That's what I see, looking through the French doors of my newly rented "guest house" bungalow here in Tucson: the stark and deeply shaded Santa Catalina range rising to the east. Between me and the steep Catalinas forty miles away are a couple of acres of lush desert growth, then a sprinkling of reasonably sized houses (no California McMansions -- hallelujah), then, about five miles from here, Interstate 10 (inaudible to me), and then the northwestern corner of greater Tucson, population 1 million. It's not wilderness, but all in all, it's a salubrious setup for a Zen refugee trying damned near desperately to find a sustainable niche in these United States.

Have you spent any time in the Sonora Desert? It brims with flora and fauna. As I hike and bike in this this cool season I marvel at the density of this natural garden all aflutter with a great variety of birds and other wildlife. (A bobcat was spotted in a nearby palo verde tree last week.) The notion of the desert as wasteland is one of those absurd American fictions. Another one is that Mexicans are lazy, an ironic hilarity here in the Southwest, which depends heavily on Mexican labor.

I was, by the way, delighted to discover that Tucson is a very bike friendly city. It has an extensive network of bike paths, bike boulevards, bike lanes and "share the road" signs. New to me are the "ghost bikes" painted white and installed at places where cyclists have been killed. I take this as a positive sign that Tucson's large bike coalition is determined to educate the community.

Of course the city itself, considered as a whole, is the familiar disaster of shopping malls, fast food franchises and heavy traffic that plagues the Western states. As Wallace Stegner pointed out, only the Morman pioneers built to last. Elsewhere the prevailing Western ethic was quick-buck exploitation. But since Tucson is home to a major public university and located in the serene desert and not far from the border, there is depth, creativity and tolerance in the city's culture, enriched as it is by a large, civic-minded Jewish community.

Which is why the slaying here a year ago of six people at a political event for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who is Jewish, was so shocking. But then Tucson is located in Arizona, where a madman, armed with the Supreme Court's twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment, can readily obtain enough weapons to spray his suffering around. I suppose you could call it the state's karma, which is simply another word for history, which is another word for story.

I've come to Tucson with the intention of tweaking my story a little and renewing my sense that I do not really know what is coming next, even though I think that I do know. Being a pioneer in my own life is unnerving. Clarity comes so slowly. And then it comes all at once. The natural processes of this great wild desert are similar. To the dull eye the desert appears eternal and unchanging. Until a flash flood comes roaring down the wash and carries your car away. Now that's a wake-up call.

There is a strong vitality in these giant spaces. Under such a sky, small-mindedness is a too-obvious mirage. Rediscovering that life requires shade and water and not the lnternet plants the feet firmly and straightens the backbone. And then there are the psychedelic sunsets, a glimpse of paradise. As the Apache woman Annie Peaches told an anthropologist: “The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right."

Perhaps that was what Robert Frost was hinting at in "The Gift Outright," with its famous first line "the land was ours before we were the land's." How tragic that we belong less to the land now then when Frost delivered his poem at Kennedy's inauguration nearly sixty years ago. These days we Americans seem to belong lock-stock-and-barrel to Wall Street. And yet the land still stalks us.

-- Merrill

He was small, thin, dark-skinned and he wanted to know if I spoke Spanish. What he really wanted was money. I must have looked like I had plenty of it, me in my shiny new rental car driving the smooth asphalt roads of a Phoenix suburb. I’d made the two-hour trip north from Tucson, where I’m living now, to buy a mattress on sale at Macy’s, but I’d gotten turned around in the seamless uniformity of a housing development and had stopped to check my map.

That was when he popped up by my open window on a battered BMX bike, his fox-like face shrouded by a dirty blue hoodie, an apparition as out-of-place in the sterile suburban environment as a pink flamingo in the Sonoran Desert around us. He said he’d just arrived from Guatemala, but he was no campesino; he had the sly manner of a big-city hustler. My mind zipped to gangs, drugs, car-jackings. To pull out my wallet, I would have to unbuckle my seatbelt and reach down awkwardly into my front pocket, my car window open to invasion. Instead, I curtly directed the man to seek immigrant social services and drove off.

I headed back to Tucson on the interstate. A hour or so I turned off for gas and a bite to eat. At the top of the exit I could see across the road at the entrance to the ramp leading back down to the highway the outline of a hitchhiker backlit by bright sun. He had long blonde hair and his belongings lay in a heap beside him. No way did I want to spend the next hour sitting next to some smelly guy full of hard-luck stories. Or so I thought.

I filled the tank harried by questions in my head about my selfish attitude and went into the Burger King. I figured that having just spent a year in a Buddhist monastery in Big Sur’s mountains, I could allow myself french fries and a Coke. I ordered a chicken sandwich, too. (What the hell, the poor bird was dead already.) But when my order arrived, next to the fries and the Coke lay not one sandwich but two -- there was a two-for-one special on. I was about to return the extra sandwich when it occurred to me that I could give it to the hitchhiker. The thought instantly made me feel happy. I saved the Coke and drank water instead and didn’t touch the fries so he’d have a complete meal as we motored south together.

But back at the entrance to the interstate, the hitchhiker was gone. My mission was unfulfilled. I looked around and damned if there wasn’t a man not far away hunched down by the side of the road. I maneuvered my car right up next to him. He was a black man maybe forty-five years old and most of his teeth were missing.

-- You want a ride to Tucson? I asked him.

-- No, I live here, he replied.

-- Where?

-- Here. In the desert. I live right here, man.

I held out the sandwich, and he took it. Then I gave him the fries and the Coke.

-- God bless you, he said.

-- We can all use it, I said.

Then I was driving south, feeling pretty good about myself and feeling pretty bad about all the suffering in the world. I was tucked into a long line of traffic when I glimpsed a large dog by the side of the highway standing unsteadily on long legs, staring vacantly at cars speeding by. I only got a snapshot, but the picture was unforgettable: man’s best friend, bred for loyalty and service and empathy, abandoned to die in the desert.

