see even a single beat-up motorbike. The high-rollers vanished as soon as they arrived.

If one isn’t careful, these attitudes can rub off on them. I see many missionaries fall into this trap. Rather than trying to elevate the people they serve, they pick up the same indifference towards basic safety measures or personal health, the same fatalistic outlook on local advancement or improvement, the same sloppiness in organization, the same lack of punctuality, the same lack of discipline, the same indifference over the outcomes of projects and events. If you stay here long enough, you become jaded—just like the villagers who make fun of each other for being lazy or thieves or drunkards.

And yet, Lufubu is certainly not all thieves and drunkards—despite what the jaded missionary or old-timer villager might lead you to believe. Nor is it the kind of place that is somehow fated to remain an undeveloped backwater. People in Lufubu have all kinds of incredible qualities—and the potential one can see here is enormous. People will work long, hard hours for very little money. Students will learn in incredibly difficult conditions. Mothers will raise children, families will send youths to college. And a few of them even come back—bringing new ideas about development with them.

Students will come from all over Zambia to attend DBTTI. Buyers will come from all over the area to get produce from the farm. There’s a new Airtel tower going up, new offices and homes are being built on a gigantic road grid being carved out of the bush. Development is happening, and our young people are part of it.

Youths here will surprise you with their intelligence, and embarrass you with their largesse. People in Lufubu are not ashamed to ask for what they need (or want), but will always find some way to give from what they have—even if it is very little.

The kids at the oratory ask me for sweets (candy) almost every day. It can become very annoying. The ones that don’t speak English will sometimes just say “Muzungu! Sweetie!”—White person! Sweet! One time, I thought I would joke around with one of the worst offenders. He had been given a sweet during one of our programs, and I went up to him and stuck out my hand. “Give me!” To my utter surprise, he immediately handed it over.

“No, no!” I said. He looked confused.

“Nshileefwaya!” I said. “I don’t want!”

Sometimes the kids will be with us for a program all day. They’ll eat nothing besides a few palm nuts they manage to scavenge and the little ration of starvée we give them at the end. Without fail, one of them will always come up to me with their plate: “Come eat.” I always refuse—but part of me thinks they would genuinely be happier if I didn’t.

Parishioners will bring whole chickens for offertory on Sunday—even cook them nicely for us to enjoy. Sunday collection will turn up hundreds or even thousands of Kwacha—in a place where fair pay hovers around 5 Kwacha per hour.

People are incredibly generous to guests or outsiders. Anyone who is “new” is shown the greatest kindness and respect. For my birthday, two students I barely knew organized a 15-minute tribute dance in my honor. Students on shoestring food budgets will invite me to eat dinner with them and then try to give me the best portion. At graduation, students who I hadn’t even taught introduced me to their parents. At a birthday party I once attended, the cook, who was busy cutting two chickens into tiny pieces for 20 different guests, tried to give me an entire leg and thigh.

Men from the village will sit for an hour as I give them a talk on drugs and alcohol (at the request of Fr. Hamweete), then respectfully ask questions and defer to my judgement. Women in the village will address me in Bemba with the honorific noun form. At a wake in October for a boy who had died, the village asked me to give the opening prayer.

None of these things are because I’m special. It’s because these people are special—really, truly kind and generous to the stranger, the outsider. They consider it an honor for them to be there.

And so, at the end of the day, the missionary must walk a fine—some might call it “impossible”—line: they must become like the people they serve, but only by absorbing their positive qualities, and not the negative. They must absorb their mannerisms, their culture—indeed, even their hardships, their struggles—while at the same time leaving themselves room to call people out on the areas where they need to change. They can’t do this if they suffer from the same weaknesses.

To come here in authenticity, to serve people at parity, a missionary must leave the cushiness, the foppishness, the wastefulness of the first-world behind—but they must not forget the qualities that allowed for that success and extravagant plenty in the first place. Efficiency, punctuality, a love of hard work, a sense of personal responsibility, awareness of the common good, even a desire for material advancement—these are good things! Young people here need this. If we want to see them advance, we need to inculcate this spirit. It’s not quite Gordon Gekko “greed is good”, but you certainly have to want to improve your standard of living before it can be improved.

There are already steps being taken towards this end. Well-educated instructors and enthusiastic students coming from other parts of Zambia bring with them ideas of progress and development. Don Bosco Trades Training Institute (our school) brings in educators, motivational speakers, and politicians to try and stir up young people’s confidence for making change. Most importantly, there are always Salesians here at the Mission that are willing to engage young people on a person-to-person level, challenging them to become “Good Christians and Honest Citizens”, just like Don Bosco intended.

So—where does this leave us? What do we need?

Well, for starters, we need more people from outside to come here. Farmers, teachers, professionals—even just young people with big hearts and a love for hard work. We need financial support—but more than that, we need partnerships of solidarity with sister parishes and communities around the world. Problems aren’t solved by just throwing money at them. They’re solved by building relationships, fostering mutual exchange of blessings—and this sometimes requires one to move beyond the neat little boxes of social nicety.

Volunteer and missionary work are a good thing! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. For one thing, struggling institutions get needed help and new life. For another—and more importantly—young people start to learn what’s possible for them. They get inspired, they become hungry. A liberal academic in America might call this “neo-colonialism”. Ask anybody around here and they’ll call it “opportunity”.

This is not to say that all international involvement in Zambia is perfect—or even good. Voluntourism is a real problem—as my friend Stefan joked when he called the African Impact house in Livingstone “the white-saviorism hostel”. Missionaries aren’t immune from self-promotion at the expense of locals, either. Aforementioned burnout or indifference can lead to disregard or disrespect for local people, which, in the end, harms them more than helps them. And international companies (especially mining companies…) still come to Zambia to totally rip off, exploit, and undercut the Zambian people. All of this might just be the “neo-colonialism” that gets talked about—or something worse.

And yet, there are miles of difference between these things and the kind of authentic, personal, loving service I have seen here at Don Bosco. Lumping all types of foreign involvement together only shows that you have no understanding of the world you’re talking about. Anyone critiquing voluntary service from their armchair gets to feel smug and satisfied while accomplishing nothing.

So, at the end of the day, it’s not sensitivity our friends here need. It’s not well-wishes, or coddling, or even starvée. It’s sacrifice. Personal service at a cost. Friendship. One might even call it love.

Sunday, June 7. Feast of Corpus Christi. Lufubu, Zambia

Today, we had a Mass and Eucharistic Procession for Corpus Christi. It was incredible. There are several different women’s choirs in the parish. Each of them was wearing their own colors—patterned head scarves matching patterned chitenge dresses, all with some religious motif, the Sacred Heart, folded and praying hands, etc. The Xaverian youth group were wearing their uniforms—a kind of red, white, and green scouting garb with a folded seaman-style cap. They carried a little posted tarpaulin embroidered with the likeness of the Eucharist, words from John’s Gospel (I am the Bread of Life) in English and Bemba. The altar servers walked in the front swinging the incense censer. Fr. Cao and Fr. Waldemar followed, taking turns holding up the huge, gilded Monstrance in the likeness of a burning sunburst, Christ in the center. We all followed behind singing songs, talking, praying. Kids ran around or stopped to look, wide-eyed, as the crowd passed.

Different houses had erected small altars for us to stop at. These were simple wooden tables draped with white cloth, two candles set and burning to flank the Monstrance. The procession stopped at each of them to kneel, receive Benediction, read Scripture, and pray. The scenes repeated themselves—hundreds in their Sunday best, kneeling in the dirt, thatch-roofed and clay-walled houses behind, mango trees dropping leafy boughs over us, rows of dried and dead maize mixed in with the remnants of tomato, pumpkin, sweet potato gardens. Puffy clouds drifted across sparkling azure. At each altar, Father would bless us with the Monstrance, sweeping up, down, left, right—a cruciform sunburst, light glinting and shining in reflection from above.

As the procession ended, we returned to the Church, received the final blessing, and departed. People spent some time talking on the steps outside. Students from the college mingled with the young people from the Oratory. I went and grabbed some candies to distribute among the altar servers. We talked and laughed a little bit, and then went our separate ways. “See you tomorrow!” they said. “Pa mailo!”

The table at dinner tonight had more laughs than I’ve heard in the house for a long time. Our community received two new members: a co-adjutor brother (Br. Chris) who is coming to run the farm and a seminarian (Br. Benjamin) who is here on holiday from school. We played some pick-up basketball the other day at the oratory. They’re settling in nicely. The jokes have already started.

Life is warming up a little bit. Happiness is coming back. The clouds that have hung over the community are clearing up—and behind them can be seen a few rays of sun.

I’m becoming more of a missionary every day. I’m playing football barefoot in the thorny grass. I’m eating nshima and liking it.

Photo Gallery. Last Eight Months.

Currently listening to heavy rain from under the outdoor shed at Kubu Café in Livingstone, Zambia.

How long have you been there?:

At this table? A little over six hours. In Livingstone? Five days. In Zambia? Six months.

Why the heck haven’t you posted since December?:

Uhhhh…

January 19, 2026.

00:23.

It is not about success, it is about obedience.

Visions, works, experiences, miracles—obedience is prized above all the rest.

When you ask, “What ought I to do for God?” the answer is simple: be obedient.

Do your duty in a spirit of love and the rest will follow.

Tonight Fr. Cao shared with us that he basically got completely eviscerated by the financial “powers that be” and the mission is once again in rough water. This is on top of every other concern, with the school running a deficit, the government refusing to pay tuition, demanding income tax on untaxable income, some (soon-to-be-expelled) students in near riot drunk and publicly fighting each other and the teachers for the past two days, the staff completely underprepared for the school year, the farm minus, all the while having the same tensions and difficulties in the community.

So I tried to cheer him up. He likes to have a beer sometimes so I sat with him and we drank a couple of beers. None of the other confreres were with us for dinner so we made sure the table was extra lively. Afterwards, I asked to talk to him privately to offer donations and try and come up with a solution. The aspirants were eagerly watching the Africa Cup final, and we went and joined them. I slipped away to work on the wifi project. I somehow stumbled into having to write an algorithm ChatGPT described as “enumerating rational lattice points on the probability simplex intersected with a second affine hyperplane along a lower-dimensional polytope”. What? I bonked around some Python and ChatGPT figured it out. Above my pay grade… which is zero.

Earlier today I sat on a wooden stool outside of a mud-brick walled and thatch-roofed hut as a visitor at St. Paul’s Small Christian Community in the village. They read Proverbs 5:1-5 and discussed. The men sat on stools while the women and children sat on a large mat. Ants crawled around on the knotted tree trunks beneath my feet. Angela, our cook—in whose small yard we were seated— smiled at me.

On our way home, I spotted children from the oratory hidden in the trees and bush, peeking out of mud-brick windows, playing on distant porches. They called out my name as I passed along the main road. I heard it probably 15 or 20 times, often from unknown directions.

Today in the offertory, gifts included a boiled guinea fowl, five bottles of cooking oil, a 15 kg bag of charcoal balanced on a woman’s head, a live chicken, a whole tub of nshima, some greens, and a scattering of small kwacha. On Christmas Day, a similar offering had ended with the chicken escaping its bonds, running wild all over the Church, and generally causing a ruckus until Nate simply caught it and held it for the rest of Mass.

January 30, 2026.

22:59.

You can be an apostle

The apostles were not perfect

In fact, they were very imperfect

But Christ called them

And they were made great by their obedience

By their desire to do all they could for Christ, working with and in spite of their limitations

They were lauded for leaving their nets, leaving their father in the boat, and immediately following Christ

Love causing feet to run ahead of ability, heart to run ahead of head, love running even beyond where the road leads, where the path ends, into open air yawning over the abyss, upwards into everlasting sky

A young boy approached the gates of the Oratory today as Father Cao and I were watching the children. He addressed us in perfect English. We were taken aback. We asked him how he had learned.

“English is my first language,” he said. “I’m an orphan. I was raised in the Salesian orphanage in Kazembe. I learned English from the volunteers.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ephraim,” he said.

It was the eve of the feast of Don Bosco, and the young people had planned a big day. Ephraim had come from Kazembe to join in the festivities. The three of us stood there together while the Oratory bustled with life.

“Young man,” Father Cao began. “What grade are you in?”

“Grade five,” Ephraim said. “But I’m 15 years old.”

“What’s the matter? You stopped school?”

“Yes. My brother stopped, so I stopped as well. But then I realized that school is very important, so I returned. I want to get an education so that I can be successful.”

“Good boy,” Father said.

They continued talking, laughing and smiling. Ephraim, orphaned from infancy, a stranger in his native place; Father Cao next to him, a man worn thin by the yoke of responsibility, the crushing weight of isolation—laughing, his arm around his shoulder in a gentle fatherly embrace.

Youth from the Oratory spent the day celebrating Don Bosco’s feast. For big feasts they always do this kind of program where they camp out at the oratory for a few days and have activities from dawn to dusk. Literally waking up at the crack of dawn—like 5:30am, I can already hear them singing outside my window. People in Lufubu get up early. You’ll find kids no taller than my knee heading out alone to the fields with a mattock slung over their shoulder at 6:00am.

They had sports and other events all day, Mass. They didn’t eat dinner until 9:30pm—cooked by themselves over a charcoal fire—now they’re having a kind of dance party in the pitch dark, lit by the one small stripped-bare bulb hanging from a jagged wire in the apse of the Oratory’s iron sheet roof.

Here under the hall, music is loud. Remembering sober journeys inside bars and clubs, speaking to people lost and beginning to realize they are lost, speaking to people yearning, searching for something more, and not finding it, victims of their own weakness, drunken resolutions to do good, to change, followed by drunken forgettings, drunken excesses and lusts, a problem for tomorrow.

It was a strange, liminal life I lived for a while. Half-way between worlds, still with the memories of various bars and clubs fresh in my mind, but resolved to concern myself with all of that no longer. Nevertheless, finding myself here or there, on a trip, visiting a friend, hosting someone—sober or nearly sober in the midst of the hazy, artificial-light-induced brain fog of the Dimes Square dive bar, the grimy Chicago yuppie-havens where first year analysts and accountants and consultants and software engineers mingled, sprawling indoor jungles in Bali with dirt cheap drinks and expatriates from half the known world staggering around.

Yeah. Not perfect myself, but one who had already seen beyond the veil, one who had already peeked beyond the curtain, one who had already seen that all the world was empty, that meaning lay beyond the world, beyond the light, yet, intractably in the world in an unimaginable way. These were some of my favorite conversations. Grasping at those whose realizations seem to be dancing just beyond the veil. Those young hearts where, if you could only find the right words, might just listen—might just change. “Do you know there is a higher way?”

February 4, 2026.

22:13.

If there is no way, God will create a way. He will pull you up by a path that does not exist, because God is the Way.

“I am the Gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

God may as well have said, “I am the Ladder,” Jacob’s Ladder—

“Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

It’s a very simple mystical meaning. Christ is the nexus point between Heaven and Earth. Christ is the unity between human and Divine, between created and Uncreated. Christ is that by which God descends and man ascends.

Last week, a boy named Peter showed up to the Oratory with a nail in his head. Or rather, the gaping hole where a nail had just been.

We asked the kids how deep it had entered, and one of them held up a finger. Uh oh.

Nobody knew what to do about it—his parents were in the field, and in any case, one had to be careful with these things. If we tried to help him, and things went badly, the parents might accuse us of witchcraft.

We debated and waffled for a while until Nate put his foot down. We were taking him to the clinic, and that was that. If someone wanted to accuse him of witchcraft, they were more than welcome.

We set off to see if we could find Peter’s parents. We ended up finding his uncle. A crowd of Peter’s friends came with us. He walked stoically in the middle—Nate at his side.

Near at the clinic, we passed a woman looking deathly-ill headed in the other direction. There was some murmuring in our crowd. “What’s that?” I asked. Br. Philip responded. “That’s Peter’s mother.”

We turned and flagged her down. We quickly explained the situation to her and asked for her permission to take Peter to the district hospital, if necessary. The poor woman looked terrible. She took one look at Peter and left.

Peter continued walking like a soldier. Nate held his hand the whole way, then didn’t let go while the surgeon sutured his forehead without anesthesia. The kid didn’t make a sound.

While Peter was vaccinated for meningitis, we had an impromptu Oratory outside the clinic. Anthony and I had a Kung Fu battle against all the boys, and they ran and jumped on us and attacked us from all angles. We walked home in the light of the setting sun, passing villagers bent at their labor in the tall rows of ripening maize.

Though he hadn’t been a regular guest before, Peter came back to the Oratory the next day. Actually, he comes every day now. The hole in his head is healing up.

February 10, 2026.

23:38.

God has been very kind to bring me out to this unseen place.

Where I am hidden.

An arrow hidden in His arm.

Like Christ in Nazareth.

Today I woke up like any other day—5:00am—and sat down for about an hour at my desk to throw together lecture material. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants since the second week of January. Some days I’m so busy I literally forget to tie my shoes. Today, during my second class, and at 10:37 in the morning, I looked down to find both shoes untied.

Eating breakfast in under five seconds. Taking a few moments to suck down my cup of piping hot water. Walking out the door with a banana in my teeth and bread crumbs stuck to my face.

Yesterday, in the middle of my programming lecture, I heard a knock at the door. It was Madame Miriam, the school accountant & operations manager. She told me I needed to listen to her very carefully: stop teaching the class, pack your things, and hide yourself.

“What?”

“There are people from immigration here. You can’t be seen teaching—Fr. Cao thinks they might give you trouble. Please, just make yourself unavailable.”