Traffic was moving fast. I was already a mile down the road when an argument broke out in my head. No, I can’t do it, I thought. I can’t go back and get that dog. My search for a mattress at Macy’s had proved fruitless; my four-hour roundtrip was for naught. I couldn’t spend the rest of the day getting a dog to the humane society. Anyway, who knows where it will be by the time I get back there?

And then, not more than five minutes later, as if to cap the day’s strange journey, a program came on the radio that offered some summary thoughts. It was a show on public radio’s “This American Life” devoted to the theme of helping. How do we determine when and how much to help?

I marveled at the coincidence, if that’s what it was. I mean, that’s what it had to be, right? The universe doesn’t write scenarios for our personal edification. Right?

I don’t know. I’m just trying to pay attention to what is. I have noticed that when I pay close attention, such coincidences get more common. Paying attention reveals a profound connection with people and the world. The stronger that sense of connection, the closer to reality.

The reality of Arizona is that there are many, many poor people living here -- a reality which the Republican-controlled legislature seems determined to ignore as it underfunds education and human services despite a state budget surplus. I will certainly have many opportunities to find my balance and be of help in this new situation.

May you all have a fine year in 2012, and may all beings be happy and may they live in joy and safety.

Just before I left San Francisco Zen Center I had a final interview with the abbot. As we sat on our cushions a few feet apart in that intimate room, he looked at me with kind eyes and said, “I just wish you could be more hopeful.”

Well, Paul, you got your wish. Something happened during my scant two months here in Thailand.

But let me back up.

About this time last year, as I was doing my early morning bows at the altar of our monastery in the Big Sur region, I heard a voice say, “You have been doing this so long. Why don’t you believe in it?”

Say what?

I don’t hear voices. I’m no Martin Luther in his monk’s cell, muttering away at God. Nor am I a true believer, which is one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Buddhism. The Buddha instructed his disciples to find their own truth.

But Shakyamuni was not a skeptic. His years of searching taught him that truth exists. He believed others could find it, too. That was the Buddha’s faith: he believed in us.

So what do I believe in?

Mostly, I’ve believed in doubt. It was in my nature, and in my profession as a journalist. Habitual doubt is destructive. It’s like digging up the ground you’re standing on to fill the hole in yourself.

Bangkok, the hedonist’s theme park, is a strange place to get grounded, and yet the city’s fleeting pleasures have had no appeal. Living alone in a media-saturated mega-metropolis forced me to focus. I saw how untamed my mind is; I saw how it was making me unhappy. I didn’t like it. At the same time I found contentment meeting with the small Bangkok Zen Club, reading books by the Dalai Lama in the fine old Neilson Hays Library and attending a 10-day retreat at Suan Mokkh Monastery, 350 miles south of Bangkok. The contrast was notable.

I am a person whose sight is easily fogged. I seem to see better when I’m moving. But constant motion generates its own confusion. Even as I’m taking the train to Kerala I’m thinking how nice Buenos Aires might be at this time of year. Or maybe a sea voyage to Indonesia...

So many choices.

A man too rich in choices can have a tough time squeezing his wealth through the gates of heaven. What to keep? What to relinquish?

And yet my friend Ken is quite right when he tells me that I am very lucky to have so many options. Unlike my dharma brothers in San Quentin State Prison, I can choose to change my location. Can I choose to change my mind? They did it. Can I?

There is no such thing as destiny. Whatever direction you’re going, you can turn on a dime if you have faith. That’s the lesson of the San Quentin sangha.

Faith, belief, hope -- all very problematic words for me. But what other words could better describe my years of blind seeking? “I may not can see/but I’ve got somebody looking after me.” I’ve always loved that song by the Blind Boys of Alabama.

There is something rather childish about my resistance. What keeps me from acknowledging what I've been doing, and who I actually am? “What is outside yourself that you are trying so hard to find?” writes the Korean Zen Master Daehaeng Kun Sunim.

The flip side of ‘trying to find,’ of course, is ‘trying to escape.’ But I can never escape what I don’t relinquish.

So I’m hanging up my traveling shoes and returning to our monastery in the Big Sur region of Northern California. On the way, I’ll visit my sons in Australia and Los Angeles.

After Jan. 5, I can be found deep in the Santa Lucia Mountains at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 39171 Tassajara Road, Carmel Valley, CA 93924.

I have hope that I can keep myself at Tassajara until I don’t want to hit the road again. ###

Imagine my surprise to discover soon after my plane put down in Bangkok that I had arrived on the eve of a shootout. No, I’m not talking about another round of bloody protests like those that shook Thailand’s capital last May. The antagonists this time are not the government and its “Red Shirt” opponents but rather two versions of me. There is the me that wants to stay here, and there’s the me that wants to move on.

I should hasten to add that the issue is not Bangkok. I knew that this crowded, noisy mega-metropois would be a challenge but I intend to live in Thailand longterm and I want to learn how to use the capital city even if I settle elsewhere in the country. Plus Bangkok is where I can get the best language classes and I don’t want to drift along on the large, lazy river of English-only expatriates here.

Nor was getting set up a problem. Inside a week, I had enrolled in the best language school, rented a lovely one-bedroom in a quiet complex nearby, opened a bank account, bought a cell phone, joined a fine little private library and got connected with an English-language Buddhist group here.

But then, having accomplished all my initial goals here, my thoughts turned to... going SOMEWHERE ELSE! Oh no...

Restlessness is a perennial problem for me, but I’m not alone in it. When I was in India and Nepal a couple of years ago, I was surfing the Internet to get travel tips and news when I came across a guy who had been on the road for years, ostensibly looking for place he could call home. He had made his search systematic by rating places on his scale of preferences, sort of like the (nearly forgotten) movie “Ten,” with the perfect place instead of the perfect woman as the object of desire. But in “Ten” Dudley Moore finds his Bo Derek whereas the guy on the road couldn’t find his ideal and kept moving.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to see the suffering in this. “Can’t get no satisfaction” says it all.” If this isn’t the story of my life, it’s at least several chapters in it. My school teachers from first grade on complained about my propensity to stare dreamily out window when I should be doing math. Staring out the window at what? Someplace else!

Of course, to run away from home, you have to have a home to run away from, and at times I dream of having a permanent dwelling place and old friends living nearby to share it with, but this is just another kind of staring out the window and not my reality. The truth is I’ve invested my life in the road. I’m mostly pretty good at living the life I made for myself. But there are times...

I’m in a raw moment here. It’s scary and it’s full of potentiality. I don’t yet don’t know the best ways to the watering hole in Bangkok’s urban jungle and I have to make my own paths. It puts me in a reckless mood, like the time as a college kid when I woke up drunk in Athens and had a boat to catch and could’t read the street signs. Whee!

Something in me wants more of this kind of excitement, and that’s why even though I just got to Bangkok, some part of me wants to hit the road. It makes me laugh. There is something so profoundly delusional in wanting to throw everything up in the air just to see where it comes down. Essentially, it’s a childish behavior, and I’m determined “to put aside childish things” because, although I still “see through a glass darkly,” I have, after long struggle and with the help of many people, finally become a man.

And I intend to stay put here in Bangkok.

Last night I attended an intimate gathering in the beautiful Zen temple that serves the Korean community here. Four of us sat close together with the resident teacher and engaged in deep conversation. As we talked, it struck me that one of my favorite songs is Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” whereas the founder of the temple has written a book titled “No River to Cross.”*

Nowhere to go, nothing special to do. Just things as they are. What the heck. That’s excitement enough. ###

I’m back in the city now, after living in the mountains for a year. A few days after I got here, I was doing some housekeeping in my room when I noticed the sky darkening as twilight approached. Uh, oh, I thought. Have to hurry and finish up before nightfall. And then I remembered the light switch on the wall.

This little epiphany sums up what I learned at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Living “off the grid” on the rugged eastern slope of the Big Sur region in Northern California, my body grew sensitive to the cycles of the sun and the moon and the seasons; I adjusted to the discomforts of rain and snow, the threat of a rising creek and of falling rocks. Here in San Francisco, where I will be through September, “civilization” armors us against the fundamental reality of wild nature. And then an earthquake -- or a volcano in Iceland -- jolts the memory. Oh yeah, that’s where we live. On Earth.

As for Tassajara, for those who don’t know, it’s been the site of a Zen monastery-cum-summer-resort since the mid-1960s. Before that it was one of the early California hot springs spas; before that a settler homestead; and before that part of the Imunajon district of the Esselen peoples.

The Esselen culture was snuffed out by the Spanish padres in Carmel and Monterey, but Tassajara’s environs, the 320-square-mile Ventana Wilderness, remains an untamed world of rattlers and rock slides and forest fires and flooding creeks and cold winds coming up the steep canyons of the Santa Lucia range.

These days Tassajara operates as a get-away-from-it-all summer resort for those able to pay its rather stiff rates. Summer helpers and long-term residents keep the resort going, earning in return their room and board for the fall and winter “practice periods,” when Tassajara closes its gate to guests and functions solely as a meditation-based monastery.

I spent the summer of 2009 working in the kitchen. Tassajara summers are tough, especially in the kitchen. The kitchen crew produces six meals a day under deadline pressure in hot, crowded conditions using temperamental ovens. Whew! I found relief by taking to the trails.

Many of Tassajara’s trails were damaged by a forest fire that swept the Los Padres National Forest two years ago, causing landslides of scorched topsoil and loose rock. One day, after slogging through a two-thirds-of-a-mile stretch that was nearly buried under drifts of forest fire detritus, I came upon a tool accidentally left behind by firefighters or trail workers. It was a McCleod, a half-hoe, half-rake used to dig soil and chop brush.

I looked at it while reflecting on the tiring walk I’d just just had and then a light bulb went on. I could use the McCleod to fix the trail. That was in June. For the next three months, I spent every day I had off from kitchen duties turning that burned-out section of the Horse Pasture Trail into a nice even path.

I’d leave the valley at first light and hike up the canyon and by 7:30 I’d be moving dirt. The first couple of hours were always pretty easy and then the sun came blasting over the ridge and I had to pull down my hat and pull up my kerchief and stay focused. By noon it could be a hundred degrees or more. Sweaty and dusty, I’d eat my sandwich in the sparse shade and flop down exhausted in the dirt for a nap. By mid-afternoon I was back in the valley soaking my aching bones in the hot springs bath.

The trail repair project became my refuge from the hub-bub of Tassajara in the summer. The fire’s destruction of the trails and the forest canopy discouraged hikers and backpackers and I was mostly alone up there, allowing an intimate connection. I got to know every dip and turn, and then I started taking in more of my surroundings. By August, I had developed a fascination with the opposite canyon wall, whose subtle grays and greens seemed to be getting more and more vivid as I studied them. By the end of the month, it seemed like colors were fairly jumping off the wall, throbbing and pulsing like Van Gogh sunflowers.

I should note that I’m not given to deeply experiencing color; in fact, I’m red-green color blind. But the north-facing rock wall rising up from the Tassajara Creek Canyon -- dull to the casual observer -- had become for me visually exciting, the result, I think, of my focused effort and engagement and single-minded attention.

And that brings me back to the light switch I flicked on so I could continue my housework as the sun’s light faded. I’m not against modern conveniences per se, but the project of modernity that has taken humanity so decisively out of nature and into culture seems to me to be killing us. I’m not talking now about what we’ve done to the planet, but of the deprivation we’ve inflicted on ourselves, on our senses, on our capacity to appreciate and feel alive in our skins.

And yet earthly delights are still everywhere, ready to be seen, tasted, heard, felt, loved. On that night of my light-switch epiphany, I happened to look out the window and notice a low wall of snow-white clouds running along the city’s northern border. I went up to the roof to have a closer look. Turns out it wasn’t clouds at all but a river of fog being pulled through the Golden Gate by rising warm air in California’s Central Valley, a perfect natural process. I found it reassuring to see this evidence of the forces that made and shaped us. They’re all still there. If we can only learn to live with them. ###

After nine months on the road in Africa and Asia, I'm off to California to settle myself down in a remote corner of Big Sur for a year. I'll be staying at San Francisco Zen Center's monastery there, a collection of stone and wood buildings and cabins clustered on the banks of Tassajara Creek. The dramatic terrain is jammed with steep geologic upthrusts caused by tectonic plate collisions eons ago that created hot springs. The hot springs drew Northern Californians to Tassajara for many decades before Zen Center acquired it in the 1960s. These days Tassajara functions as a rustic resort during the summer and as a cloistered monastery in the fall and winter.