I told her I had all of the necessary documents: work permit, University degree, invitation letter. She said it didn’t matter—they didn’t care if your documents were in order, they could give you trouble any way they wanted to. I said alright, peeked around outside, and assured her I would pack and leave immediately.

I returned to the front of the classroom.

“Uh, so, guys—class is dismissed. I guess immigration is here looking for me. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

Then I left. I spent the rest of the day in my room.

February 15, 2026.

21:24.

A vision of God

As Life

Ebullient, bursting life.

Creative life.

I understood what they said:

“Do not speak to us again or we shall die.”

I drained the beer and peered into it like a telescope. Fr. Cao: “Ambroise!” He held up his hands holding two empty beers. Big smile. “Oh, you took two!” I said. He laughed. “You can hold them up like this. Like binoculars.”

A man serious in fasting and joyous in feasting.

Lent begins tomorrow. Nothing but soup and beans for weeks.

“We have to make some days just eggs,” Fr. Cao says. “Otherwise, what kind of fasting are we doing?”

Nate left a few weeks ago. It wasn’t quite sudden, and it wasn’t quite unexpected, but it hurt nonetheless. I mean, being compatriots is one thing, but even beyond that—people are different around here. He was the only one with whom I felt we actually understood one another.

There is an oppressive lack of empathy that hangs around this village, a kind of cloud of darkness. People’s lives are so difficult that they seem not to really value them. Death is only an inconvenience. The death of another person is an inevitability.

One of the altar servers had been sick for a few weeks. William. A lively young guy, always smiling. Maybe 16 years old. He had come down with severe typhoid, and was a long time in the hospital. Right when the news had broke, some children at the oratory were overheard talking about it.

“I hope he dies—then we can eat chicken at the funeral.”

Children so hungry that death to them seems an inconsequential thing.

A few days after we had heard about his illness, I went to visit him at his house. I tried to catch him on the day he was supposed to be at home while being transferred from Kazembe to the district hospital at Mansa. When I arrived, his neighbors told me that the ambulance had already left.

I found his younger sister to be the only one there. I tried to speak to her, but my Bemba is poor and she’s too young to speak English. I ended up giving her some lollipops and sweet rolls I had brought.

“For William, ok? Or for your family. Maybe you can bring them to William in Mansa.”

She smiled and gently took the bag.

“Natotela.”

A week or two later, we were all seated at the dinner table. Fr. Hamwetee was talking about William. Apparently, there was a huge controversy in the village. He was still in the hospital, and people were starting to think that he had been bewitched.

“This young girl,” Fr. Hamwetee said, “his younger sister—she had a dream. In this dream, she saw another woman from the village wearing black. She was wearing black and laughing. Black is an ominous color. It means death. She took it to mean that this woman had bewitched William. So, she told her mother. Her mother marched straight across the village and publicly accused this other woman of being a witch. Loudly! Screaming, shouting. And the thing is, this other woman—she’s a Catholic. They both are. The two of them couldn’t work it out, so they came to me. I tried to advise them, but William’s mother wouldn’t drop it. They took it to court, you know. It’s being judged by Mwata now. In his court—behind his palace. He sits there on his throne and judges. I have no idea how this thing will end.”

March 1, 2026.

09:15.

It was hidden and unexpected.

We hold this treasure in earthen vessels.

The salvation of all the world came in such a quiet, humble, and unexpected vehicle, which was at the same time a Voice that resounded through all the universe.

Lufubu sits sleepily under a wet and grey sky. Spotted showers cancelled this afternoon’s meeting of small Christian communities. No sound has been heard within the walls of Lufubu Mission for at least the last two hours.

The storms broke quietly. Rain bathed the earth in gentle showers, falling in sheets receding into the distance. The earth is exceedingly peaceful. All nature holds together like a delicate crystal. Birds sing, trees wave, grasses rustle.

It’s the mildest storm we’ve had in a while. Earlier this week, thunderheads crouched over the landscape like a menacing presence. Anthony, one of the aspirants, and I were walking to a meeting of the St. John’s small Christian community. We reached the house of the parish secretary and found the yard to be deserted. The benches where people normally sat could be seen scattered around the large mango tree near the road.

“It’s empty,” Anthony said.

Spotting us loitering, the woman’s husband came around from the back and invited us inside. We passed two boys playing on the modest porch and were led into a small sitting room. A simple wooden table with three chairs was pressed up against the curtain which divided this room from the main house. A large banner with a depiction of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope hung from the East wall, and an ancient television and sound set were tucked onto a shelf near the south wall. It was the first one I had seen in Lufubu.

The parish secretary poked her head out from behind the curtain and greeted us, then joined us moments later. Anthony spoke with them for a few minutes—enough to learn that the meeting had been canceled for fear of rain. We thanked them for receiving us, then left.

Rain began in earnest as soon as we reached the road, and its red, muddy clay quickly began to seep into our shoes and socks.

Anthony and I had both brought umbrellas, but we were huddled together under only one. Twenty minutes ago, as we were leaving the mission, we had spotted Nate and Cosmas walking only a few moments ahead of us on the road—also on their way to small Christian communities. Fr. Cao had sent us out two by two, taking neither scrip nor sack, the two Americans paired up with the two aspirants. Nate and Cosmas had forgotten their umbrellas, so I gave them mine.

“It’s like the Gospel,” Anthony said.

“How so?” I asked.

He laughed. “The foolish virgins brought no oil. ‘Give us some of your oil!’ they said.”

I finished the parable. “No, otherwise, there may not be enough for ourselves.”

There was indeed not enough for ourselves, as the rain splattered our exposed legs and shoulders.

Out of the blue, a gigantic bolt of lightning, seen an instant before it was heard, shattered the air around us. It had struck a house no less than 50 feet away. We dropped the umbrella and sprinted for the cover of an abandoned store. We waited for the storm to pass, then returned home unharmed.

Others were not so lucky. A Catholic woman from the parish was struck along the road and paralyzed from the waist down. Two village houses were lit and went up in flames. One of these burnings resulted in yet another witchcraft accusation.

Later in the week, bolts struck both the mission house and school, burning the overcurrent protection circuits in the electrical rooms and knocking out the power for several days.

Looking into the distance from the mission yard where I walk and say my Rosary, I see wet hills rolling into the deep yonder, releasing a mist into the air. If one followed the great plateau upwards where it slants, they would eventually reach the Great Rift Valley and the Rift lakes beyond: Malawi, Tanganyika, Victoria, Mwelu. From a high place, the Congo can be seen in the other direction. It stretches into the sunset as a flat, green floodplain, upon which, scattered lakes and marshes flash in the dying sun.

Under cover of darkness, smugglers cross the Luapula river in hand-crafted canoes, carrying sacks of grain to sell at Congolese market. Boat teams of ten or twenty, paddling like a machine in unison, motor under manpower up and down the winding tributaries, searching at nighttime for fish. Along the river’s banks, entire villages squat among low reeds, rising from the mud—transient persons, moving as the river moves, floods, overflows its banks. Their children do not attend school. The Sacraments reach them only once-in-a-blue-moon, when a Priest braves the waters of the Luapula, bearing a portable Mass kit to the island outstation two kilometers out in the middle of Lake Mwelu.

This morning, after the 7:00 Mass, Fr. Cao and Br. Philip rushed into the chapel while I was praying. Fr. Cao quickly unlocked the Tabernacle, removed a ciborium full of consecrated hosts, and wrapped the entire thing in a corporal. Br. Philip peeked his head inside.

“No purificator?”

“No, I have everything else already.”

They scrambled past the armoire in the hallway, pulling out an alb, chasuble, and stole. “We’re late,” I could hear Father say as they descended the stairs.

They spun out of the driveway in the mud-spattered Ford Ranger, the mission car inherited from a previous rector. They went south towards Mununshi, an outstation 40 or 50 km down the muddy and torn up marsh road. The parishioners there receive a visit from a priest once every two months. The rest of the time, a presbyter leads them in a Communion service.

Lufubu Mission is technically an outstation itself—one of the 80+ satellites of Kazembe Parish, run by our sister community of Salesians in Kazembe. A few weeks ago, I found myself in the halls of their residence in the early morning hours of a Sunday. I was drinking a coffee when I spotted Fr. Joseph walking out the door in a motorbike helmet—with an alb, a stole, and a Mass kit in a small pack strapped to his back.

He looked at me and smiled. “Outstation.”

He mounted the motorbike and tore off down the road in the gentle rain.

March 16, 2026.

17:25.

The space in which we encounter God is much more liminal, chaotic, and beautiful than the neat lines of philosophy and categorical reasoning. Even Thomas recognized this when he declared his work of systematic theology to be straw—in comparison to the dangerous, uncertain, numinous, divinely luminous realm of mystical experience.

We find that all is chaos—too many initial starting conditions make our differential equations behave all weird, and anything can only really be an approximation. And yet, we find a pattern within the chaos—that we can somehow grasp and model the swirling beast that is reality and somehow make things that work. It is nothing less than a participation in a divine act of Creation, an example of God’s finger leaning on the scale, that God is in the chaos, in the darkness—as an inexplicably Good entity with whom we enter into a kind of dance of unknowing that ends in knowledge by way of an impossible transfer, a sideways precession by channels unseen to the human eye into a realm that exists beyond our understanding. We see glimpses and flashes and Cross-sections of this World in Love. World-in-Love. That is the point towards which all things tend.

This past Sunday, it was my turn to go to the outstations. Fr. Chisanga was in Lusaka, so he asked Fr. Cao if he would say the Mass at Mondo. Taking along Anthony as an interpreter, the three of us squeezed into the cab of the Ranger.

Mondo is just a short drive away, but transportation in the area is so bad that the villagers receive a priest only once a month—if they’re lucky. As we arrived, the parish chairman met us at the door. Fr. Cao informed him that we were there for the 9:30am Mass.

“Oh, there’s no 9:30 Mass! The program we received said 10:00.”

It was around 9:15, meaning we had 45 minutes to kill. The chairman handed Fr. Cao a handwritten note.

“These are the names of all of the sick people in the village. Would you take them Communion?”

Fr. Cao agreed.

We found ourselves shuttled between different houses, climbing firm, mud-brick stairs, bending under low doorways, staring up at thatch ceilings covered in dust and spider webs. Most of these dwellings were the same: four walls, four interior walls arranged in a cross, and a central dual-post supporting a thatch ceiling, the ribs of which circled from the top to the bottom around spines made of sturdy sugarcane. We would find an elder, sometimes with family, immobile and seated (usually on the floor) waiting patiently for the Sacrament they hadn’t received in months.

Anthony carried a backpack with the portable Mass kit, while I carried a lectionary and the small, Corporal-wrapped Ciborium that in itself contained the presence of the Living God. I held it tightly against my chest as we walked through bush-tracks on the winding trails that connected house to house in the village, following the parish chairman and Fr. Cao in a white alb.

I felt several times as if there was a heartbeat in that Ciborium. Most likely, it was my own heart reflected back at me, but the impression was made. Things like that are not accidental.

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

We found ourselves in a small thatch-roofed house behind the Church. A man and woman sat on the floor. They were both old and obviously homebound. We greeted them and told them we were there to bring them the Sacraments. Through Anthony, Fr. Cao asked if they were prepared to receive Communion.

“He would like to make a confession,” Anthony said.

I quickly pulled the alb and Mass kit out of the bag, while Anthony handed Fr. Cao the stole. In a few moments, Fr. Cao was vested. We waited outside while the man’s confession was heard. Then Fr. Cao anointed him with oil, and they both received Communion.

We went from house to house, and soon, there was a crowd of kids walking with us. The same scene was repeated: a smear of oil, a statement of faith, reception of Incarnate Wisdom. I felt like I was floating.

After Mass, the parish council hosted us for a meal in the chairman’s home. It was a larger structure than the other houses in Mondo and had a dedicated dining room—which simply meant a few plastic chairs and a little table. They passed around the nshima and we dug in. Afterwards, we thanked them and left.

March 21, 2026.

22:35.

Your mind can ponder the mysteries and not understand

Your heart can hope for the answer of a prayer for something you desperately need

You can be in a place of darkness and unknowing

And then suddenly it’s there, and all is well. Light illumines and you understand. A prayer is answered and you breathe a sigh of thanks and relief, and you go forward in joy with your lease on life renewed.

The love of God, that sublime and universal vocation has led me here—reading Jeremiah by the light of a flashlight under a mosquito net hung with socks and underwear, itself under two paracord laundry lines drying the rest of my clothes. An unfinished Yagi-Uda antenna of my own design sits on the shelf next to me, soldered together with scraps and junk and connected via a quarter-wave transformer (aluminum foil wrapped around the outside of a coax cable) to a hacked Wi-Fi repeater, alongside bundles of ethernet cable, wire, a soldering iron, Raspberry Pi’s, two of the cheapest 15V power supplies on eBay that shock me when I use them, a digital oscilloscope, a multimeter. A crucifix hangs above the door, and the blessed Sacrament is in 15m to my right.

The antenna is kind of a mess. The matching is terrible and it’s probably not even resonant at the right frequency, but initial tests indicate that I made at least something that radiates in a relatively directional pattern.

Until the spindly piece of junk on my shelf is operational, I have a regular rubber-duck antennae’d Wi-Fi repeater pointed in the general direction of an outdoor access point 100m away from my window, which I recently zip-tied to the roof of the school. In this way, I have been successfully stealing Wi-Fi from myself. It’s extremely unreliable—power goes out at the school about twice a day, and somewhere in the janky software stack I wrote, my IP address timeout service has been a bit overzealous. That same software stack is currently regulating the data usage of 50+ students and staff at the school. It’s hacked-together, but it’s functional Wi-Fi —and it’s the same connection I use to write this post.

The past three months have been a kind of weary blur. The heavy-hitting experiences, sufferings, and spiritual discoveries of the first two months long ago gave way to a kind of Divine Silence. Late nights in the chapel blended into late nights at the desk. The numinous, sultry mists of autumn Lufubu gave way to darker, bleaker days—clogged and splattered by rain, heavy rain, and more rain.

As I sit at my desk, thunderheads roll in the distance. Lightning illumines the grey sky.

March 27, 2026.

15:03.

It is impossible until it is simply being done. The heart rejoices at what it already knew while reason is playing catch-up. Faith seeking understanding. The foreknowledge of faith being squared with doddering, linear, slow human knowledge. The electrifying light of faith, forming impossible connections in the ether by dead reckoning, by the tunings of the heart, electromagnetic coupling with the divine—an antenna attuned to the most impossible reality, reacting in jumping, fluttering love to fluctuations in a glorious, imperceptible medium.

Today, our third year students had their graduation.

During the intentions at Mass, a girl prayed to God that there would be no rain today, so that we could enjoy the celebration. Only a few moments later, we could hear rain falling on the chapel’s tin roof. Everyone laughed.

At breakfast, Fr. Cao brought it up. Everyone laughed again.

“Ah, these people. They think they can command God!” Fr. Hamweete said.

“He can do what He wills. If He wants it to rain, it will rain.”

As I walked around the campus—helping students carry chairs, decorate the stage, hang up the banners— I looked up and noticed a clear blue sky.

The ceremony was supposed to begin at 9. At 9:15, they were just putting up the tent. Mr. Sokoni whipped a tractor with a grass cutter around backwards, slicing the five foot tall bush that had sprung up around campus.

At 10:15, a line of nice cars appeared parked on the grass between the classrooms. The District Commissioner, the District Secretary of Education, and other guests of honor filed in and took their seats. Students were still carrying in chairs when the MC started speaking.

A photo tent with a backdrop containing a prowling lion, a banking 747, and a poolside set of cabana chairs waited for the students after the ceremony. Warm-up music screaming in Bemba about private jets and money banged over the muddy and torn up speakers that I helped set up—tapping power by sticking bare wires into a socket.

The second tent we had paid for was never put up. It sat in a crumpled heap in the midst of the chairs.

The MC was a friend of Mr. Kunda, a comedian from Mansa in a Ceaușescu-esque suit, a Mao suit. The microphone buzzed harshly with evident DC pollution at 50 Hz.

There was a burst of sound, and a band began to process in from behind us. They wore matching blue tracksuits—a group hired from a local boarding school. The graduates walked behind waving their caps. A crowd of schoolchildren followed in their blue uniforms— many of them kids from the Oratory.

The DJ began a song, and the graduates started to dance. They had prepared something before, and they stepped and swung around in their gowns. I noticed the lyrics—“In the Name of Jesus, I can never be the same again.”

I stopped to watch a few of them in particular: John, a talented cook who had helped me put on a feast for the students at Christmas, dancing with a serious face and sunglasses on; Peter, one of my computer students, almost a head taller than the others around him; Mortone, a talented musician and producer, who produced his tracks on the school computers with a trial version of FL Studio, whose music I heard everywhere from Kazembe to Nchelenge; another John, a talented choir director and youth animator; Blackson and Aron, self-described “drunks” who had asked Nate for his copy of the Young Pioneers book when he left.

Each of the guests of honor was introduced and cheered for in turn. A large cheer came for Fr. Hamweete—who walked up to the stage in a suit, fashionably late (“ba Black Fatha!”). The largest cheer, to everyone’s shock and surprise, came for Fr. Waldemar, who came even more fashionably late, in—against all odds or expectation—a crisp suit with a starched, open collar’ed white shirt, despite walking around the setup no less than an hour before in the same short shorts and stained gray tank top.