The weather, like the terrain, is extreme: very hot in summer, very cold in winter. I was there in the extra-cold winter of 2007, when I wrote the following piece. I'm including it here to provide a little taste of the Tassajara experience.

During most of my time at Tassajara, I won't have Internet access, so if you want to contact me, please use snail mail.

c/o Zen Mountain Monastery

39171 Tassajara Road

Carmel Valley, CA 93924

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was Tassajara's coldest winter in memory. Water pipes were bursting all over the place. The toilet outside my room froze so solid I couldn't crack the ice with the wooden handle of a plumber’s helper. With the temperature staying well below freezing until mid-morning, I sought out warm clearings as soon as the sun rose above the rim of valley and stood there baking myself as motionless as a lizard on a rock. When the sun went down, I took refuge in bed.

One bone-chilling night I was reading a book of Buddhist sutras when it came time to blow out the lamp and get some sleep before the wake-up bell at 4 a.m. They'd instructed us on the proper way to extinguish a lighted kerosene lamp: you have to blow down into the chimney rather than lifting up the chimney and blowing out the flame. But on this particular night I was so nicely tucked in under my quilt and the room was so cold that instinctively, foolishly, I remained warm and toasty under the covers and reached over to the nightstand and lifted up the chimney by the rim to blow out the flame at the base.

At the instant I clamped down my thumb and forefinger I knew I was in trouble. It came to me in a flash what they had said about the glass chimney getting very, very hot. Hot doesn't begin to describe it. My two fingers were on fire. I would have let the chimney drop, but I remembered, also, that they'd said if you did that the glass would shatter on the floor. Maybe it was fear of doing wrong -- this was my first time at Tassajara, and I had a simmering resentment of the many rules -- or maybe it was my (characteristic) bone-headedness, or maybe it was just simple masochism. I can't explain it. All I know is I held tight.

With my hand electric with pain, I made myself carefully get out of bed and set the chimney down as gently as if it were a new-born baby. This couldn’t have taken more than fifteen or twenty seconds but it was plenty long enough for the red-hot rim to fry my fingers. And even after I let go, the skin went right on burning. My mind flashed to various ways to ease the agony -- stick my hand in cold water? run to the first aid cabin for burn ointment? -- but thinking about remedial action only made it hurt worse. So I did nothing, and I thought nothing, and strangely enough this made the pain OK. The more I gave my full attention to the feeling, the less it seemed to trouble me. Weeks of meditation had made my mind so spacious that even as my flesh was on fire, my perception was large enough to allow the pain its own place.

Finally the fire in my skin cooled enough to let me lie back down on the bed.

I had trouble sleeping. My hand throbbed and ached all night long. In the morning there were blisters, and for awhile I had was awkward in the kitchen, but the skin healed and I forgot the incident. In fact, a few weeks later I nearly did the same thing all over again but this time I caught myself. Even a three-month monk can make a little progress. The horse doesn't always need the whip.

By the time I left, the bitter cold weather was barely a memory in the buoyant warmth of a spectacular spring. The foliage along Tassajara Creek was so green it was like there never was a winter. The redbud trees in bloom took your breath away. ###

I'd run out of books to read and couldn't buy more in the small town in Thailand where I was, but I did have free Internet access at my hotel, so I entertained myself by ambling around the web. And then I remembered a request my friend Roberto had made when I was staying with him in India recently.

He'd asked me what had become of my college friend who had visited us in D.C., back when Roberto and I were roommates decades ago. I said I didn't know but I'd try to find out when I had time. So now I had time. I typed my friend's name into Google: Francisco Newman. What I came up was so unsettling I had to write this blog entry so I could understand.

Francisco arrived at our door back in 1968, when Roberto and I and some fellow graduate students had a house off Dupont Circle. He was sporting a big, bushy Afro that drew a lot of interest because Washington's conservative blacks were just then turning more militant following Dr. King's death. The city had been hit by rioting, and tall, well-built Francisco -- his nappy hair almost Jimi Hendrix long -- looked like the white man's worst fear as he loped along those burned-out streets.

In fact, Francisco came from the black middle class and he was primed for the establishment. He was smart, he was handsome, he liked people and people like him, and he could talk. Man, could he talk; today we might call him a regular Obama. Francisco had just finished two years of Peace Corps service in Botswana and he was on his way back home to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he'd risen to glory as student body president at Berkeley High and graduated from Stanford in political science. It was an era when big opportunities were starting to open for gifted, well-educated black Americans, and Francisco could have written his own ticket to wealth and fame.

But there was way too much artist in him for that. He had a fine aesthetic eye and a natural talent for drawing and he was an energetic performer with a comedian's irreverent wit. He'd been yell leader at Stanford and he and his cheerleaders had once showed up at a football game in front of maybe 50,000 people dressed in hooded KKK-style sheets as a joke. That was Francisco.

Under the funny man there was serious stuff. We became friends when we were students together at Stanford's Italy campus. It was during the time of the Watts riots and I was dating a black woman so we fell into a lot of conversations about race. I would say that back then Francisco saw his future unfolding mostly in the world of white people, but when he returned to the States after two years in Africa it was obvious he'd done some thinking. In the States, the civil rights struggle had segued into militancy and black consciousness had shifted and so had Francisco. But he also had deeper questions that politics couldn't answer. I know now -- but didn't then -- that he'd come from a deeply Christian family and that, as a youth, he had developed a close relationship with God which he had lost. This loss was to haunt him. More about that.

A couple of years later, I hooked up with Francisco again. He was living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and working as a journalist at KQED Public Television. He was doing some politically cutting-edge stuff. For TV, he did "Staggerlee: A Conversation with Bobby Seale," the leader of the Black Panther Party, and he was also putting together his first independent film, "Ain't Nobody Slick," featuring black revolutionary Angela Davis. And he also did a film that a mutual friend just told me about that chronicled the culture of the folks who ride public transit in San Francisco's Western Addition, a black enclave. I'm told the film was shown in the early 1970s at the pantheon of New Wave filmmaking, UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive.

So Francisco was doing right by his career. He'd also fallen in love, but his relationship collapsed and he went to New York and then things really came apart. I'd lost track of Francisco at that point, so I've lifted the rest of the storty from his online biography, which appears to be the loving work of his survivors.

"For a while [Francisco] lived in New York, supporting himself as he worked as a carpenter, painter, and construction worker while trying to raise money for his film making dreams.  Separated from GOD -- and living a wild, demonic, voodoo, lust filled, womanizing life -- his brilliant mind blew apart, and he found himself in Bellevue Hospital."

The biography says that in the mental hospital, Francisco got himself locked into the bathroom and was in such a state of confusion and so dazzed by medication that he couldn't get out.

"He often told the story how he was sitting in the bathroom in Bellevue Hospital and couldn't remember how to get out of the bathroom, and he began to sing a song from his church youth days..the prodigal son made a choice to return to the GOD his parents had raised him to believe in.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  A mustard seed of faith was restored to him as he weakly struggled to sing, "I know it was the blood.  I know it was the blood, one day when I was lost, Jesus died upon the cross.  I know it was the blood for me."  He was able to figure out how to open the bathroom door.  He rose up in faith and didn't take the pills the doctors gave him that sedated him to the point where he couldn't think, pray, or function.  One of his dear uncles came and got him, flew him to Denver, Colorado, where an evangelist fasted and prayed for him for seven days drinking only water -- the church prayed for him...and he was completely delivered and restored to his right mind.  Just like Paul on the road to Damascus, just like St. Augustine, just like St. Francis of Assisi, the young man Francisco surrendered his life to the LORD."

Posted on the website is a black and white photo dated 1980 that tells what happened next. It shows Francisco in New York City standing with his arms stretched out and roped to a huge cross (but with his feet resting on a platform) under a sign saying: "I am not the Christ, but Jesus is coming again."

It's a startling image of Francisco Newman, Stanford graduate and onetime aide to U.S. Rep. John Conyers. You could easily think the guy had gone completely bonkers. But as I look at that photo I notice that in addition to his Levi's and white shirt Francisco is wearing his familiar half-smile and then I realize what a wonderful piece of street theater he's doing, and what a great prop that giant cross is. And suddenly I don't see a looney-tunes in the photo but rather my outrageously creative friend with his great sense of showmanship (those KKK sheets -- remember?), literally standing up for what he believes in. And as I realize this I say in response -- what? Right on? Amen? Maybe I'm just too humbled to say anything at all.

No, Francisco didn't go around the bend. That conclusion is born out by the rest of his life: he married, had five kids, held teaching jobs, made more movies, including "Virgin Again," a conversion story based in the ghetto, and continued to stir things up in his well-practiced way. Picture, for example, Francisco confronting the redoubtable Steven J. Gould on evolution. It happened. Have a look at http://www.virginagain.info/visionary_director.html

In August of 2002, he was interviewed by the African American literary journal Callaloo for a piece called "Cinema of the Oppressed: An Interview with Francisco Newman." Nine months later he was dead of a heart attack.

When you lose track of an old friend somewhere in the back of your mind you know you're missing them, but you don't know how much until you hear they're gone. However, this rather long blog entry of mine is not a grief-stricken lament. It's an attempt to honor something deep in all of us, something Francisco went through a very great struggle to find. For him, this something was God. Me, I don't really know but "Buddha" works fine so I go with that. What I do know down in my bones is that we must come face-to-face with this "something" in order to be who we really, really are. I just hope I don't have to do it in a bathroom in Bellevue Hospital. ###


I flew here from Kathmandu, arriving in the smoky haze of twilight rush hour for a horn-blaring, 20 kilometer ride into town. Unlike Delhi, which requires its buses, taxis and three-wheeled scooter rickshaws to run on clean-burning compressed natural gas, Calcutta lets its ragged public transit fleet pollute. And after the diesel fumes choke the city's many millions of residents, the particulate matter the fumes carry settle down on the crumbling Victorian-era buildings built by the British, adding new layers to the thick industrial grime deposited by factories to the north.

All in all, not a pretty picture, unless you see beauty in decay, which I do. In fact, it was for that reason that I came here. I was hoping that Calcutta would fill the place in my imagination made vacant when China razed Shanghai's colonial architecture.

I don't want to sound cold-hearted. The world sees Calcutta as a center of human suffering, and the world is not wrong. Calcutta sits sandwiched between the intensely poor Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand and the nearly failed nation of Bangladesh and economic refugees poor into a city that can't support them. Calcutta has been in decline for nearly 150 years. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 diverted Euopean shipping to Bombay, on the opposite coast of India. And then the British administered the coup de grace by moving the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911.

The appalling result is apparent to all. Tens of thousands of poor survive in hovels straddling the railroad tracks and by living on the pavement, where they sleep stretched out on mats and defecate into storm sewers.

The personification of all this misery is the rickshaw puller. Calcutta is the last city in India where humans pull rickshaws and even here the practice is legally banned although this law, like many others, is not enforced. You see their stick-thin figures, sometimes wrapped in what amounts to rags, trotting through the dense traffic at a good clip pulling passengers who often appear only marginally better than they are.

It's a hard life, and not a long one. I heard of a Dutch photographer engaged in a longterm project of returning annually to photograph the same rickshaw puller and thereby document the steps of his steady physical decline -- first a tooth goes, and then a limp develops, and so on. This would seem to me to have a potential for opening a lot of hearts. "The poor" remains a concept, an idea, until you get to know a little more about the life of one very poor person.

Having said that I should add that although I haven't seen the Dutchman's photos, I suspect that in many of them the rickshaw-puller is smiling. For one thing, Indians generally like to have their picture taken, and, for another, people of all social classes in Calcutta are remarkably warm and friendly.