The cultural dance group came and, against the booming drums, danced their typically scandalous, gyrating dance.

Finally, Fr. Cao gave a speech, the gist of which went like this:

“You will leave with far more than a certificate. You will leave with a heart formed in the Spirit of Don Bosco… you have learned the spirit of sacrifice… you learned that strength is built through perseverance. You learned to be a community— ubuntu. You became, at Don Bosco, a family.”

As his speech ended, clouds began to form. The DC came next to begin his speech. He encouraged them—first decrying the decline of the institution, lamenting the days past when produce came in plenty. He encouraged the students to apply for loans from his office, tapping into the something-odd 40 million kwacha that was currently sitting idle in CDF accounts.

Then the students walked. They shook hands with each of the honored guests in turn before receiving their diploma from the VP.

The best student in each program of study was honored with gifts and cash prizes from the guests of honor. Brian—far and away my best student, and also the best student in the school— was given a cash prize of 1500 kwacha by the mayor of Mwansabomwe. I gave all of my students a present, and Brian a little bigger one. There was more dancing, more speaking, and finally—things were wrapping up.

Toward the end of the ceremony, the MC disappeared for a moment, then reemerged— no longer in the Mao suit, but in garb resembling an artistically liberal impression of a Depression-era hobo.

“It is so paramount and tantamount, it is so comprehesivient, so electroplastisic. It is French as well, ‘Je vais a la madame que tort, que le petit poid’.”

We closed with a word from the VP, and a prayer from Fr. Chisanga, and it was over. The comedian gave a closing instruction.

“I would like to direct the guests of honor toward the high table near the cars there. That is where you can sit to chill a bit. To…soak enough your throats, to soak enough your stomachs, to soak enough your—medulla oblongata.”

After we ate, I went around congratulating some students. I found a girl named Faides there who had not yet graduated, but was sitting behind me at the ceremony. She was a friend of mine, having made a great first impression by asking if I was drunk when I injured myself after first seeing the stitches on my cracked-open head in November. I asked her how she was.

“Oh, I’m great. I hope that it is this nice on my graduation.”

I remarked how a girl had prayed for no rain during the Mass, and it seemed that God had heard her.

“Yes! He heard me. I prayed for no rain, and He listened.”

“Oh, it was you that made that prayer!”

“Yes, it was me!”

I left the grounds and walked towards the residence. As soon as I entered the house, thunder boomed. A heavy rain began to fall.

April 5, 2026.

14:43.

‘Behold! I am coming soon…’

Said again and again, in cycles, in ever expanding blossoms, flowering of the Kerygma across reality, time and space. A spiritual posture, a mystical key, a sublime truth, and eventually… a physical reality. If there is repetition, if there is a cycle, constructive interference, resonance, negatively damped oscillation, exponential growth at one frequency, Fourier transform finding the pattern, probability density function spiking into infinity like a white hole.

Maranatha.

He appears.

On Good Friday, one of my students—Chanda—was in the exam room writing my Computer Architecture final. I had asked him and the other students if they wouldn’t rather write an exam on a day they weren’t fasting. They shrugged. One meal a day isn’t so uncommon.

Six hours later, Chanda was carrying the Cross in a Passion procession that led every Catholic in Lufubu two kilometers from the roadside to the Church. The bush-track running through the village leads right to its doors. It stops there as if in awe of the edifice, the largest structure for miles, hidden in the dish-shaped depression of the river valley. Sitting on the Church steps on a Sunday, one might see all the way across Lufubu, a river of living color streaming towards the Lord’s house, people in their finest blues, reds, greens. This day, they wore red.

Holy Saturday found me swaying and about to pass out from keto-flu on the top rung of a ladder swapping out light bulbs twenty feet up in the rafters of the Oratory. Martin (the councilman for the parish youth) and I then spent about an hour swapping the solar light on the front façade of the Church, the only light visible in the bush-dark of the Lufubu night. The same light illumined the Easter bonfire as the sun fell. After the last light died, we were left in neon-glow.

Reading after reading came in the dark. I sat next to some girls from the school, following along with the English readings on my phone while they dozed.

I felt a tap on my shoulder as I nearly dozed as well. I turned to find Cosmas there in altar server garb. He was whispering intently.

“We forgot to charge the microphone. Do you have an adapter and a USB-C cable?”

I left the Church and sprinted inside and grabbed what we needed, then clandestinely handed them to Cosmas in the dark at the altar. Right as I reached my seat, the Gloria began. Light returned, in the midst of darkness. A long-absent joy filled my heart.

April 19, 2026.

18:23.

“That’s just part of discernment—being confused.”

— My mom

A Danish or Norwegian or otherwise Scandinavian girl sits in front of me on the other side of the Livingstone café it seems we are both regulars at. Yesterday she and her friends were also here and were having some conversation involving Norse deities in Danish-Norwegian-Swedish that I imagined (since I couldn’t understand it anyway) was a lively discussion of one of my favorite crazy theories about the Iliad taking place in the Baltic or the theological overlap between the Hindu Vedas and the Icelandic Skalds.

My phone just recently pinged with a message from one of my programming students that graduated and it seems that he is also in Livingstone. Maybe I’ll go say hello. Another student recently told me that he is in Choma. It would be nice to see him, but the bus to Lusaka is tough to get on, and it stops in Choma for all of five minutes, so the manner in which the meeting will be accomplished is as yet indistinct.

One week ago, Stefan (my Austrian traveling companion (and also Salesian volunteer in Lilongwe)) set out from Kazembe for the 1600 km to Livingstone. We hitched the first 1000km with Fr. Jacek in exchange for helping him haul some benches to a mission in Masansa.

The priest in charge of the mission was none other than Fr. Zenon, a Polish diocesan missionary I had previously met when he came kayaking with us on the Luapula River. Nate was still here in those days, and we had shared a kayak while the Fathers took the other.

In the marshes along the Luapula are a series of transitory and often unoccupied villages. We drifted among these, stopping to take some lunch in an abandoned hut. Fr. Zenon was joking with Fr. Jacek about the way he interacts with his German girls, the volunteers in Kazembe.

“Jacek, you are always calling them ‘princesses’ very sarcastically! Someday, you should say to one of them, very earnestly, ‘Today, you look like a princess.’”

I laughed and joined in. “Yes, but Father, that might cause a very serious misunderstanding!”

“For Jacek, maybe, but for you! If you were to try that…”

“Vocation gone,” I said, quoting Fr. Cao.

“Vocation gone!” he said. “I like that…”

When we saw him again in Masansa, he hosted us incredibly well. I was well-used to sparse Lufubu fare, so I was utterly shocked when his lay volunteer, Kasia, pulled out a huge assortment of Polish baking. We were plied with coffees, cakes, cookies. I felt like a parched wanderer suddenly finding himself in Calypso’s halls.

The next day, we unloaded the benches and completed the trip to Lusaka. I cast a look at my watch as we entered the city and noticed the date. It was six months to the day since I entered Zambia.

Stefan and I were hosted at the Salesian post-Novitiate house, which ended up being a gigantic compound with space for hundreds a few kilometers south of the Provincial House. Br. Philip and Br. Mark were there as well preparing for a Brother’s retreat, and we took them for burgers and beers. In the morning, we had a quick coffee with Noreen, Danielle, and Alma—in Lusaka and staying at the Provincial House—then boarded the bus for Livingstone.

We had settled on a cheap option with terrible reviews:

‘These guys are not serious’

‘Terrible service’

‘Bus left four hours late’

Without much surprise on my part, our bus left two hours late and broke down an hour into the trip. While the other passengers screamed at the driver, I spotted the driver from the bougie bus company (which had been completely booked) also pulling into Kafue station (jarringly on-time). I went over to them.

“Any space?”

“Give us 400 kwacha and you can squeeze.”

I forked over the equivalent of twenty bucks and we changed over our bags for the last 500km of the trip.

We arrived in Livingstone at night. For me, it was cultural whiplash. Livingstone has nice streets, pretty buildings, cafés, shops, resorts, landscaped sidewalks—in short, things that would be eye-poppingly out of place in the Zambia I know.

Seeing all the money and trappings of money is… kind of gross. You can stay at a luxury resort and pay Bellagio prices, drink expensive liquor, fly in private helicopters over Victoria Falls. I think that somebody in Lufubu would probably cry if they saw me drinking a 200 kwacha cocktail, and even 50 kwacha for a coffee seems painfully expensive.

Fr. Cao recommended me some Sisters to stay with, and I’ve been at a convent for the past six days. They’re incredible ladies, but I think some unfortunate mistakes on my part have left them thinking that I was rather foolish. On the first morning, right before Mass was about to start in their Chapel, I squeezed in just before the Priest was about to enter. Everyone stood, thinking I was the celebrant. I went pink with embarrassment, then tried to squeeze against the wall so that he could pass, but the chapel was so small that I ended up cramping a poor Polish nun so that the priest had to go around the both of us to get to the altar.

By the end of the Mass I was able to laugh at myself. As we all were standing outside, I made a joke to Father Hakim and Sister Agnieszka afterwards and they laughed merrily.

The next morning, I was forced to send Sister Eveline an apologetic text, as I had washed my one pair of pants in the wee hours of the morning only to find (not so surprisingly) that they were soaking wet when I got up for Mass. The same day, my room key fell out of my pants while I was reclining in a chair at Stefan’s hostel, and Sr. Eveline had to drive me there in the middle of the night to get it. Since these events, she has been calling me at least once a day just to make sure—I don’t know—that I’m alive? Given recent events, I’ve decided that her motherly concern is probably a good thing.

On our second day here Stefan and I visited Victoria Falls, got soaked, had our biscuits stolen by a baboon, and ate a nice Indian meal for dinner that, surprisingly, didn’t blast my intestines.

The next day, we saw some rhinos in the national park, then afterwards, met three Americans traveling with an unclerical looking man en route to the same Zambezi sunset cruise we had booked. They ended up being Benedictine Volunteers taking a little vacation accompanied by a Benedictine priest from a mission site near Mpika.

They were at the end of their time of service and were traveling a bit before heading home. We had a grand time rediscovering American-style banter and talking about God, and after the cruise went for a while to shoot pool and have a few drinks. Sophia—one of the two girls in their crew—taught me how to Salsa dance and explained that being Hispanic is a mindset. Dominic and Fr. Gabriel and I talked about vocation and played crappy pool while Stefan and Elizabeth (the other girl) powwowed at the table and hung out with Chanda, the birthday boy of the evening who we had met on the cruise.

Yesterday, as I walked to the hostel where Stefan was staying, I noticed that the police were closing the main road. I asked one of them what was up.

“The president is coming today. His convoy always passes at very high speed. We close the road for him to travel.”

I asked why he was coming to Livingstone. He said that he was here to attend a conference of engineers.

“Maybe I can go. I’m an engineer.”

He laughed.

“Yes, you’re invited…”

After I reached the hostel, I accompanied Stefan to the bus station, where I packed him, along with the three Americans and every other person, it seemed, that we had met in Livingstone, on the bus back to Lusaka. I remained at the terminal, alone.

After losing Nate (he’s alive, just back in Illinois) it was really nice to be traveling with Stefan. But, as I have learned to accept, sometimes God uses only short friendships to change our hearts. Among the hundreds of friends I have made since quitting my job in July 2024, I have been with none of them longer than a year, and most of them only weeks or months.

As a prime example of this phenomenon, Stefan and I had met at a workshop for all of the international volunteers in ZMB Province that took place two weeks ago in Kazembe. As had happened with the American SLMs, I became incredibly close with these people in no time at all, and just as soon after was forced to leave them forever, or at least, indefinitely.

The workshop was, unexpectedly, something my heart had really needed without me knowing. Fr. Chris Kunda, our sort of spiritual guide and charismatic leader, led us on activities around Luapula, and we spent the week living and praying together while sharing our experiences.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one having a tough time. Kasia, a Polish volunteer in Makululu, described the crushing isolation she felt among the boys, all of whom had been picked up from lives on the street, who could love her one day and be completely indifferent to her the next. Somebody asked her what she thought she had changed while in Makululu:

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can do whatever you want, Makululu will remain the same.”

Stefan and Alma described the difficulties of working in Malawi, where the people in the capital city were even poorer than the people in Lufubu. Noreen talked about the hair-pulling stress of writing projects for the Project Development Office; Danielle described the difficulties of being the only woman in a house full of men. Everyone had troubles. In this, we all found consolation.

Not that it was a competition, but I certainly felt as if my struggles in Lufubu were put in perspective. Serving God is not about running to the place where human suffering is the thickest, but rather about committing to the particular place in which he has placed you. It’s not grit that gets you into Heaven—obedience is prized above anything else.

For sure, Lufubu had been gritty. But at the end of the day, there are still beautiful things there. The kids at the oratory are incredible. The Christians at the parish have a simple faith that would put most American Catholics to shame. And my life is still ten times easier than the least jacked-up street kid in Makululu. My suffering is voluntary. Theirs isn’t.

There’s no big fat theological treatise in this blog post (sorry to those who wanted one?), aside from the small reflection that we are more powerless than we think. Really we are just confused creatures, stumbling around and falling constantly while Christ the Rock and His Immaculate Mother sort of lead and guide us along like lambs. The sooner one realizes this, the sooner they can let that sweet sweet love pour over them like sunlight.

I’ve had to butt up against this fact pretty directly in these past days. Vocational confusion is at an all time high. God sends incredible people, then they disappear. Three different religious orders contact me on the same day, and the same evening I meet a girl that knocks my socks off. We walk faithfully into an indefinite future. I sit at a café typing in the rain.

There are more things I could write. But as a beloved disciple said:

“If every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

Our community received a Salesian aspirant named Anthony two days ago. He had nearly paddled his way across Lake Bangweulu in a canoe to get here when the ferry from Chilubi Island (his home) had broken down. In the rain season, this can be very dangerous, so Fr. Cao had told him to wait. He arrived without incident on the bus.

After Mass, Brother Philip, Nate, Anthony, and I sat for a short meeting with the altar servers. They poked each other and laughed, and Nate gave them a talk on the profound holiness of the Mass. I gave an impromptu talk on John 13:34-35:

“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.

This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Anthony translated for me. I told them simply: they needed to love each other. You can’t be a Christian if you don’t love. It’s an essential part of the experience. In fact, there’s no experience without it.

I taught them a good-old-fashioned St. Francis Parish School hymn: “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love”. It was a strange experience. The last time I sang that hymn, I had probably done so ironically. I don’t even think I believed in God when I graduated grade school.

I had a similar experience yesterday when it was my turn to choose a hymn to open Mass. I chose: “Make Me A Channel of Your Peace”. At St. Francis, we sang it almost every day at morning assembly. In those days, it was usually an opportunity for a joke: changing a lyric to something dirty, singing purposefully bad. Yesterday, it made me cry. My eyes strangled the tears before they dropped. Nobody noticed.

You cannot be a Christian without love. Here in Lufubu, as well as in America, many go through all the motions of Catholicism while forgetting this basic fact.

Two days ago, several Oratorians were arrested in connection with a brawl that occurred after a football match. One of them I knew—he and I had played football together with the kids. Last week he ate dinner at our house. The police raided the village at 02:00 and took them away. One of the guys they couldn’t find—so they arrested his younger brother instead. They have held them for days without seeing a judge.

On the day of the arrests, Fr. Hamwete went early in the morning to the jail. When they told him they were still processing the suspects, he returned several hours later. They refused to let him see them.

I heard that another friend of mine—who was out of town when the raid happened—also has a warrant out for his arrest. I’m not sure what will happen if he comes back. I’m not sure if he will come back. He’s supposed to be married in April. He invited Nate and I to his wedding.

Today, two days after the arrests, they’ve brawled again. Supporters of one team threw stones at the other. A tree was uprooted from the ground (likely from the graveyard, which directly borders the football pitch) and used to thrash someone. People stomped and kicked each other on the ground like animals.

All to support a Catholic football club.

You cannot be a Christian without love. I’ve had to remember this myself. Prayer doesn’t make you a saint, fasting doesn’t make you a saint, works of mercy don’t make you a saint. What makes you a Saint is Love. Self-giving, self-sacrificial love. Sometimes it costs you everything.

“If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing…”

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.“

After the altar server meeting, I went and had breakfast. When I returned to the church, Anthony had somehow become the leader of the Day of Recollection for the middle schoolers that we had learned was happening that very morning. We sang Christmas songs, prayed together, and the kids had Confession with Fr. Cao.

Afterwards, I distributed some sweets, and the girls got to work cooking the rice we had been given for lunch. In the Salesian residence is a mountain of Feed My Starving Children rice bags that we use in the preschool and at the Oratory. The girls—the oldest one among them being fourteen—got to work building a fire with plastic bags and broken tree branches. Soon they were boiling the water for the rice. The older boys played basketball, while the younger ones scrambled up into the top branches of the huge mango tree above the cook site, looking for the last fruits of the season.

Among the branches on the ground, I noticed a huge stick—almost the exact size and weight of a good hickory baseball bat. I picked up a mango and let it fly.

The girls noticed me doing this. They came by and asked for the bat. “We try?”

Soon, I was teaching a whole group of Zambian girls how to play baseball. We had a pile of underripe mangoes for balls, the thick stick for a bat, and broken bricks for bases. While half the girls kept the fire going with plastic bags and twigs, we smacked around the mangoes and ran bases in the tall grass. Soon, the boys from the basketball court were interested in our play, and we moved the game over to the flat ground near the volleyball court.