In fact, the decaying city brims with human energy -- yet another of India's many paradoxes. Calcutta's infrastructure teeters on collapse, the traffic is horrendous, the dirty, damp air has half the population coughing, beggars besiege you and yet a sense of creativity pervades the place. It seems appropriate that Calcutta's favorite in the Hindu cosmology is Kali, creator and destroyer.

I was aware that Calcutta has a vibrant intellectual and cultural tradition from my father's admiration for native son Rabindranath Tagore, a great poet-philosopher, and also through the films of Satyajit Ray, who won an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Ray was also a writer of repute and I had great fun picking up a collection of his detective yarns at one of the dozens of used book stalls that line the street outside Presidency College.

I visited the film center Ray founded and architecturally designed but it was closed. Still, I found evidence that Calcutta deserves its name as "Kollywood," one of the three places where movies are made in India, when I twice overheard producers discussing projects at lunch.

Calcutta is visually very stimulating and would be a great setting for a film, maybe "Death in Venice" revised for India. I couldn't stop shooting photos in the Park Street Cemetery, where the British buried their notables in the expectation that the Raj would last forever. The competing spires of family mausoleums -- getting larger and larger as the decades advance -- testify to the arrogance of imperialism, and the encroaching tropical underbrush speak of its impermanence. (The British left behind lots of enormous monuments when they were forced out of India in 1948. The U.S. only leaves behind military bases....)

At the cemetery, I sat down for a good long chat with Kenneth Rodrigues, 61, a born-again Christian "called by Jesus himself." As a self-proclaimed "Lone Ranger" evangelist, he struggled to win me to his cause. He is a sweet guy and I would have liked to make him happy but, alas, it was not to be because I've found my kingdom within. ###

Back in November, shortly after I arrived in India, terror attacks in the heart of Mumbai ignited a crisis with Pakistan that could yet end in war. Just before that, while I was still in Uganda, rebels not far from me were laying waste to the eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, forcing thousands to flee. This morning, reading the New Indian Express over coffee, I see that Israel's self-declared "war to the bitter end" with Hamas has killed hundreds this week, including many children.

I reflect on my distant connections to this small sample of the world's bloodshed in 2008 as I enter a new year with a question: what can one well-intentioned person do to reduce the mayhem?

But let me back up. One of the great joys of the kind of vagabond travel I'm allowing myself here in Asia is that I get to leave goals behind and step out of the mindset that has me valuing people in proportion to how much they help me get my stuff done. As a vagabond, there is stuff I can do -- or not. This leaves me a lot of time to visit with the people I meet, and they haven't disappointed me.

The great travel writer Jan Morris speaks in praise of the invisible nation of people around the globe -- people of all religions and language groups and ideologies and races -- who give generous aid to travelers. Certainly I've been in that nation ever since I left the States back in August.

It makes you wonder: people are so kind and yet there is so much cruelty. What to do? What to do?

For a long time I thought in terms of macro solutions, i.e. politics. And then I got involved in internal work and turned pretty much apolitical for number of years. But my travels have reminded me of the structural issues. In Africa, for example, development is doomed until leaders agree to peacefully share power. And here in India, in the state of Bihar, the very place were Shakyamuni Buddha discovered that the root of human suffering is untamed human desire,

suffering is pervasive because high-caste landowners exploit the poor "to the point of persecution," in the words of my guidebook.

Again: what to do? For me, the word "duty" comes to mind, maybe because I've been traveling in India, where I sense of duty prevails, especially in relation to family and work. No doubt the caste system had had a lot to do with this, but India's torrid pace of economic growth is tearing up the old ways. It can create value conflicts for individuals.

The other day the train got me to my destination before dawn, so I waited at the hotel until daylight chatting with the night clerk. He was an ambitious young guy full of frustration over his low pay and yet determined to stay on the job because his mother depends on his salary and because "God wants me to be right here." He said this last part with something like desperation, as if he were trying to convince himself.

I can sympathize. I haven't found it easy figure out what God -- or "the universe," which is our Zen jargon for God -- wants of me. But what my travel experiences seem to be saying is that it's not one thing. God wants this. And then this. And then something else. And so on. What God wants fits exactly with each situation that I enter into, with each person I encounter as I amble along like a pebble in the stream.

So I've resolved that in the coming year I'll try to listen as carefully as I can to what each moment asks of me. That's how I'll respond to the world's violence: no overall answer, no putting "peace work" on my to-do list. No, I'll try very hard to keep my ears open.

May peace prevail in India in 2009. ###

An all-day bus trip took me from Lumbini to Pokhara, on a lake at the edge of the Anapurna Range of the Himalayas in north central Nepal. Pokhara is a celebrated destination both for the adventure travel set -- mountaineering, trekking, river rafting, paragliding -- and for young backpackers from Europe, the U.S. and Japan drifting about Asia is search of themselves. I went to Pokhara for the natural beauty and for the many good bookstores. I thought I might settle in and read for awhile, maybe a long while.

Pokhara's beauty is quite startling. The glassy smooth lake, Fewa Tal, is sprinkled with just enough gently gliding fishing boats and backdropped by layered green hills as misty as a Chinese landscape painting. Looming over the hills on the far shore is craggy, snow-clad Macchapuche, as enormous as Godzilla and as unreal to the eye as a painted mountain in a movie western.

It took me some time to adjust to the scene, but, siting at a lakeside cafe ringed with Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags trembling in the the slight breeze like butterflies, I finally accepted that, yes, there are such places on Earth and not only in my imagination.

Pokhara reminded me of Bali -- because of the beauty, and because the people inhabiting both places have retained their natural friendliness and integrity despite the crowds of foreign tourists. It was easy for me to meet Nepalis, and to get to know a few of them better.

I met Ganes, a tiny, ill-clad man who appeared to be in his 30s, as he was returning from his kitchen job. He overcame me walking along the road on the west side of Fewa Tal and invited me to tea with his grandfather so I said sure. We took a turnoff and hiked 500 meters up a stony road thick with rocks washed down by the monsoon to their home, a 20 foot b 10 foot hut of stone walls and tin roof. His grandfather, Barbaram, a vigorous 89-year-old, spoke no English but that didn't stop him from and talking and grinning at me almost nonstop.