It was boys v. girls, no stealing, underhand mango pitch. In the first inning, with a runner on base, one of the girls hit a towering shot over the volleyball net. Home run. These were the only points they would score.

The boys got up to bat, and, late to the baseball tutorial, started off with small ball—grounders in the gaps and scrappy base running. By the third or fourth batter, they gained confidence, and started smacking the crap out of the ball. Their poor pitcher getting shelled, the girls pulled another from the bullpen. By the time the bleeding stopped, it was boys 3, girls 2. They managed to put us away on a strikeout and a quick play from the shortstop.

With the girls up to bat again, their leadoff hitter put a hard grounder through the 5-6 hole. The next batter smacked a hard line drive that took a skip before being stopped by the second baseman. The situation looking grim, I moved over to third base—and turned a double play to clear the field. The next batter hit a routine grounder to the short stop, and that was that.

The next inning, the slaughter continued, and the boys were quickly up 5-2. Just in time to save face, the girls announced that the rice was ready, and the kids scrambled away to eat.

It was an uncanny reminder of home. From the moment the kids sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” to the questions they asked me after lunch (“What is your family like? What is Chicago like?”), it was as if my troubles were forgotten, and those happy memories I once had were linked, through space and time, to the moments I occupied now.

Those seemingly random arrangements of peoples and places, those chance occurrences—were made present again. History is happenstance held together by the human heart. Love allows us to see meaning in the moments, order in the chaos. Love transforms absurdity into narrative.

I think more and more that God loves more wildly and passionately those who have hurt Him the most. St. Therese and I can have an argument about this in Heaven, but there is no fruit as sweet as love after forgiveness. I think every day about the ways in which I mocked Him, abused Him, ignored Him. Every day he floods me with inexplicable love. It’s absurd. Who acts like that? Divine Foolishness.

In proportion to the sin is the greatness of the Redemption. Part of me almost wishes, in a strange way, that I was worse, just so God could be even more glorified in me. If I could see St. Paul today, I would kiss him.

God is Glorious. The most hardened atheist cannot deny that. If He exists, if He truly exists as They say He does—then He is Glorious. The highest item in the metaphysics, as postulated, is the greatest item that exists. He is incomprehensibly good.

Yet, this is only half of the picture. This much gets you Judaism, or Islam, or late Platonism. Christianity stands on the absurd claim that GOD BECAME MAN. The mingling of created and uncreated reality without confusion. The irruption of the infinite into the finite. The excruciating claim that all of existence is primordially relational; that the ἀρχή at its center is “Person”—that the fabric of reality is love.

What would it be, if we pretended for just a moment, that it were all real? Aside from all doubt, aside from all legitimate lines of inquiry to the contrary. It would be…

Impossible. Too good to be true. And yet—we cannot escape its truth. It’s right there. It’s as if you somehow woke up and won the lottery every day for the rest of your life. “Impossible,” you might say, but your lived experience is right there in front of your eyes. You are holding the winning lottery ticket in your hands, brother.

Run the numbers ten thousand times—two plus two will always be four. God is inevitable. We would not exist to observe the contrary. Aside from God it is Chaos and Chaos and Chaos.

With God, it is too good to be true. Without God, it is too horrible to be false. Any other position tries to squeeze out a middle ground where it does not exist. I say: take your pick.

“Would that you were cold or hot… So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth…”

In all my years of playing sports I have never been injured as much as I have been in the past two weeks. A wise friend told me that this might be God’s way of telling me to slow down.

Yesterday began in the happy light of recollection as I remembered our Thanksgiving feast. After morning prayer, I had no class, so I returned to bed. I was awoken by a knock at my door at about 10:00. I had completely forgotten that our German friends from Kazembe were coming for a visit, so I got up and started to host them. We had a nice day around Lufubu. Nate graciously offered to give them a long tour so that I catch up on sleep.

At around 15:30 we went to the oratory to play with the kids. There weren’t many there because we had Adoration scheduled for 16:30. Most of the regular oratorians weren’t so much bought-in to the “Church” aspect of Oratory (Home, School, Church, Playground). I went and joined the circle that was kicking around a football.

We played for a while until the church bells started ringing for Adoration. We packed up and headed to put the ball away. Before we could do this, one of the kids kicked it really far away as a kind of joke. He ran to go get it, then kicked it back towards us in a tall arc. I ran to intercept it.

I was flat on my butt in a complete daze. I realized I was in the process of making a kind of mental checklist: teeth ok, eyes ok, head…

I put my hand up to my forehead and it came away soaked with blood. I realized all at once that I had just smacked at full speed into the metal netball pole that jutted out of the grass. I couldn’t help myself and cursed loudly.

I did the same thing the day before when I was electrocuted. Then, my stream of expletives had drawn Schubert, the electrician, to my door.

“Schubert, my shower is shocking me!”

“You are being electrocuted,” he asked, almost as more of a statement than a question. I couldn’t manage the absurdity of the inquiry and laughed out loud.

Schubert had been in the electrical room trying to fix our power. Since the house had been struck by lightning Tuesday we had been having blackouts every night. He must have been flipping breakers or something because I quickly realized that the ground wire of my water heater (which for the electrically un-inclined carries excess current under fault conditions) was connected DIRECTLY TO THE PIPES THAT CARRIED MY SHOWER WATER. So every time the device faulted (twice, apparently) I received a big shock—and not just a little zap, but enough to make my arm and then my legs violently convulse.

The first time this happened, I had soap in my eyes and was reaching to turn down the hot water. Before I could reach the knob, my arm seized and convulsed for almost a full second. I let fly some choice words and was immediately thrown into shock. I checked my face, my arms, my heart. I was alive! If anything got hammered into us as electrical engineers, it was that water and electricity do not mix. I figured that somehow a hot wire had come into contact with the piping somewhere (I had not yet noticed the ground wire…) and, still in a complete daze, decided to try and quickly rinse and get the soap out of my eyes.

ZAP!

I was doing the Elvis rubber legs and screaming. Another stream of expletives flew out of my mouth. What is going on?

I later learned from Fr. Cao that this is quite common in Zambia. The German girls as well had experienced something similar in Kazembe. It completely broke my brain that this is something that people just deal with rather than fixing. There is a strange attitude towards problems of this nature here. There is a sort of rampant fatalism and defeatism that prevents the truly impoverished from bettering their material conditions. It is the reason why people in the village refuse to go to the hospital just up the road in Kazembe—which is free, by the way. The poor have been propagandized to believe that their lives aren’t worth much. They believe no one cares about their suffering, and they make no effort to avoid it. It also means that don’t show much interest in the suffering of others—no one ever showed them sympathy, so they simply don’t know it. It’s heartbreaking.

Yesterday, as I laid on the ground next to the netball pole above a quickly-growing pool of blood, I let fly a choice expletive. Those who know me well know that I am not in the habit of cursing anymore, but the old man is hard to kill. None of the children speak English, so hopefully they had no idea what I said. They stood there in shock, looking at my bleeding head in horror and completely unsure what to do.

I knew that head wounds look much worse than they are, so I got up and assured the kids that I was ok before heading inside to bandage myself. We had made lots of jokes during SLM orientation to the effect that I was going to be the most over-prepared missionary in Zambia: I had brought lots of gauze, meds, wound closure kits, blood stoppers—along with anything else I thought might be useful in a bush-survival situation. It turned out I wasn’t so much “over-prepared” as “adequately prepared”.

It was a wicked gash—over an inch long and deep to the bone. More worrisome was the fact that I had just been concussed last week, and I figured there was a non-zero chance that I would turn myself into a vegetable if I kept hitting my head.

I put the emergency plasters on and wound my head with gauze. Nate and the girls came in to the house very worried and asked if I was ok. I told them I probably needed to go to the hospital. This was communicated to Fr. Cao, and we were all soon piled in the truck to head to Kazembe.

On a low hill north of Kazembe, rising from the savannah and thatch-roofed houses, is a modern metal-and-glass hospital that sticks out of the landscape like a giraffe in a phone booth. I had heard there was a good hospital nearby, but I had always assumed that people were referring to the two-room rural health clinic near the market in Kazembe. Seeing the metal-and-glass monstrosity on the hill for the first time was an utterly surreal experience after weeks and weeks of nothing but crumbling concrete and thatch houses. I was the nicest building I had seen in Zambia. I began to suspect that I really did turn myself into a vegetable.

I was brought in and seen by an off-duty doctor—“you’ll have to excuse the shorts”—who did most of the suturing with sunglasses still on. Even from the moment I arrived inside the building, it was a very strange mix of first and third-world. It was indisputably a several-million dollar facility, yet at 17:00 was completely without power and had no backup-generators to run the lights. They struggled for a moment to find gauze for my head, and, for a moment, took seriously my offer to use the gauze and blood-stopper I had brought in my own backpack. The phrase I heard probably the most during my (brief) visit there was “we don’t have”:

“Nurse, I need a surgical blade.”

“We don’t have.”

“Nurse, I need epinephrine.”

“We don’t have.”

“Nurse, I’ll need a flashlight.”

“We don’t have.”

They ended up having to do the suturing in the (empty) emergency room—simply because this was the only room that had west-facing windows to catch the light of the setting sun. When it went down, they finished suturing by the light of an iPhone camera.

After the stitching was done, the doctor asked me: “Do you have a picture of your wound?”

“What?”

“From before.”

“Yes,” I said. “Would you like me to show it to you?”

Still on the operating bed, I pulled out my phone and showed it to him. He took the phone and studied the picture.

“Ah, ok. I will take another for you.”

Using my own iPhone he then proceeded to take a close-up picture of my stitched up wound. “Thanks?” I said.

All in all, the doctor did very good work. After the adrenaline shots, I hardly felt a thing. He recommended that I come back in the morning for a CT scan. He warned me that insurance would probably not cover the CT scan, as they only took a very specific kind—something called “NEEMA”—but he indicated that it was likely I wouldn’t have to pay. The Salesians were well known around there and I was working for them. I walked out of the hospital that evening without having given them insurance information or paying a dime.

This morning, we returned to the hospital at 8:00—“come as early as you can to make sure we have power for the CT machine”—and the same doctor met me at the front, wearing a Man City jersey and sunglasses. He told us that he has spoken with his supervisor and, unfortunately, we would have to pay for the CT scan.

“How much is it?”

“Fifteen-hundred”, he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was expecting several thousands of dollars.

“Kwacha,” he continued, and I nearly laughed out loud. That was less than 75 USD. For a CT scan!

I was inside the CT machine within minutes. After a quick scan, during which I was able to see my entire skull and brain—I have a very funny looking head—I returned to the reception desk, where the doctor was waiting. He told me he was prescribing some other antibiotics for me, as he thought the Azithromyacin I had brought from America was not the best option. He directed me to pick them up from the pharmacy window after I paid for the CT scan.

As the receptionist wrote the receipt, I asked her how much it would be for the drugs.

“For the what?”

“For the antibiotics I was prescribed.”

“Oh! This is a government hospital. They’re free. And your visit—it was free as well. Only the CT scan you have to pay for.”

Whattttttt???? I said mentally. I was completely astounded. $75 total for emergency stitches, antibiotics, and a CT SCAN!!!! If Zambia is doing many things wrong, that at least they’re doing right. I have no idea how that kind of system scales, but in this district hospital in the most rural district in the country—it seems to work very well.

To be fair, the quality of care was good, but if I was having serious medical trauma I highly doubt that they would have been able to save my life. They didn’t have emergency room staff working when I went—and the “off-duty” doctor I saw yesterday was the only one there, and the same one I saw today!

I also didn’t see a single other patient the entire time I was at the hospital. It seems that the local people have a great fear of hospitals—to go to there means you are sick, and no one wants to be sick.

Even Br. Philip, as we were washing dishes today, told me a story:

“You see this scar under my eye? Several months ago, I was cutting bananas. Some of the barbed wire from the fence was caught by a tree branch. It swing across and wham! Gave me this cut here. I just cleaned it and put some powder on it. No one noticed it. This is the African way. I am afraid to get those, what do you call them—stitches.”

So there you have a very clear picture of Zambia. A country with first-world amenities and third-world problems. Where free medical care is available to all citizens and few take advantage of it.

For this visiting missionary, it worked out alright. I’ll have a wicked scar for the rest of my life. But, as I was telling Nate, in every video game I’ve ever played, I’ve always given my character a gnarly scar over their left eye. My uncle said it best: “every guy wants a scar somewhere that makes them look like a bad***.” Though this one was gained by smacking into a pole like an idiot and not in some seedy underworld knife-fight, it will still be a good story to tell. “Oh, the scar! I got it as a missionary in Zambia…”

To prepare this feast, I have been concussed, electrocuted twice, through three blackouts, nearly struck by lightning, slept a total of 12 hours since Sunday, had cash business dealings all over Luapula Province, rode for miles on a motorbike with a live turkey strapped to the back, nearly had to slaughter it myself, rode for the same number of miles with the same turkey plucked, cleaned, and dripping over washed out dirt roads in a bouncing, shock-less Ford Ranger; dealt with two broken ovens, a non-functional refrigerator; a slowly thawing freezer; cut and burned myself with knives and stoves; trudged through mud, dirt, and open fields carrying gigantic pots on my head; cooked in two different villages and three kitchens, once by the light of a headlamp in total darkness, twice in the wee hours of the morning; begged, bought, or stole (not really) ingredients from merchants, farmers, and friendly Salesians, substituting nearly every single one of them for its closest African equivalent; appealed to the kindness of friends and strangers; called in favors, prayed, nearly despaired, prayed again, cooked and roasted and basted and baked—until finally, a turkey, gravy, and all the fixings sat before a collection of my closest friends (in a several thousand mile radius) gathered to celebrate a holiday only one other person at the table knew existed before Monday.

And we enjoyed ourselves—really enjoyed ourselves! Myself probably most of all. There was no way this venture should have ended in anything but disaster. And yet, it did not. A Divine Hand has placed itself on the scales. All of existence tends, without explanation, towards an anthropic principle. I am grateful to God for His unmerited, unearned, undeserved gifts.

God has given us food to feed our bodies, but feasts to feed our souls:

You make the grass grow for the cattle and the plants to serve man’s needs,

that he may bring forth bread from the earth

and wine to cheer man’s heart;

Feasting is not about gluttony. It is not about self-indulgence. Though the word has become synonymous with excess, a feast is really about gratitude—”Thanksgiving”, if you will.

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected when received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the invocation of God in prayer…

A feast is nothing without people to enjoy it. So today, on this happy day, I am grateful for those with whom I share the feast of life, those I call friends—in Zambia, America, and all over the world. May God bless us and unite us one day at the eternal feast. Happy Thanksgiving.

I am seated at my desk in the Salesian Residence in Lufubu. Upstairs, the Provincial Council of the ZMB Vice-Province of Salesians is meeting at a chipped and torn table Br. Philip dragged over here from the school in a wheelbarrow and covered with a white tablecloth. They are seated on green, plastic chairs I brought from the garage and wiped with a wet bath-towel until their thick layers of black dust and dirt were removed. Across the room from their meeting, showers of dried bat droppings stream from an unclosed hole in the ceiling. I had cleaned the pile they formed on the floor yesterday, but more came today. We decided there was nothing to be done.

The same bats chitter above us as we have Mass in the mornings. Lizards crawl along the walls of my room. Spiders the size of teacup saucers sit silent watch in the corners and dark places.

Why the Provincial Council decided to drive 14 hours out to Lufubu to have their meeting, I have no idea. They arrived last night. Their loud laughter echoed along the concrete walls of the Residence until the small hours of the morning.

I have been busy in many ways. I have not had the time to pray as much as I used to—or write, or relax. I teach four classes a week in programming. These lectures I have to prepare as I go along, in the night hours or during the day before class. In the afternoons, I play with the kids at the Oratory.

Two Mondays ago, we buried Amfrey. For the funeral Mass, the Church was filled to the bursting with every man, woman, and child in Lufubu. The congregation spilled out of the doors and outside. Amfrey’s body was carried by the young men of the village. The women sang, while his friends served the Mass.

It was an environment strangely devoid of grief. In Lufubu, a funeral is a public event—and the hundreds of mourners that attended the service were nowhere to be seen at the Friday children’s Mass, the night-time All Saints Mass, or the two Sunday morning Masses that followed. These drew paltry crowds—though the nearest Catholic Church aside from ours is over 12 km away.

After the Mass, we followed the crowd to the graveyard. Br. Philip wore his black Salesian habit along with a large safari hat. Burials in Lufubu, and across rural Zambia in general, seem to be typically done in a forest. There are no grave markers, really. There are only mounds of dirt, stretching far away into the wooded distance. The woods containing Lufubu’s graveyard form a natural border with the village football pitch. We buried Amfrey only a stone’s throw away from the goalposts.

After some prayers from the presbyter, the altar boys—still in purple cassocks and white surplices—each threw a handful of dirt on the casket, which had been lowered into shallow ground. Young men from the village got to work with shovels and mattocks filling the rest of the hole. A kind of solemn queue formed—when it looked like one man had had enough, another would tap his shoulder to relieve him. I watched Br. Philip go in for one of the first reliefs, straining at the heavy dirt in his black, dust-covered cassock. I took my share of the load as well. Eventually, the mound over Amfrey’s grave stood about five feet high and—one might even say—just a bit taller than the rest of them.

We followed the singers in a procession that led to the house of Amfrey’s mother—the same place where we had the wake the night before. As we arrived, the singers began to enter and fill the small, thatch-covered house. To my surprise, I was asked to join as well. We stooped under the low mantle to enter the main room—thatch eaves about six feet high at the lowest, walls maybe wide enough for a taller man to lay down. We sang some songs, prayed, and after a while—filed back out.

The singers milled around for a bit and then left. Br. Philip and the presbyter entered back inside with a few others. I stood outside, unsure of what to do, before deciding to go inside as well.

Br. Philip and the others sat with legs straight on the straw mat that covered the floor—along the walls, facing towards the center of the room. A man was speaking. I made my way to take a place in the dust next to an older woman, but another fellow insisted I come and sit on the mat. I obliged.

After a few moments, I gathered that those assembled—maybe three parishioners from the Church, aside from the presbyter and Br. Philip—were going in turns to give a short word of encouragement to Amfrey’s mother. Up to this point, I still hadn’t figured out which of the women I had seen over the last two days was actually Amfrey’s mother. After scanning the room, I decided that it must be the woman across from me, listening intently to the presbyter’s speech. She was older, gray haired, tired, with a worn face—and hands rough from hard work.

I had no idea what was being said by those who went before me. As my turn to speak came around, I decided that I would simply say, in English, whatever my heart felt.

Br. Philip gave me a small cue: “It is a tradition to give a word of encouragement to the mother. Say whatever you wish to say.”

I did. I tried to make a point about the immortality of the human soul—that to live is to love God, and to be loved by God is to live—but it got confused with another point I wanted to make—that life in God makes us truly one entity, that if one person suffers somewhere, all the others suffer everywhere. Br. Philip translated for me, but I don’t think the message got through.

From the corner of the room, almost behind Br. Philip, I heard a small voice: “Natotela”—thank you. I noticed a woman I hadn’t seen before—younger, eyes dark from grief. “This is Amfrey’s mother.” Br. Philip said. “Oh,” I responded.

As we left, I went over to hold her hand. “God bless you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling.

After a funeral in Lufubu—once the burial is done and the words of encouragement have been given—it is customary to eat a ritual meal. To refuse is considered insulting. We were brought into a kind of place of honor in another house. Water in a large bowl was given to us to wash our fingers—stained red from the clay of Amfrey’s grave. We shared nshima, greens, and a kind of small fish native to the lagoons of Luapula.

After we left, Br. Philip said to me: “I was trying to give you an opportunity to leave before the meal. You must be careful. You are not used to the food here. You could get sick.”

He was right. I had thought the same thing as we had gone inside. The water, the fish, the greens—all of these were taken directly from the land around us, prepared by cooks who lacked running water, basic sanitation, and cooked over charcoal fires. In the end, I had decided that I was happy to suffer if it meant something to these people. God would provide, I figured. And He did. I went home and felt fine.

That same morning, before the funeral, I had taught my first class in Programming. I intended for it to be a kind of fast-moving motivation of the ideas behind a programming language: transistors, logic gates, digital circuits, computer architecture, assembly language, compilers, etc. All of these things they had (nominally) already learned in their Computer Architecture class.

I quickly realized that I was moving way too fast. The students didn’t gather a single thing.

The second day, I changed tack. For lecture 2, I focused on concepts and ideas that I thought were broken down into more easily digestible pieces—variables, data types, and operators. I thought that things were going well until I realized that, again, they simply had not gotten it.

All at once, I became aware that I had committed the cardinal sin of the enthusiastic professor—I had assumed that the students knew everything that I knew. They didn’t understand the way I taught variables because they had never seen a variable before—they weren’t even aware of the concept. To them, it made no sense. How could a silly little word—something absurd like “number_of_footballs”, have math done on it?

I finally went up to the board and drew a diagram. “You have a box,” I said. “And you have just put a label on it. The label says ‘number_of_footballs’. Pretend that is the ‘name’ of your box.”

They nodded, following.

“Say I have three footballs. I put them in the box. What is the box’s name?”

“Number_of_footballs,” they replied.

“So if I say, ‘there are three footballs in my box named “number_of_footballs”, does it make sense that I could also say, ‘there are three footballs in “number_of_footballs”?”

They nodded.

“So finally, does it make sense that I could say, ‘number_of_footballs’ is three?”

“Ahhh!” they said. “Now it makes sense.”

Almost two weeks later, we have made it to functions. Slowly but surely, they are getting it. They are enthusiastic, but I fear that their educational background has made it hard for them to grasp concepts in as open-ended a field as programming. From what I have seen, most teaching here is done as something like rote memorization. Getting the students to realize the creative freedom they have with code is difficult.

With all due respect, I don’t think any of my professors from Notre Dame would be in their element out here. For one, there is the idea of “African Time”. Students (and instructors) will regularly show up 15-20 minutes late for class. Sometimes, without warning, scheduling conflicts mean that you have to pack up and move to another classroom—which you only realize 10 minutes after class has “officially” started, when maybe 25% of the students have showed up. Students regularly miss 2-3 lectures per week (there are four).

There are also a frightening lack of resources. The school is still without dependable internet (more on this…) and everything they do have is old, battered, worn-down and held together by tape and string. Anything new must be bought in towns that are hours away.

As final items, students will also miss probably 20% of every thing that comes out of your mouth just because of language barrier, and the culture of a lack of academic self-confidence means that they never ask questions or feel confident enough in their answers to share them. The homework I assigned, they did not do.

But as I said, they are motivated. They are clever in a way that American students are not. They are used to making due with next to nothing—squeezing water out of stones. They work well with their hands and are creative problem solvers. If they can just get the basics down, I have full confidence that they will be able to build incredible things—as are built all over Zambia, making do with whatever is on hand.

Life at the school moves along. Every morning, the Salesians and I wake up early for half an hour of meditation, morning prayer, and Mass. There is school assembly at 7:40. Students sing the national anthem and then recite prayers. Usually, a member of staff gives a short talk.

These short talks I have learned are very common in Salesian culture. The most ubiquitous of these is the Salesian “Good Night”—a nightly talk given by a rotating member of the community that is half story-telling, half prayerful reflection. Salesians, and the students they serve, become very good at off-the-cuff public speaking, and a true Salesian product can give a “Good Night” with minimal (or no) preparation.

Thursdays, we have Mass in the morning on campus. Thursday last, as the closing prayers were being said, a whole mass of squealing hogs suddenly became visible through the school chapel windows—running roughshod over the student gardens that stretched into the distance. Less than an instant later, running after them could be seen several members of the DBATC community that, to my knowledge, had been standing next to me only moments prior. Through the open chapel door I spied a student I knew—Tuambo—chasing after a particularly quick pig, ineffectually throwing a shoe at it to slow its flight.

Every afternoon at 15:30, kids show up at the Oratory to play and pray. There is a rudimentary football pitch, a basketball court, a swing set, a pool table, checkerboards, a garden, and a large pavilion under which the kids dance and play. Fridays, there is evening Mass for the children. For these, along with Sundays and feast days, the boys of the Oratory serve at the altar, while the girls are “stella girls”—kind of half-singers half-liturgical dancers. Dance in liturgy is a big part of African Catholicism. The choir sways and steps side to side in rhythm—even the congregation is expected to step along.

There are many challenges here. In fact, there are challenges in just about every facet of life. There are tensions within the village, tensions within the school, tensions within the parish, and even—tensions within the Salesian community. For all of its lush, wild beauty—a kind of darkness is present in Lufubu. A corrupting darkness—the meanness of poverty, of superstition, of doubt.

Villagers struggle to come to Mass—many have apparently lost their faith. In their houses at night, the men brew illegal alcohol in secret stills. They are drunk during the day, leaving their children to fend for themselves. The children are fed at school and again at the Oratory, yet many bear the signs of malnutrition. Distended stomachs, stunted growth, mental slowness. These are common. Oratory staff will catch children saving and sneaking food to their parents.

There are other evils here as well. Witch doctors still hold an inordinate amount of influence—even over the Catholics. At Amfrey’s mother’s house, after the funeral, I remembered the presbyter of the parish giving a long speech to her during our encouragements. I later learned what he said.

“Do you want to know what he told her?” Br. Phillip had asked me, when we were walking home.

“Sure.”

“He said:

‘When a child dies in Lufubu, many will come to you and try to say—someone killed him. Maybe the grandmother, a relative. They cannot accept it as God’s will. They will tell you to go to the witch doctor to find out who it was. These men will lie. They will accuse an innocent person, and they will be put under the ban—and maybe, killed themselves. Do not do this, and do not listen to those who tell you to do this.’

The people, they cannot understand. In Lufubu, it is the young who die—and not the old.”

This environment takes its toll. People here, even children, have grown accustomed to helplessness. They do not know how to provide for themselves—they only know how to beg. After the independence celebration two Saturdays ago, when we had taken the children to the river, Br. Phillip gave me a bag of small biscuits to distribute. The happy, laughing children I had spent time with all day changed immediately. They snatched the treats out of my hands, roughly, clamoring all around—begging, pushing, pleading desperately—panic and fear in their eyes, like wild things.

“You must be careful,” Fr. Hamwete, the Oratorian tells me. “The people, if they become used to receiving things in charity, cease to be able to provide things for themselves. In the past, Salesians have stepped in to take care of some of these poorer parents’ children. But then—the assistance became expected, and the parents made no provision to take care of them themselves. You must be very careful…”

“The people, sometimes if we are not careful, they don’t love us—they love what they can get from us. If they think that we have money, they start to see us as only a pocket…” Fr. Cao says, eyes distant behind his glasses.

At the school there is the same problem. Students are given money from the government for education, for food, for seeds and fertilizer for their gardens. They spend it on beer, and then go hungry.

“To help these people, we must be holy. We must show them the correct way. Missionaries have always come and changed things for the better—changed culture for the better. Given people the desire to change. We must do this,” Fr. Hamwete says. He is Tonga, from the south part of Zambia. Among the Bemba, sometimes even he feels like an outsider.

There is a darkness here, certainly. Last week, Fr. Cao gave me free reign to try and fix the internet situation here as I saw fit. What followed was a week-and-a-half long debacle in which I enraged the entire students and staff of the school by removing the paltry and unstable network they had been relying on for their personal use—Facebook and Whatsapp and movie streaming and everything else—and attempted to replace it with a more secure network connected to the Starlink I had brought them. The way in which I went about this was not to their liking.

Fr. Cao and Br. Phillip encouraged me—the students need to learn. You cannot give into their demands just because they complain. If you know what is best, then you have to commit to it.

Over the next few days, I ran around like an insane person trying to fix the problem.

“I’ll build a Yagi-Uda antenna with scrap parts to boost the signal in their direction!”

This fell through because I couldn’t find a single SMA cable in the entire school.

“I’ll set up DNS filtering on my Business plan Starlink to block websites that take a lot of data and then they can use that!”

This fell through because Starlink doesn’t support this.

“I’ll put the Starlink in bypass mode and attach it to a different router that we have available here and do filtering that way!’

This fell through because the routers that were lying in scrap heaps here were too old and didn’t have these functions.

“I’ll set up a Raspberry Pi as a DNS server and point one of the routers at it!”

This actually somewhat succeeded, but unfortunately, even with Facebook and football streaming blocked, some members of the staff and the students managed to use up to 15 times as much data daily as I used on my own personal machine. The data plan was being zapped through now not in hours, but in days. Too soon for a plan meant to last a month.

Eventually, even the staff soured. No one was happy with me.

Throughout this, the Salesians supported me. Some of the students even came around.

“We see that you are working very hard. I think that it is very unfair how some of the students are treating you. You are just trying to help.”

“People need to stop their complaining. You have been nothing but generous to us.”

There were some bright parts. My programming students were interested in my plan to build an antenna and asked how it might be made. They also wanted to know the details of the DNS filtering I was doing with the Raspberry Pi. I promised that I would give presentations on these things, if they were interested.

Eventually, the students stopped being angry. They again were kind and greeted me in the hallways and stopped me to ask how I was doing. Some were very kind—following up with me when it seemed I had been anxious or upset.

The problem, for now, is out of my hands. With regards to the network they already had here, I have left them to follow their own designs. There is much to be done for the network I have brought. My site partner Nate (bless him) is bringing some equipment I ordered to his house in America—routers, access points, cables, electrical components. With these things, I hope to be able to gain more control over the network and spread its signal across the campus.

These past two weeks have been a trying time—no, they have been incredibly difficult. Almost impossible. I have found myself wondering why I am in the bowels of Africa spending my youth and life and energy on what sometimes feels like a futile venture. Helping people that do not want help, or are ungrateful for it. Or—take advantage of it.

And yet—through all of this, I remain hopeful. I did not come to help these people because they were perfect, or because I desired their gratitude. I came because they needed help.

It is not about succeeding. It is about doing the futile task out of diligence—out of love. Recognizing that we ourselves were once futile tasks. Our salvation a hopeless venture. Believing in the power of God to do the impossible.

In life, all of the little things that we do, regardless of their effectiveness—are redemptive if they are done in the Lord’s service. This is the wisdom of Therese’s “little way”. All of human action is, in fact, little before the greatness of the Almighty God. Yet God’s greatness is precisely why our little actions mean so much to him. From the one who loves Him dearly, God accepts the smallest acts and sacrifices as gifts surpassing in value even the most lavish offerings:

“Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury.”

In the active life, and indeed, in all lives—it is the dutiful obedience to our daily tasks, done in a spirit of love, that is the greatest offering we can make to God. The greatness of the offering is not in proportion to the gift, but to the love with which it is given. A mother will cherish a handwritten note from her young son much more than if he gave her thousands of dollars.

This is the supreme kindness of God, and the principle of the greatest and the least: God’s love transforms even the pathetic, petty, and humdrum course of human events into a narrative with cosmic significance. Our daily struggles are projected on the plane of the ultimate battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Dark.

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo, divinum est.

“Not to be constrained by the greatest thing, but to be contained in the smallest thing—that is divine.”

We must continue on this path with diligence—even if we cannot see it, even if we doubt, even if all of the world seems to be conspiring against us.

If we truly believe (with much prayer) that we are doing what God wills us to do, it is almost as if God’s will retroactively comes to meet us, even though we are the ones being bent towards it.

Incline my heart according to Your will, O God…

We are being pulled from before ourselves, from in front of ourselves, from outside of ourselves. Causality looks very strange when the causal agent is outside of time. It is almost as if events in the future exert causal effect on events in the past.

We must follow God’s will by pursuing it a little at a time. God does not reveal the whole path, except in flashes, but he does reveal to us the next step. To take the step we are taking, and to take it well—this is to do God’s will.

Sometimes God allows the path to be obscured. We must take the next step in faith, though we cannot see whether our feet will land on solid ground or will plunge into the abyss. The repeated playing of this kind of game of existential Russian Roulette with the hopeful belief—no, a foreknowledge using the technology of love—that you will always be led on the correct path is the life of faith.

God repeatedly allows you to experience doubt and pain and suffering to increase your perseverance and strength and trust. God trains you as the best kind of trainer, like the best kind of spotting partner— taking you to the very edge of your strength, even far outside the zone of your comfort, but always stepping in at the very last moment possible to prevent you from harm. This is the training that leads to maximum hypertrophy and the greatest amount of growth. This kind of training may hurt, and you may resent your trainer for pushing you so intensely, but life is a training for the greatest competition, and your partner pushing you any less would be a great disservice, even a wrong. God trains us so as to win.

Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win.

Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.

Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing.

No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.

Faith is a sort of combination of these things— hope, belief, trust— held together in the unique foreknowledge that comes from love, events approaching you from ahead.

We must trust. Run forward blindly. What holds us back is a lack of faith. We must make the resolution to run forward as if it were true whether it is true or not. Done out of love, this is the highest kind of faith.

Faith stretches forward as a kind of foreknowledge given by love—out of love. It is a kind of filler of the gaps, a bridge-building entity, a wayfinder—as water flowing down pushes forwards, around, and underneath until it finds a way; as fish threw themselves on the shore and died for millions of years before they evolved legs; as the men at Normandy threw themselves into the butchery of the German guns until they built a way across the trenches with their own bodies. A love that fills and strains at the gaps, ever forwards—that gasps and grapples wildly towards the object to which it is pulled— retrocausally, from in front of itself, outside itself.

It is a gamble of the entire universe, a risk of everything we know and that is possible, the final throw of the dice wagering even more than we cannot afford to lose— wagering, in fact, everything that exists. We throw with the kind of foreknowledge that we will win— though we cannot explain it, cannot understand it, cannot even guarantee it. But love is its own guarantee, and when your back is against the wall, you must play whether you like it or not.

It is all of existence, or it is nothing. That is the life of faith. God makes us all gambling men.

What then can we say that Abraham found, our ancestor according to the flesh?

Indeed, if Abraham was justified on the basis of his works, he has reason to boast; but this was not so in the sight of God.

For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

Rom. 4 1-3, 18-25

“He [Abraham] reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead…”

Heb. 11:19

Wednesday night, I was welcomed into my new home by Fr. Cao, Br. Phillip, and Fr. Antonio—the previous rector in Lufubu. He had stopped in for some last-minute items and shared dinner with us. Br. Phillip is here for the whole year. He is Zambian—a Salesian in formation with the Vice-Province.

We had all walked together and said a Rosary as the sun set, a dark orange streak across the upside-down sky. The stars, when they came out, were unfamiliar. Orion stood on his head, Pegasus laid on its back with legs up—a stiff and dead horse.