Ganes boiled water over a twig fire and then we sipped sweet tea from aluminum tumblers and gazed out at the tranquil lake backlit by low, afternoon sun. I was sitting there thinking it was one of those spectacular views that are sometimes the reward of Third World poor living on remote, unwanted hillsides when I noticed that Ganes had a nasty gash on the ridge of his left ear. At that exact moment I knew -- from my experience in Africa -- that I had to make a choice. You don't ask a poor person about their health problems, of which they so often have many, unless you're willing to get involved. It can get complicated. And expensive. Oh well.

I asked, and Ganes told me that he had fallen and scraped his ear on a rock. It was brilliant red and tender to the touch and so hot that he couldn't sleep at night, an obvious infection. Was there a clinic nearby? There was. We took off walking on the lakeside road. Forty-five minutes later we reached a general store with an attached shed containing shelves piled with boxed medicines. Our reception wasn't warm. The young couple attending to the store were angry at Ganes, which confused me, since he was a person in need. I was wondering how to intervene; they were speaking rapid Nepali and didn't seem to understand my English. Then the clinic proprietor showed up and had a look at Ganes' ear and brusquely gave him an injection and a stack of antibiotics and I paid up and that was that.

On the walk back, I asked Ganes why the couple was angry and he said a friend of his had failed to pay them for a boat he rented, but Ganes wouldn't look at me directly as he said this and I felt he was hiding something. We walked for awhile and gave me a smile and said getting the medicine made him happy. We walked on toward the turnoff to his hut and he asked for money to buy some juice and snack for grandfather. Having just paid a sum for the antibiotics equal to a night in my hotel, I declined. He kept repeating his request and I kept saying no and he finally dropped it. By then we had reached the turnoff and there Ganes spotted a foreigner he knew at a tea house and greeted him and walked off, leaving me with the sense that this was how he managed to survive in such a poor country: by going from foreigner to foreigner.

And it is a poor country. One-third of Nepalis earn less than a dollar a day. It's amazing that foreigners, with their fancy trekking gear and fat bank accounts, aren't robbed blind, but Nepalis generally treat the tourist hordes as honored guests. In fact, Nepalis are more sympathetic to tourists than I am, and after a week among them at Pokhara I felt it was time to move on.###

Lumbini, Nepal, is just across the border from India in the hot and dusty lowlands of the Ganges known as the terai. I came here to visit the 6th century birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, the "awakened one."

Today, Lumbini throngs with pilgrims, but Buddhists lost track of the place for hundreds of years. In fact, India, where Buddhism was once the state religion, lost track of Buddhism. It was slowly eclipsed by Hinduism and then given the coupe de grace by Muslim invaders in the Middle Ages.But by then the Buddha's teachings had taken root elsewhere, so when I arrived at Lumbini there were temples and travelers from all over.

The Tibetans command the largest -- and most colorful -- presence. What a vigorous people. And how refreshingly unsanctimonious. I was enthralled to watch a bunch of miniature novice monks strip off their red and gold robes and dive into the lake built around the sacred site of Buddha's birth and laugh and splash each other and have a grand time being the boys they are. Tibetans may have lost their country but they don't seem to be defeated by it.

I arrived at Lumbini after a comfortable overnight train ride from Delhi to Gorakhpur, one of India's main gateways to Nepal. There I hired a taxi for a furious, horn-blaring two-hour trip to the border. Sharing the ride were a friendly father and son from Punjab, northwest of Delhi, on their way to Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, where the college-age son was to receive a diploma for a correspondence course in management. This astounded me: the two of them doing a full day-and-a-half of hard travelling to get to a correspondence course diploma ceremony. Says alot about how much Indians value education. And family.

The son was just as amazed that I was tramping around the subcontinent advised by nothing more than my Rough Guide to India. He called this "courageous." I was a little embarrassed, but then later I thought there was truth in what he said. Courage is what you get by overcoming fear, and one of the reasons I've done so much traveling in my life -- many, many thousands of miles -- is to meet up with my own fear. Stop me if I'm wrong but this seems to me exactly what we're supposed to do, push against our own barriers. So I'm OK with saying I travel because I'm a little scared of traveling.

Maybe it was that kind of thinking that prompted young Shakyamuni to turn his back on the pleasures of the palace hit the road to figure out what the bleep life's it's all about. In any case, it was that kind of thinking that took me to Lumbini, where I intended to spend several weeks in intensive sitting and walking meditation at Panditarama Vipassana Meditation Center, a satellite of a Burmese center led by a renowned master.

Alas, the stripped-down, asocial style of the teaching and practice was not for me. Thus it was that after a few days I found myself outside the monastic gates catching a bus to Pokhara, eight hours to the north at the edge of Anapurna Range of the Himalayas.

What I took with me on the road was this quote from the Buddha painted in fractured English on the wall of Lumbini's funky Nepal Buddhist Temple:

"I have sons; I have wealth; thinking thus the fool is troubled. Indeed, he himself is not his own, who can sons and wealth be his?" ###

The horrific events in Mumbai have turned the world's attention to India, reminding me that although I've been here a month, I haven't written down my first impressions of the country. And since I won't have access to the Internet for the next six weeks (see below), it's now or never. So here goes.

My most relevant impression is that the Mumbai attacks, and the Pakistani jihadists who were apparently behind them, don't seem to characterize the mood of daily life here. Although Muslim-Hindu violence split India apart at its founding in 1947, you don't feel sectarian tension, at least not in Delhi, where I have been bathing in the boundless generosity of two dear friends in the diplomatic community while absorbing India at a gentle pace. Even as Indian security forces were clearing out the last of the gunmen on Saturday, local elections calmly wen on in Delhi. It was a beautiful day with weather like fall in New England, and the businesses and bars were closed and the public was on holiday. My friends and I walked in well-kept Nehru Park (no smoking!) and visited national monuments (the huge India Gate built by Britain to honor itself) and reviled in relaxation in this city of broad boulevards and green trees and some 400 species of birds..