Later that night, after dark, I go for a walk with Brother. Somehow, it hadn’t really dawned on me that I’ve become an instructor at a college—even a very strange college, halfway around the world and with a unique program of study. Now it does. When we go around the dormitories to meet the students, I am struck by how much I am reminded of Notre Dame.

Don Bosco Agricultural Technical College is, by Luapula Province standards, a very reputable institution. Students come from all over Zambia to be certified in Agriculture, Computer Studies, Power Electrical, Fashion & Design, and more. They are young, mostly—the vast majority between the ages of 18 to 25, with some younger (having completed secondary school early) or older (having deferred schooling until their families had enough money).

As we make our rounds, I meet most of the fifty-or-so students—and am struck with a kind of uncanny remembrance of the people I had met at my own university. Under the light of the moon and between the men’s and women’s dormitories, I suddenly remember orientation, Welcome Weekend, hot Indiana nights socializing on the quad between Knott and Flaherty. I haven’t flexed that muscle in a very long time—that kind of effortless banter between young people. Yet this time, I am their teacher—strange to think of myself as such—and realize that I am, to a certain extent, in charge of these students’ formation.

For all of its similarities to that alma mater of happy memory, DBATC is a very different school from Notre Dame. A walk through the men’s dormitory reveals caved-in ceilings, leaking toilets, broken down walls. In their “kitchen”, outdoors and behind the main building, students boil nshima in steel pots on coal fires in the utter dark.

In the lighted space between the dormitories, we return to find the students dancing. Some play huge hand drums, taken from the church. Brother Phillip informs me: “Tomorrow is Zambian Independence Day. The students are practicing their performance for the celebration in Kazembe. But it is not so common for all of them to attend. It is because you are here.”

The next day, I introduce myself at morning assembly. Afterwards, I am given a tour of the grounds by Fr. Cao. He shows me cracking timbers, leaking roofs, caving floors, termite-eaten beams, crumbling concrete, broken electrical boxes. “This is where we will use your money,” he says. “I have already started planning. We will get to work right away.”

I see the farm—the chickens, the pigs, the cows. I see the broken-down solar panels, the corroded power lines, the rusted water pumps. I see the computer lab—twenty-five wonderful desktop PC’s, plenty of RAM, good CPUs, keyboards, mice. And yet, the entire school, the Salesians, and even some pirates from the village share the same paltry Starlink connection routed at the Salesian Residence. I watch as Kunda, the Computer Studies instructor, attempts to email me some course materials. “It is very slow,” he says. “If I angle my laptop just right… there.”

Without good internet, the computers are basically dead in the water. And yet, the Computer Studies program is much more comprehensive than I had ever thought. Students take courses in IT and Operations, Computer Architecture, Computer Programming, Entrepreneurship, Communication and Study Skills, Mathematics, Management, and Commercial Real Estate.

“Will you teach Programming?” Kunda asks suddenly.

“Sure, you mean the course?”

“Yes, the Programming course.”

“Of course. I guess I would start next term?”

“You can teach it now if you like. I have three courses I am teaching already. It would be a great help if you could take on Programming. The students are eager to learn.”

And just like that, I am the Programming instructor.

Kunda is very excited when I tell him I have brought a Starlink. He asks when we could install it. That same day? Maybe later? We settle on Monday. We begin to imagine the kinds of changes we could make with a better internet connection. Maybe some kind of computer server for the courses. We could manage access to the network remotely, maybe even add some extra layers of security to prevent poaching. “Everyone in the village knows the password to the wifi,” he says. “Oh yes?” “Yes. It is very simple. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight.”

That afternoon, Br. Phillip gives me the keys to the Oratory. As I go out towards the football pitch, a handful of kids are already there. “Hello,” I say. “Hello!” “Do you want to play football? Football?” I make a kicking motion. “Yes.”

I go inside the classroom and open up the bin with all of the balls. One of the boys comes over and chooses a good one.

We walk back towards the pitch. There are about nine boys of various sizes. I turn to the biggest one. “You are captain. Ok? Captain. Iwe. I am captain. Ine.” I choose teams by counting ones and twos. Their team ends up with four players and mine with five. I try to send a boy over to the other team, but he won’t go. I take off my shoe. “If it lands up,” I make the motion, “you go there. If it lands down, you stay here. Ok?” He agrees. The shoe lands up, as it always does. The teams are now fair.

—or so I think. With only three teammates, the kids run circles around me. I am wheezing within five minutes. Thankfully, I am relieved by a whole mob of children that trickle in as the game continues, and we end up with about forty on the pitch at the same time—even some girls, who, all things considered, kick my butt.

The next day is Independence Day. The students pile in the bed of the community pickup truck to make the 12 km drive to Kazembe. Br. Phillip, Fr. Cao and I squeeze in the cab. The road is terrible. The 2010 Ford Ranger we’re in jerks side to side and up and down. After some time, we arrive in the town. Fr. Cao points out the direction of Kazembe’s palace—the King of the Bemba—who apparently is Catholic, and reclusive.

The celebration is at the Salesian oratory, in a huge courtyard with an enclosed concrete stage. Br. Phillip comes up to me as we look around. “Would you like to meet the other volunteers?” “The German girls?” I ask. “Yes, your girlfriends!” Fr. Cao says, bursting into laughter.

Br. Phillip takes me across the street to where the girl live. They are just coming out of their house as we arrive. They are Sarah (19), Sophia (20) and Thea (19), from Central Germany—Frankfurt and Hanover. We chat for a bit in the Salesian residence until Fr. Jaczek comes out—another Salesian in the community there—after which we return to the Independence celebration.

The girls introduce me to the children of the oratory. They have been in Kazembe for over a month now and know the children very well. “This is Junior,” Sarah says, holding a little boy in a tattered shirt. “Junior is a ‘problem child’, but he is no problem—we love him!”

Junior comes up to me. “What is your name?” “Ambroise,” I say. He laughs. “What is your name?” he asks again. Sophia interrupts—“he says that a lot.” “What is your name?” he asks again, laughing.

“My name is Junior,” I say. He looks upset. “No!”

“Yes, my name is Junior.” He laughs. “What is your name?” he asks again.

The children crowd around us. The girls pick them up and carry them. The kids challenge me to arm-wrestling, and when one begins to lose, another comes to add their arms to the struggle—until I am arm wrestling four children at the same time.

As we goof around, the celebration begins, and I receive a text from Br. Phillip: “Your students are about to perform and you are nowhere to be found.” I return quickly to find them in costume and about to go out. They dance, and are far and away the best group in the informal “competition”. As they come back, some of them spot me.

“Where were you? You were not here!”

“I was! Just on the outside of the crowd, is all.”

We hang around for a little while longer and then leave. The next day—Saturday—there is a program of celebration for the kids of the Oratory. The day begins with Mass at 7:00. The rest of the morning consists of singing, dancing, and games. The children recite poetry in English, verses from Scripture, and compete for prizes of little sweets—bananas, biscuits, candies. They are served lunch cooked over a charcoal fire by a few of the women from the village—huge piles of nshima with vegetables and chicken.

In the afternoon, we walk to the river for the children to swim. As we go, we pray the Rosary. At one point, I notice that two boys have taken out a slingshot they had concealed in their bag. They pick up a stone to shoot it at the girls walking in front of us. “Hey,” I say. “Use something soft instead, like this.” I tear up a little bush with fluffy seed bulbs. They look at me, relieved. “Thank you,” they say, and proceed to annoy the heck out of the girls.

After the kids swim, I pick some small fruits to teach them how to juggle with one hand, and they are mesmerized when I demonstrate how to hand-whistle. A little group of them walks alongside me as we go, trying to show off their skills. “This one! This one!” they say, throwing their fruits in the air or blowing ineffectually into clasped hands.

After we get back to the oratory, the crowd of kids around me is joined by more that have just arrived. They spend about ten minutes trying to figure out the hand-whistle, until a little girl tugs at my sleeve. “Change game,” she says. At this point it is late. Br. Phillip asks if I would like the keys to lock up the Oratory. I decide to resume up our play on Monday. “Bye, bye,” I say to the kids. “Bai, bai, bai, bai, bai!” they imitate.

Today (Sunday), after morning prayer, there is Mass in the main church. The villagers arrive in their best clothes, and the children I saw yesterday scrappy and dirty are scrubbed clean and presentable—for the most part. Some of them come alone.

I recognize the boys serving at the altar, the girls singing in the choir. They are all Oratory kids.

Some boys in the church play hand drums—deep, booming—resounding like claps of thunder. The women dance and sing. They are the most powerful hymns I have ever heard. I imagine David dancing “with all his might” in front of the Ark; the infant Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb.

After Mass, Fr. Cao is to head to Mansa for a few days. “Are you going to the funeral?” he asks me. “There is a funeral?” “Yes, Brother is going. One of the altar boys died today.”

I am struck in the stomach as if I were just punched. “Died? One of the boys?” “Yes, very sad. He was very sick.”

The day passes in silence. After evening prayer, which Brother and I say alone, we head for the village to attend the wake. It is pitch black. Brother lights the way before us with a flashlight. The stars, inverted, cover the heavens, and smoke from village cookfires rises into the sky. We meet one of our students from the college along the road. “We went to attend the wake, but the singers are not yet there. I am returning to the college,” he says.

We continue along the dark path until we reach a dense group of thatch houses. “Brother,” I ask. “Will you remind me how to say, ‘good evening’ in Bemba again?”

“Chungulopo mukwai. But you do not say that at a funeral. Instead, you say mwabombeni mukulilako—‘How are you mourning?...’”

We arrive at the wake to find two watchfires burning and a hundred people gathered in the inky darkness, seated on small stools. Others lay out on straw mats. “They will stay here all night,” Brother says. “The body remains inside.”

An older man I recognize from the parish offers me his seat. In church, he wears a red scarf around his shoulders, directs the collection—conducts communicants to the altar. He looks like I imagine Saint Paul’s presbyters would have looked—kindly, dignified, strong.

Brother sits as well, across from me. He leans in to speak.

“It is good for us to be here. If we want to bring God to these people, but do not go out to meet them where they are—we cannot expect for them to accept our message. We must be near to them. In Africa, to show your love to someone—it is necessary to suffer with them. We must suffer with them. You will learn.”

I am on a sort of two-person bench, and eventually am joined by another person. “How are you?” he says to me. I can barely see him in the fire-lit darkness. “He is another altar boy,” Brother says. “He has come to mourn.”

I realize that I have a question for him. “Will you ask him what the boy’s name is? The one who died?” Brother confers with him for a moment. “Amfrey. His name is Amfrey.”

Some men stoke the fire in front of us. Another burns a short distance away, dark silhouettes visible seated around it. I sit for a moment and pray, watching the smoke rise towards stars. People around us speak in hushed tones. It is not all dour. Some laugh quietly, others smile. At a certain point, the dead boy’s older sisters begin to wail. They walk in a circle around the camp, moaning with grief, repeating words as if in prayer—shadowy figures in the darkness.

“Do you want know what they are saying?” Brother asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“They are crying to his spirit. They say: ‘How can you leave us?...”

We sit in silence for a while. At some point, the singers arrive. Their voices rise—softly at first, then louder. A song—not of darkness or despair, but of hope. An expectant joy.

I notice Brother conferring with the same man from the Parish who had offered me his seat. After a moment, he turns back towards me. “You will say the opening prayer, then I will give a reflection.”

“They want me to say the opening prayer?”

“Yes. In English is ok.”

I look out at the hundreds of people around me, visible only in fire-light. I hear the voices of the singers, the crying of the boys’s sisters—still making their circuit at the edge of the darkness. I think about the kindness—the profligate, ridiculous kindness—these people would extend to me—a visitor—to speak a word of blessing over the death of their youngest son.

“Okay,” I respond.

The singing stops. Everyone is quiet. I stand in the light, and say something like this:

“God, we praise you.

We give you thanks for having created us.

Thank you for the air we breathe, and the food we eat.

Thank you for the life within us.

We ask you to remember tonight—Amfrey.

Receive his spirit into Your hands.

We pray that we may join him, one day.

That we may be with him again—in Heaven.

That we may all be together, with You, forever.

Amen.”

“Amen,” they respond.

Sam gets me down for the early morning Wednesday bus without me giving him any information whatsoever. I finally offer my name, in total disbelief that he could make a reservation without having even that! He basically says that he doesn’t need it, and tells me that if I want to bring luggage, I should come to the Lusaka Bus Terminus at 19:00 to drop it off.

I figure I had better at least tell someone about this plan—in case it goes horribly wrong—and I elect to call Fr. Cao, who tells me to talk to Fr. Francois.

I text him and he comes by my room. He says that the company I have made the booking with is reliable (even though it is not the one Fr. Cao recommended (vid. “Peace Soldier”) and volunteers to take me to the station to drop off my bags. As it is already 18:30 we leave immediately.

It is my first time seeing downtown Lusaka at night—which is imminently familiar because it is exactly like Lusaka in the day. Even in the pitch black (Lusaka lacks reliable street lighting), armies of hustlers display their wares to car windows—shorts and belts and fake passports and shoes and headphones and speakers. Every single Airtel Money kiosk and haphazard fruit or food stand along the roadside is still open, and the traders are still screaming at exactly the same volume over jerry-rigged speaker systems: “FIVE KWACHA, FIVE KWACHA, FIVE KWACHA. BISCUIT. FIVE KWACHA BISCUIT. TWENTY KWACHA…”

“Why do they do this,” Fr. Francois says, looking at a guy in a Bulls jersey and bucket hat selling a huge wad of belts at 18:45 at night. “They stand here all day from six hours to nineteen just to make twenty Kwacha profit. If they would just go farm they would spare themselves this mess…”

Flashing police lights bounce off of the passenger side mirror. A convoy of brand new Hilux trucks pass at speed, narrowly missing the crowds crossing the street in streams through the stopped traffic.

“A politician,” Fr. Francois says. “Maybe a big fish.”

For those in the American world, the Hilux is a giga-Toyota truck that is like a way more rough and tumble version of the Tacoma—and is not available on the American market. Top Gun did an episode where they dropped an ‘88 Hilux off a cliff, put it through a fire, submerged it in water—and it still ran. It is this truck (along with the Land Cruiser cab chassis model) that you see in all of the North African and Gulf State conflicts outfitted with 50 cal machine guns and anti-tank missiles. It has (well-deservedly) achieved legendary status in Africa, and in Zambia is available only in right-side drive—along with all the rest of the vehicles in the country. The effect is a peculiar aura of supreme tactical efficiency that makes it extremely popular among politicians, off-roaders, and the giga-wealthy—along with any of those with cargo-hauling or bush-whacking needs (i.e., the Salesians).

After inching along in traffic, we arrive at the bus station at almost exactly 19:00. It consists of a long, open-air L-shaped depot populated by what seem to five-thousand people and fifty busses—turning this way and that and spinning in random circles. Shops line the walls of the alleys around the main drive and bags of luggage are stacked as high as a man in front of tiny, handmade travel company booths sporting neon lights and hand-painted signs. As we enter (still in the car), we are immediately swarmed—literally, like bees around a hive—by hustlers. “Where are you going boss?” “Boss, are you using Road Force?” “Hey boss, Peace Soldier will take you to Kazembe”. Others swarm alongside them, offering sodas, sausages, chips, popcorn, shoes, phone chargers from huge piles of identical goods strapped to their persons or balanced precariously on their heads.

Neither I nor Fr. Francois have any idea where Bili Transport is, and in the sea of hustlers their booth will be impossible to find. He suggests that I call Sam and ask for directions. The phone rings a couple times before he picks up. “Hello?”

“Hi Mr. Sam, this is Ambroise. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

“Hello Mr. Ambroise.”

“We are here at the first entrance of the bus station. Where is your booth?”

“Just come straight.”

“Straight? We are behind a bus that is reversing, can you see us?”

“No, just come straight—behind the Hilux.”

Fr. Francois spots a Hilux in front of us and we move towards it. I thank Sam and hang up. We pull in and I hop out to look for Sam. This is a mistake. As soon as I get out of the car I am swarmed by hustlers in a group about five guys deep. Others congregate around the driver-side window where Fr. Francois is still behind the wheel.

I soon realize that even from behind the Hilux, Sam’s location is a mystery. All I see are huge piles of luggage and foodstuffs—grain bags, fruits, bread—dwarfing the handful of metal stalls behind them. I call Sam again. The phone rings in my ear.

I walk forwards and the hustlers follow, still offering their services into my ear. I go forward a few paces and notice that a guy in what looks like a uniform—black with blue sleeves—has materialized out of the crowd. His polo is embroidered with the Bili logo and a string of large red characters that read: “The Glory of Zion”.

As I catch sight of him, I see him put his phone up to answer a call. I point at him, then at the phone next to my ear. “Is it you? Are you Sam?” He hangs up his call and puts his phone down. Mine continues ringing. Not the right guy. “Yes, hello?”, he says to me, confused. “Hello. Do you know where is Sam?” “Sam is inside.” I turn and see a man behind a small booth barely visible behind a crowd of people and stacks of luggage, lit up like a weird little diorama in the total darkness, Sam shining in a fluorescent white T-shirt, simultaneously keeping books and beginning to speak into a phone. “Hello?”— I hear him answer finally. “Yes hello. I am in front of you.” He looks at me and hangs up.

He remembers me from the phone conversation and assures me that my seat is reserved. He asks how many bags I have. “Three.” He whistles at some guys in Bili Transport polos, and they come over to help me. Hundreds of people look on, and hover in a crowd giving me just a few feet of clearance. I lead the Bili guys over to the car, which is still parked about 15 feet away. I see that the crowd of hustlers around Fr. Francois has grown. He does his best to ignore their entreaties through the window.

With so many people moving around I am unsure how to coordinate the transfer. It ends up working out just fine—the Bili guys grab my bags from the trunk and back doors of the Toyota and throw them on top of the huge pile outside Sam’s stall. A few other Bili guys sit atop the pile with arms crossed, eyes scanning the crowd. “Your luggage is safe now, boss.”

I figure that’s as good as we’re gonna get in terms of a guarantee for the safety of my property overnight, and I return to Sam. I pay for the luggage and he tells me to be at the station by 3:00 the next morning to board the bus. I hop back in the car and we leave without having given a single discernible scrap of identification to Sam besides a phone number—but Fr. Francois assures me that this is fine.

We head towards the exit of the Bus Terminus, passing a huge throng moving to and fro, busses turning and moving and wheeling inches from each other. As we get on the main road to return to the Provincial House, the street hustlers are still at it. It is now almost 20:00. “How long do they stay out here?” I ask Fr. Francois. “Until all the cars have gone. If there are still cars, they are still here.” From within the alleys of Kamwala, I hear cries of “KWACHA KWACHA, TWENTY KWACHA…”

Fr. Francois and I have missed prayer and dinner. We stop at the mall next to the Provincial House and I treat him to a steak and some beers. I head home and try to finish my prayers from the day. I tell Fr. Francois that I will take a Yango (Zambian rideshare service) to the bus station in the morning, as the bus boards at 3:30, but he insists on taking me himself. “Yango, too unreliable…”

We get back to the Provincial House around 22:00, and I say my prayers and continue to pack. I finally fall asleep at 00:00.

At 2:00, my alarm goes off. I awake in a complete stupor before realizing where I am. I tear down my mosquito net and throw my last few things together, then wake up Fr. Francois. We depart for the bus station at 2:30.

The streets are empty and we get there quickly. As we pull in, two hustlers appear outside my window. “Where are you going, boss? We will show you!”

“It’s ok, I already know where I am going.”

“We will escort you!”

“No, really it’s ok.”

“I will carry your hand baggage!”

“Hey, really, it’s fine.”

They end up walking with me all the way to the Bili Transport booth. In the end, I feel bad for them having been out all night, and hand them a few kwacha.

Within the bus station, people sleep in sad, blanket covered heaps on the ground. Others sit in a closed cafe, awake and talking. Traders are already back in their stalls, selling fruits, waters, exchanging currency, facilitating cash withdrawals from Airtel Money—the ubiquitous mobile network / money transfer / shopping / bill paying platform with ten million hand-constructed corrugated steel “branches” in every town and village across the country.

I find Sam’s booth and go in. I pay for my seat (which he has somehow remembered) and he hands me a handwritten ticket. The massive pile of luggage outside has already been stuffed in the hold of the bus. I am told that mine is in the “first boot”. I don’t get to see it with my eyes, so to my brain it exists in a kind of Schrödinger superposition—maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not!

I sit for some time before boarding the bus around 3:15. One of the Bili guys directs me to my seat, which is right in the front of the bus opposite the driver. He is livid when there is already someone sitting in it. After they argue for a moment, it comes to light that there has somehow been an entire chain reaction of stolen seats throughout the entire bus. Some people play musical chairs and I finally sit down. There is a bit of an argument with the same Bili guy over my carry-on bag, which he wants me to pay for and stash in the bottom of the bus, but after overhearing us, the bus driver takes it without a word and starts to use it as an armrest. “Are you sure it won’t slide?” “Yes, it’s fine.”

Other passengers carry more interesting cargo. The women next to me have a 55” flatscreen TV box propped on their legs, while others carry sacks of mealie-meal, fruits, or packages with ersatz address labels written in Sharpie and taped on the front.

While we wait to depart, an endless stream of the hustlers from outside come freely on and off the bus. They are selling an incredible assortment of goods: 5 Liter juices, phone chargers, headphones, unmarked packages of pills for who knows what, mosquito repellent candles, sausages, “brede” (bread). Fistfuls of Kwacha change hands and the Bili workers act as if this is the most normal thing in the entire world.

In the nearly pitch darkness, a guy gets on selling bluetooth speakers—then turns one on to show it off. It blasts out a super loud start up sound, “BUM BUM BUM!” Super deep voice, “BLUETOOTH CONNECTED.” He proceeds to play very loud Afrobeats with huge bass.

The clock above the bus driver reads 3:46 in the morning.

Five or six Bili workers hang out in the front of the bus—literally in the space between the driver’s seat and the door. It is one of those huge tour busses where the driver sits lower than the passengers and there is about 10 sq ft. of floor space before the front window and the stairs. Several of them take turns plopping down for a time in the seat next to me.

As hustlers continue coming in and out, they chat and laugh. One guy eats an apple. It has the atmosphere of a cafe or a marketplace and not at all a transport bus. A pile of bags has formed on the platform above the driver, and has now bled into the bus aisle. At one point, the Bili guys move them to pop open a floor panel and pour some kind of motor oil or lubricant down into the engine.

I am unsure of who is actually the bus driver. Several guys hop in and out of the seat before a guy wearing a pink plaid shirt with the collar popped comes and takes his seat authoritatively.

Outside my window people move around. A guy in a metal stall sells stacks of whole chicken eggs lit by blue and green neon lights. Others continue with the customary pile-of-fruit-on-head, or crates of sodas, chips.

Suddenly, we’re on our way—the six Bili workers are still sitting and chatting in the front of the bus. The driver is working the wheel like an expert. As we get out onto the highways of Lusaka he passes the cars in front of him at reckless speed, flying by with flicks of the wheel that bring the window next to me inches from station wagons and semi-trucks. The window itself is not well secured, and the glass rattles and crashes at loud volume inches from my head. The bus rocks and rolls like the deck of a ship, with huge bounces landing on blown out and basically ineffective shocks. I fall asleep immediately.

I come to as we pass through Kabwe—120 km down the road, schoolchildren visible in the dawning light making their way to classes. I watch the scenery for a few minutes before feeling the weight of sleep, and it takes me again.

I jump awake to an incredible scene. Twenty Kapiri Mposhi hustlers are crammed into the front of the bus screaming at a guy I quickly realize is in the seat right next to me. Their hands are in fists, gripping Kwacha and waving wildly.

“Blah blah blah EXCHANGE MONEY!” one of the hustlers screams at the man next to me, shoving a fistful of Kwacha in his face. The last part is strangely audible in the midst of an incomprehensible stream of Nyanja.

The guy next to me is absurdly calm. He holds his hands up. “Exchange rate is good, you will make money…” he says, laughing and smiling while the hustlers continue to scream and jab at him with fingers.

One of these jumps up so that he is 2 in away from my face, screams in Nyanja, and snatches a sweet roll directly out of my seat partner’s hand. I realize all at once that this ridiculous sweet roll is the cause of all the contention. He takes it down and off the bus and the chaos continues, with the 5 or 6 Bili guys finally realizing what is going on and trying to control the scene.

Outside the bus window, I see the hustler who had grabbed the sweet roll confer with another guy. He then angrily points back at the bus and right towards us. This second hustler gets angry as well, promptly grabs the sweet roll, rushes back on, sticks it in my neighbor’s face and demands that he pay—with Kwacha! Cornered, he finally produces the money, which the hustler roughly snatches, throwing back his other bills—what kind they were I have no idea.

The hustlers are still shouting, and the Bili guys have had enough. One of them comes up to our seats. He looks at the sweet-roll-pilferer with a scowl. “Can’t sit here. Boss seat only.”

The guy, already having a very rough bus ride, makes his way to the back. I am in such a daze that I simply fall back asleep. I drift in and out, oppressed by the kind of exhaustion that feels like a lead blanket has been draped over your chest.

At about 10:30 I finally wake up for good. The rest of the bus ride is a smear of green and brown as we fly up the entirety of Great North Road—swerving wildly to avoid bikers, trucks, schoolchildren, animals, motorbikes, and huge, gigantic washouts that sometimes stretch on for miles.

Villages with thatch-roofed cottages begin to appear on the sides of the road. As we cross the Luapula river (really a marshy collection of rivers), large groups of Bemba women and children appear along the banks—wearing clothing of the brightest colors, arms full of fruit and fish-baskets, trying in vain to sell their catch to passengers on a bus speeding by at 100 km/hr. Their husbands ride sampans along the bending river, casting their fishing spears here and there into slow-moving, water-lily and rivergrass covered depths.

The dryness of Central Zambia gives way to the lush green of Luapula province. The bus makes impromptu stops to pick up more passengers, who clamber over the piles of luggage and foodstuffs to lay haphazardly along the aisle. On the TV screen at the front of the bus is a several-hour-long mix of Pentecostal hymnals, followed by a series of flashy Afrobeats music videos.

As we pass through other small towns, we are met on the road by scores of women with fruit baskets, bread, water stacked on their heads—trying their hardest to earn a few Kwacha. One man along a more deserted stretch of road has placed a large branch across the left lane, extracting a kind of charitable and voluntary toll from passing vehicles. To my great surprise, one of the Bili guys pays it.

We roll along at an incredible clip, the bus driver making liberal use of the horn to facilitate wild passing and swerving. After many hours with no break, an announcement comes over the intercom that we will be stopping for “seven minutes” in Mansa bus station. This was kindly translated by one of the Bili brothers—who struck up a conversation with me after occupying the seat to my right. He is interested in sending his son to the school I am headed to in Lufubu—to the electronics program, no less! We exchange contact information and he disappears into the crowds in Mansa.

It goes without saying that we are swarmed by hustlers as soon as we arrive in Mansa. They run up to the bus and begin to bang on the luggage hatches before we have even stopped. They hand bread, sausages, drinks, phone chargers through the bus windows to passengers who pass back fistfuls of Kwacha. The Bili brothers unload packages marked for Mansa, and one of them disembarks and runs into the distance. As we leave Mansa along the main road, I spot the same guy running out of a Hungry Lion restaurant (kind of a Zambian McDonalds) with a fistful of greasy brown food bags. He jumps into the open door as the bus flies along and the Bili brothers sit back to feast on burgers and fries.

These same scenes play themselves out in each town we pass through. The day drags on and on. Finally, at the 14 hour mark, I conclude that we must be close to Lufubu. I lean down into the front platform and catch the eye of a Bili brother. “Hey boss, will the bus stop at Lufubu?” He gives me a thumbs up and relays the request to the driver.

A few minutes later, we arrive, and the bus clatters to a stop. I climb up and over the seat divider onto the front platform and give all of the Bili brothers the Zambian dap, then jump down and out to retrieve my bags.

Waiting for me with two motorbikes is Schubert—the electronics instructor at DBATC—and a handful of students. He comes up to me as I am taking stock of my luggage. We load my three huge bags onto the backs of the bikes with a clever system of rubber tie-downs and hitch knots. As we tear off down the road to the school, the villagers we pass shout hello and wave.

After a few minutes, we arrive at the place I have been anticipating for months: Don Bosco Agricultural Technical College. Three separate plane rides totaling 39 hours and a 14 hour bus ride over some of the wildest road I have ever seen have led me to the place I will call home for a year.

As we unload my bags from the bikes, I hear some commotion behind us. I turn to see that the entire population of the school’s Oratory—some fifty children from the ages of 6 to 13, have snuck up the road behind us to say hello. They look at me and giggle, standing back in apprehension. “Muli shani!” I say. In perfect adorable unison they respond: “Bwino!” Everyone devolves into laughing. I tell them my name and try to ask some of theirs. I ask how old they are, and when they don’t understand, I ask, holding up my fingers as I go: “How old are you? Are you four, five, six…” They completely misunderstand and start to count along with me: “seven, eight, nine, ten!” By the end of this I am in stitches.

As my bags come off the bikes the kids rush forward to “carry” them for me. Somehow, groups of four or five kids that barely come up to my knee manage to pick up and carry my 50 pound suitcases towards the gate of DBATC. As if with a flair for dramatic timing, Fr. Cao comes out of the front gate, and we greet each other with a firm shake and warm embrace. This is my introduction to Lufubu.

It’s 10 PM on Sunday in Lusaka and the night air is quiet, for once.

Today, I discovered the source of the heretofore unmentioned and unmitigated noise that emanates from a westerly direction several hours of the day and several more hours of the night. After a very private Sunday Mass (Fr. George, Br. Joseph, Br. Simon, and myself) and a no-coffee breakfast I went and took a walk around the compound. I went out back where the Salesians’ Oratory is, as I hadn’t yet seen it. Somehow I was expecting a larger building, but the community here is small and no doubt doesn’t have the resources to run a large Oratory. Behind the tiny classroom is a hard-packed dirt soccer pitch with two netless goals and a roofless cinderblock structure at midfield.

Beyond that, and beyond the distant 10-foot wall of the compound, there is a gigantic corrugated steel warehouse containing what I can only imagine is a Pentecostal Church-cum-nightclub. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights—while sleeping in my room—I heard extremely loud trance music and club-style shouting until the wee hours of the morning. Today, probably from 8:00am until 1:00pm I heard extremely loud praise & worship music and a charismatic pastor with voice hoarse from screaming and audible, sucking breaths between powerful streams of the Word. I was almost tempted to go check it out, but figured there was no way in heaven that a Mzungu walking in mid-service wouldn’t attract an inordinate amount of attention.

I brought it up to the Salesians at lunch and, as I have learned is their attitude towards most idiosyncrasies of Lusaka, they laughed at it like a big joke. They are incredibly easy-going. One would think they would complain at being kept awake at night and having Sunday Mass disturbed by probably 500 Watt speakers blasting deep-bass techno-evangelium from the lot behind them. Instead, they said they were lucky the Mosque had moved—otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to hear a thing!

Yesterday was “National Day of Fasting and Prayer”: a civic holiday introduced by Edgar Lungu in his administration several years ago. I had seen some advertisements around Lusaka concerning this holiday, most consisting of suave, bespangled preachers clad in white suits promising spiritual healing and revival against a backdrop of large, concert style venues and rave lights. This the Salesians also treated as if it were a big joke. “Prayer is good, we do that every day. Fasting! That is where the problem is…”

At the breakfast table it certainly seemed as if people were fasting, or at least eating frugally. Most had nothing but a bowl of oatmeal or the like. Fr. François launched into a hilarious tirade about the recently sworn-in President of Madagascar (his home country), who sounds like a cartoon character—brought to power by military coup, dubious international businesses concentrated in (of all pairs of places) Gabon and Serbia. Previous president recently swore up and down to reporters that he was not going to flee the country—and then fled the country the very next day, taking with him a sizeable amount of assets. The new president is a Belgian citizen, having renounced citizenship in Madagascar—which makes it illegal for him to hold office. Apparently this is ok, since he’s promised to “fix” the constitution—much to Fr. François’s chagrin.

After that breakfast, I payed the paid the price for having stayed up all of Friday night writing. I ended up taking a six-hour (!) nap. When I woke up it was too late to play football at the Oratory, so I did laundry instead. Fr. Michael stopped in to wash his own clothes, and chatted with me while he waited for me to finish washing mine. Apparently he had spent three years in Luapula—at Kazembe, in fact. He spoke for a while about the area, the goodness and simplicity of the people, the challenges of running a mission, financial concerns, concerns over the integrity of local clergy, the fact that the parish has 34 outstations and only 3 priests.

We spoke about young people and the Gospel, American politics, the state of the Church in America, the state of young people in America. I gave him my thoughts—in America, many people are wealthy and prosperous. With wealth and prosperity, it is very easy to become distracted from the desire to seek the truth, which makes people think that they don’t need the truth, or can declare the truth for themselves—functionally, that there is no truth.

In Africa, it is different. I think that in many places where the line between poverty and destitution is very thin, it is different. Those who suffer are lashed to the Cross whether they like it or not, and those for whom suffering is a way of life are pierced with the very wounds of Christ. In Africa, there is no question over God’s existence. That is a first-world luxury. One needs Truth in order to live—because there is no comforting distraction to delude you into thinking you can live without it.

This does not mean that sin doesn’t exist here—on the contrary, it does in spades. But sin exists in a monastery, as well. Even in a Provincial House. That is why it is important to maintain discipline—to fast and pray. On yesterday’s national day of fasting and prayer, the first part was easy for me—I slept through lunch. But prayer proved itself difficult. It is difficult to pray, even for those who enjoy prayer. I don’t mean the kind of simple, quiet prayer done at your own convenience—but the discipline of prayer, the commitment to certain quantities of prayer at certain times, the wisdom of the desert fathers, of St. Benedict: “Seven times a day I praise you for your just decrees…”

Yet, it is possible to overdo it. St. Benedict allowed for no virtuoso asceticism in Monte Cassino. Fasting and mortification were geared towards the spiritual development of the community, not the glory of the individual religious. The monks of Scetis used to keep a flask of wine for visitors, scandalizing them until they realized that the rest of the entire year, they drank salty water.

As it is important to keep the fast, it is important to keep the feast. In proportion to the hardship of one’s life, you must find reason to celebrate. Give us joy to balance our affliction. We must remember to feast as well as fast. In the midst of extreme hardship, feasting becomes an art, a virtue—a way of loosening the tension of the mind and restoring joy and charity to the heart. These are the fuels one must burn to live the Christian life.

If one’s life is easy, simple, full of luxury and temptations to pleasure, then you must ride yourself hard, not sparing the whip and the goad in mortification and self-discipline.

But if one becomes grey of soul, if the light retreats from one’s eyes, if one’s life is nothing but toil and hardship, grief and woe—then a feast becomes a gift from God.

We must remain along the middle way, the narrow way. Too much hardship leads one to despair if one does not allow—no, make the concerted effort!—to enjoy the small things of life. In the same vein, too much ease and prosperity leads to pride and ultimately indulgence if one does not make a strict effort at discipline.

The life of the impoverished, of the desperate, of the despairing should be a continual feast.

The life of the rich, of the fat, of the happy should be a continual fast.

As I prayed alone in the chapel before evening prayer, one of the Fathers came in, not seeming well. He began to prepare the altar for Mass. Finding me praying, he asked my permission to say Mass for his friend who had just died. I gave it, of course. I extended my condolences and asked when it had happened. Very recently, he said. He had killed himself.

I sat in the back of the chapel as Father whispered the opening prayers to himself. It was a strange thing. As he prayed this Mass, I saw thousands of years of this same sacrifice said in the quiet—in the dark. Words whispered so that only God would hear. I saw Aaron, oil upon the beard, atoning for his people. I saw Christ, in the Garden, in anguish and supplication before His Father: “That they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you…” Speaking into existence the radical likeness between the union within God and the union between Men—the irruption of the divine into the plane of human existence, and likewise, the irruption of the human into the plane of divine existence. He has joined Himself to us inextricably.

And likewise, I saw, without a doubt, the impossibility of Father’s friend having been refused into the life of God if he desired it with all his heart. Not even death, not even suicide—can break the divine grip on a soul that yearns for Him.

Fr. Kunda and I spoke for some time after dinner. He had arrived before Mass that morning and the first view I had of him was towering over the altar in his red vestments—stained yesterday with St. Luke’s blood—and breaking the Body before our eyes. He had given me a warm, brotherly hand clasp and embrace when we entered the dining room for breakfast. In his office, after dinner, he laid out the contract I was to sign as a volunteer with the Zambia Province. He spoke well of Fr. Cao, assured me that I would be in very capable hands, and gave me a detailed picture of what I was to find in Lufubu.

He pulled no punches—it would be hard, he said. A very poor area, a school in disrepair. But the people are good, the children will love you, and the Salesians there will be your support. He also informed me of the existence of other Salesian volunteers in Zambia, all of which (excluding Nate and myself) were girls—three Germans, two Czechs, two Poles, one Irish. We would all meet at some point after Easter for a conference on our mission work. It would be an interesting dynamic, for sure!

I like Fr. Kunda a lot. He is an intelligent, tall man—full of gravitas, radiating integrity. He was happy to hear that I was considering a Salesian vocation—“it is a beautiful life.” We finished with a Zambian shake and parted ways.

Today I decided to seize the opportunity to play football at the Oratory no matter what. I intended to go straight there after lunch (during which Br. Joseph brought in four ice-cold 16oz beers) but it was a ghost town at 13:00. I sat down to read Andrew Sardanis’s book (Zambia: The First 50 Years) and fell fast asleep for a couple of hours.

I woke up around 13:45 and headed out to the soccer pitch. I sat on the steps of the oratory for a few minutes before one of the kids came over and invited me to play. There were about 30 kids between the ages of 7 and 13, many of them with bare feet—which I learned very quickly was necessary to keep grip on a dusty pitch as slippery as an ice rink.

I settled into a kind of midfielder position and tried to play unobtrusively. I thanked God’s Providence that I had spent my 10 months of seminary playing soccer with a bunch of middle schoolers every Friday. The kids had fun calling me “Mzungu” and I tried to not accidentally knock any of the little ones over while slipping and sliding on the rocks.

They had three really talented forwards that ran circles around our defense. A little guy—maybe seven years old, built like Popeye and no taller than my knee—was always right in the thick of it, using feet, knees, chest, head, driving ruthlessly on our defenders and making key utility plays in the box. At one point, the right winger that I was contending fell and got some dirt in his eyes. I hurried over to grab my water bottle and poured some on his face to get it out. I offered him a drink, and then to the kid next to him, and next to him and so on—and, not much to my surprise, they drained my water bottle!

The completely lopsided game went to penalties by the grace of the referee (really just a Salesian Lay-Collaborator who ran the Oratory). Despite me missing mine, we tied and went to sudden death. One of their players walked it off and our team came together to lick our wounds. I said my goodbyes to the kids—likely forever. They have school tomorrow, and I leave for Lufubu on Tuesday.

I was struck by the kindness and openness of these children. Most of their families live in the cheap housing compounds in the area and survive by selling things here and there on the street. Many of their parents probably make about $1 a day. And yet, there is a joy and ease and lightness with them, an honesty, a willingness to share.

There is much to be said about hardship making people better. I don’t mean “more efficient” or “stronger” in some kind of Nietzschean sense. I mean more kind, more compassionate—in a word, more human.

Everyone remembers the first part of the Beatitude: Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Not many remember the second: But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Having little makes you more content with what you have. Having much… you begin to resent what you don’t have.

God loves the poor—in fact, He might just love them more than the rich. This is not to accuse God of being unfair—rather, it is the solution to the problem of evil, the silver lining for all those who mourn, who are hungry, who suffer: God Himself will repay you for your lack. Maybe not in this world, but in the flashing glimpse into eternity, the changeless realm beyond quarks and gluons and stars and planets—just maybe. That is our hope, anyway. Ave crux, spes unica…

Woke up today early for morning prayer in the chapel at 6:30. The community here does some vocal prayers and then meditation for about 20 min, followed by Morning Prayer and then Mass. They do this really nice thing in Morning Prayer where they sing all of the canticles—led by Br. Simon, who has a great voice. Today’s canticle they layered like a canon, which was very impressive considering there were only eight of us in the chapel. Mass afterwards was concelebrated by Frs. Joseph, François, George, and Andrew.

I forgot to mention that, last night, Fr. Joseph said Mass at 20:00 with only myself in attendance. He had an early morning traveling from Lufubu and had been unable to celebrate. I, for my part, had been being shuttled around on various airplanes and unable to attend. Responding for the Mass parts as the only member of the congregation made me aware of the fact that I was actually participating in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. It is not only the priest, after all, who offers the Mass—the faithful offer it with him. It is our worries, wants, needs—even our sins that are put on the Paschal Lamb. They are atoned for by the same once-and-for-all cosmic action that occurred at a single point in history—looped back to again and again by collective memory. Like a wormhole making spacetime bend, the Sacraments create bridges through eternal consciousness. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek…

Afterwards, breakfast with the community. I volunteered my help to Fr. Andrew, who told me: “in Lufubu you start work—here you rest.” Nevertheless, after he left, I convinced Naomi (their cook) to let me do the dishes. She is very sweet. Seventh Day Adventist, one son (18) attending University of Zambia sitting Economics.

Fr. Joseph had a doctor’s appointment in the city and asked me if I wanted to tag along. I was on a quest to replace the mud boots I had thrown out in Paris and he suggested that we could look for them. I met him at 9:00 to head out. We went first to an AutoWorld shop to try and get a new rim for his Toyota technical. The roads in Kazembe are terrible and a pothole had bent the rim, causing the tire to be off balance. They didn’t have any single rims (except for expensive ones), and recommended that he instead replace all of them. One of the workers behind the counter quoted him for about $1500, which was very expensive compared to the ~$800 he had paid last time he had gotten new rims and tires.

We left without purchasing and he left the truck in their parking lot. Right next to AutoWorld was Kamwala Market, and we entered through an alleyway. Kamwala is the quintessential African open-air market: frenzied energy, people roasting whole goats right in front of you, plastic fires burning unchecked, cheap Chinese electronics on sale for a pittance and every consumer commodity under the sun visible in packed-to-the-gills market stalls and precariously leaning buildings baking under a hot Lusaka sun. Cars and trucks and vendors with wagons and wheelbarrows carted to and fro narrowly missing throngs of market-goers and women with towering piles of fruit carried on their heads.

We stopped in to a shop and bought fifteen footballs (soccer balls), five volleyballs, five netballs, and a football net for around $400. They got this ready for us while we went to another vendor selling football apparel and accessories, tried on some turf football boots (I bought my pair for $50, fake as the day is long), returned to pick up our Santa’s bag of footballs, hauled them over-shoulder back to the truck—where Fr. Joseph deftly secured them with a dazzling series of hitch knots.

Traffic in Lusaka is an absolute nightmare and road-safety is less than an afterthought. Fr. Joseph navigated expertly through swarms of bikes, busses, trucks, milling pedestrians, salespeople carrying odd items along the lane dividers—changing lanes with full body gestures out the driver’s side window, hands outstretched to push away encroaching cars, wordless conversations to discourage would-be salespeople from offering us their wares.

We inched along and avoided probably one thousand collisions by millimeters until we reached Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Institute along a roadway flanked by tall flowering trees. Fr. Joseph has developed a pterygium in both eyes—basically a growth that comes from the corner of the eye inwards until it covers the pupil and eventually blinds—which need to be removed by surgery. The eye doctor’s showed nothing but a cycle of American news—CNN to Newsmax back to CNN again, Trump saying something about buying his supplements on a dot-gov website.

We left the hospital and made our way to a hardware store—Handyman’s Paradise. It had been recommended by the guys at AutoWorld as a place to buy mud boots and a chainsaw—mine and Fr. Joseph’s items of interest, respectively. They had neither, but directed us to another vendor that might carry a Husqvarna 24” chainsaw (maybe). Returning by way we came, we made our way to a shop deep in the markets selling large LiPo batteries, solar inverters, and panels—where Fr. Joseph was good friends with the 6-odd fellas running the place. Muli bwanji, the tripartite Zambian dap (learned originally from Jackson on the way back from the airport), some good banter—good Catholic fellows wanting to support Don Bosco. We left with a 51V 100 A/H LiPo battery that could probably burn down a small forest, put it in the trunk of the pickup before getting smart and putting it behind my seat where it would be in the shade, wormed our way out through the traffic of downtown and headed back towards the Provincial House. Along the way, we snagged South African gum boots at a home supply store then enjoyed some Windhoek Namibian barley beers and a delicious bony fish eaten with hands in the African way. We never did get that chainsaw, though.

All-in-all the feeling today was one of total enamorment and freedom—enamorment with Lusaka and the Zambian way of living, and freedom in service to Christ that stripped away the usual scrupulous anxieties that come with indulgent first-world living, stepping into the blessed realm of going-with-the-flow that to a large degree is necessary in mission work. I hope that it is a correct development of thought to be able to set aside some of the scrupulous baggage I often struggle with in service of a kind of survival-mode flow-state that comes with living and existing in a locale as frenzied and impoverished as Lusaka. What is important is the Love of Christ, I believe, and the sincere desire to serve Him.

Getting bogged down in scrupulous minutiae is a first-world luxury—and thank the Lord for it, since the feeling of being liberated from it is amazing. When among the trash fires and destitution of the city, the minutiae cease to make an earth-shattering difference, and one might lean into the concessionary nature of Christ’s practical love. He knows we are but men, and I believe He values certain things over absolute perfection in the minutiae: seek first the Kingdom of God, and the rest will follow. Perfection is a fruit of friendship with Christ, and not a requirement—and the Kingdom of God requires honest workers.

[Endnote: I’ve started a YouTube channel where I’ll upload footage throughout the year. I plan to put out videos slightly less frequently than blog posts. If you would like to put a visual to the events described yesterday and today, the first videos are live here:

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The mall is nice, actually. On walking inside earlier I was unintentionally barrel-flagged to the maximum, along with all other passerby, by the bored security guard sitting on his phone with an AK47 across his lap and parallel to the ground. Inside there are banks, clothing stores, electronics stores, furniture stores. A shop had a whole bunch of Adidas shoes and apparel at high prices (~3000 ZMW or about $130). The Shoprite supermarket at the end was well stocked and well-run.

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On the walk back I gave some Kwacha to a couple of kids who excitedly snatched it out of my hand as soon as it left my wallet and ran away whooping and shouting. They had time to yell back a thank-you before disappearing into the distance. Along Chipwenupwenu Road I saw a lot of souped-up Toyota trucks with roll bars and metal frames like you would see in some kind of Gulf State conflict—with guys sitting on the back and the top and the sides, driving in and out of gated compounds. On the roadside are a handful of small stalls offering competing business to the shopping mall: money changers and fruit sellers and apparel stands, complete with bizarrely-featured mannequins with accentuated… parts.

There have to be thousands of these around Lusaka. Alongside are armies of street merchants—literally, merchants walking along the divider lines between lanes in the street—carrying the most eclectic collections of salestuff imaginable. One memorable man held nothing but lanyards, toilet plungers, flags, and a framed picture of President Hakainde Hichilema. I have since learned that every school and place of business needs a framed picture of the President if they don’t want to run into issues—which makes this make a little more sense.

At the Salesian Provincial House are Frs. Andrew, Joseph, George, François, and Michael, along with Brother Simon. Fr. Joseph and I will be seeing a lot of each other. He is assigned to Kazembe, only 12 km up the road from Lufubu, and is only in Lusaka to attend a doctor’s appointment. He and Fr. Cao (my site superior) were classmates in the seminary (in Vietnam) and have been sent all over Africa for the last 15 years—Zambia, Kenya, Namibia, etc. They have just recently been placed only one village apart. I also learned that at the site in Kazembe there are volunteers from the German counterpart of the SLM’s—three girls just graduated from high school. I am sure this will make for an interesting dynamic.

Yesterday I spent a ten-hour layover walking around Paris. In spite of myself I went to all of the tourist sites. I walked a kind of circuit starting at Saint-Michel: Notre Dame, the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, Luxembourg Gardens, Montparnasse, Champs de Mars, Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, Champs-Élysées, Tuileries Garden, the Louvre, Pont Neuf, Saint-Germain, then back to Saint-Michel.

I think Paris is the kind of city I would have really liked when I was younger. I couldn’t help but see myself in the Sorbonne students I found sitting on the steps of the Panthéon. In the church of St.-Etienne-du-Mont, tucked in a little corner, some of them prayed. A distinguished older gentleman with the look of a free-thinker gazed with solemn respect on the pillars, the ribs along the vault. A pretty girl crossed herself, a young man sat in silence. Fresh faces beholding the ineffable divine.

A little thing huddled in the doorway—a young girl with a blue and brown headscarf, tiny sandals with grey socks, a shawl pulled tight against the autumn chill—looking scandalously like the Ferruzzi Madonnina. She was no older than me—younger perhaps, though it was hard to tell. I saw her when I passed into the church the first time, at the beginning of my circuit. I had nothing to give her, and even if I did, it was likely that she was simply being exploited in one of the unfortunately common street schemes I have seen in other European cities. I didn’t want to pay into the hand of some nebulous mafia. I decided to say something to her rather than nothing—“bonne journée” as I passed. Her brown eyes became shy, withdrawn. I was wrong. She was much younger than me. No older than fourteen.

I thought about her all day. After completing my circuit, I eventually found my feet leading me back to the Latin Quarter, past the Sorbonne, behind the Pantheon, and to the porch of St.-Etienne-du-Mont. Some girls sat on the steps, smoking and talking. The Romani girl was still there, cup no fuller than it was before, sitting on a suitcase. I handed her a ten-euro note. She brightened, took it gently.

What is your name? I asked.

Andrea.

Ambroise.

Ambroise?

Yes. Have a good day. Pray for me.

She nodded as if she didn’t understand, and I left.

Back at Charles de Gaulle airport, I was forced to throw away 1/2 of a pair of mud boots that I had unfortunately placed in my carry-on bag, as it was overweight. I figured I would be able to buy another pair in Lusaka, but the loss hurt nonetheless.

Paris to Johannesburg—uneventful. Johannesburg to Lusaka, sat next to an interesting Britisher coming to Zambia for a fishing trip on the Lower Zambezi. He was the head of the Trade Commission or something or another where he dealt with all of the berry-crop import/export for the UK. I told him my family farmed in California, and we talked for a long time about berries, farming, export, water-law, etc.

I was picked up from the airport in Lusaka by Jackson—a good man, married, Salesian-collaborator. I unfortunately didn’t have any cash to tip the guys who non-consensually helped with my bags, so he covered me. Asked him a million questions on our way to the Provincial House. And ended up right here, where I write this post.

What else? Personal note. I feel far from God. I have noticed the past couple of days a streak of real cynicism. What are we doing, anyway, aside from what-we-are-doing-right-now? I have no other goal or desire or plan than to be where I’m at doing what I am. I know I’m a sinner, and a bad one at that. I also believe that Christ is much more good than I am bad, and infinitely kind and generous to boot. Chasing Him gives me life, because He is the cessation of all desire. He is the fulfillment of every lack. And yet, I falter, because with running one can always run harder, with working work harder—but with loving… how does one love harder? I have no idea.

I know that I must look forward to eternal life—I must yearn for it with reckless passion. I must believe that even though I undoubtedly do not and will never deserve it, Christ will give it to me out of His magnanimity, His merits, His goodness, and that He will sustain my desire, even fulfill it, for eternity. But first, He must stoke and fan the flames of this desire such that it rises to a fever pitch. Christ, ignite my soul, make me run after you with reckless passion, with obsession! Give me living water, that I may thirst.

At least temptation reminds me that I am still alive. If I were Dead, I would not be tempted. There is no need to pummel your opponent when he has tapped out—only the contender continues to take punches. Christ, be my strength.