Here in Delhi I've been seeing lots of tombs and temples, dipping into the culture and syncretic history of the tolerant Mughals (Persian-inspired Muslims) who ruled India from Delhi for centuries. (It was a Mughal ruler who built the real Taj. The real one, not the hotel that got half-destroyed in Mumbai last week.) Even now Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs still live on top of each other in the capital. Turn a corner and you change religions.

I like it very much. And I like the Indians. What surprises me is how none of what I've seen so far seems very strange to me. I wonder if it's because I've heard about India as long as I've lived because my grandparents were missionaries here at the time of the British Raj. Or maybe, after Africa, I'm ready for anything.

As for Mumbai, where I arrived in the middle of the night from Nairobi, Kenya, and then had wait several hours for my flight to Delhi, all I can say for certain is that the airport terminal is built on the scale of the Taj Mahal. Mumbai, the "maximum city" of Bollywood billionaires who fly their own helicopters to dinner parties, is obviously on the make. The airport bookstore burst with self-help books. The chichi shop selling crystal opened at 5 a.m. I bought a cup of tea at a chrome-and-glass counter lamenting the passing of incense-wreathed India full of snake charmers and holy men, but then I spotted a foot-long rat ambling across the airport's marble floor and felt strangely reassured.

But the comforting thought that things in India were as I expected (unsanitary) also put me on alert: it is very easy for visitors to India to only see their preconceptions. This is understandable, given the mind's need for order and India's confusing contradictions. Deeply spiritual? Or grossly materialistic? Over-organized (the Kafkaesque bureaucracy)? Or anarchic (the traffic)? You can go on matching up pairs of contradictions (rich vs. poor; dirty vs. clean; crass vs. elegant and, most recently, violent vs. peaceful) and never achieve any insight into India, because almost anything that can be said about India is true.

For sure, India is not the mystical East of Orientalists and hippies. I saw an older American couple sitting in the New Delhi railway station grimly displaying the red dots of Hindu ceremony on their foreheads and felt a little sad. (Sad for my wasted youth, probably!) In fact, India is not really "East" at all. Somebody notable, Gary Snyder, I think, said the West begins in India, right along with our Indo-European languages and the binary logic structure that underlies them. No surprise that Indian techies are pretty darned good at binary logic.

As for those techies and their money, yes, the nouveau riche of "Monsoon Wedding" fame are present and obscene, but India is not all about material gain. I've seen this argued by Indian intellectuals, but I don't believe it. The spiritual roots of the country are simply too ancient. A tourist like me can savor the fruits of that tradition in the many kindnesses of ordinary people, the owner of a store I visited going from restaurant to restaurant to return to me the pen I had left behind, for example. No, India in its immensity will not be reduced. India, says Jan Morris, the great British travel writer, is "prodigious."

The other day I was whizzing through Old Delhi's narrow streets in a three-wheeler taxi powered by compressed natural gas when I passed right by an artisan who had set up his pottery wheel on the curb and was in full production. Imagine.

I wrote at the top that I'll be out of circulation for awhile. Today I take an overnight train to the border and cross over into Nepal and then go on to a meditation center in Lumbini (Buddha's birthplace) where I'll stay for most of two months. Have a look at www.panditarama-lumbini.info. I'll be back in touch in mid-January or so.###

As it turns out, the Runaway Son is once again on the move. I've left Peace Corps service in Uganda and am now visiting a friend in northern India.

"Why, Merrill"? That was the first question the Peace Country country director asked when I said I was leaving. I hesitate to compile a list of factors because, basically, I don't like to whine. Nor do I want to convey a negative impression of Uganda or the Ugandans with whom I worked, or the Peace Corps or its staff. But I do owe my friends and colleagues an explanation if only for the sake of passing along information. And it also helps me to translate experience into words. I don't really know what I think until I write it. So here goes.

In general, I would say that the prospect of spending two years in Masaka proved to be too much for this 65-year-old guy and his body.

The dampness that came with the onset of the rainy season, which I couldn't escape in my damp and tiny concrete house, had something to do with it. Likewise the bed that was too short for me. And hauling my water in 20-liter jerrycans, which gave me a semi-permanent backache made worse by bending over to do the many housekeeping tasks that Ugandans do at ground level. And the starchy, unseasoned food that killed my appetite, taking me down to 155 pounds, a long way from fighting weight for this 6'2" human.

But even with all that, I'm healthy and physically fit and reasonably adaptable, so I think that maybe it was less the material factors than the mental ones, especially the problem of social isolation.

Not that there weren't people in Masaka. It's a city of 60,000. Clouds of kids cheerfully shouted "Muzungu!" everywhere I went -- far too many for me to ever get them all to call me by my actual name. And that was a problem. It made me feel watched; it was the isolation of the celebrity.

And then there was the isolation from peers. I was two generations older than most of my fellow trainees. In fact I was older than the Peace Corps country director! And this is where I fault the high-pressure Peace Corps placement officer in D.C. -- "high-presure" because she called me a month early and gave me only one day to decide -- who proposed that I give up my requested placement in either Morocco or Jordan and accept service in Uganda. Peace Corps places very few older volunteers in Uganda, perhaps because it's just too demanding. I didn't know that when I accepted, which I did because my son is in neighboring Kenya. So if I have a complaint about Peace Corps, that's it. On the other hand, I took the Uganda assignment on my own free will. No whining!

A third factor was isolation from community work, and this was significant. Peace Corps volunteers typically, although not always, work in villages, where they establish close ties with their neighbors and seek to engage them in development projects. But my "host organization" was a two-person nonprofit living hand-to-mouth on minimal consulting fees. My boss had spent all his money on setting up a small place for me behind his house. They didn't have the money to transport me to the villages where they had worked for years because that would mean renting a car and driver. (Peace Corps doesn't allow volunteers to ride on cheap motorcycle taxis, which are considered too dangerous.) So I was stuck in the office, where I worked under dim light and within earshot of loud noise and loud music. I never visited a village during the month I was there. I missed the energizing contact.

I set out to turn a lemon into lemonade by convincing my colleagues that we had to make fund-raising a priority, and they agreed. I got Internet access installed in the office so we could drum up some money from foreign foundations. But then, in my mind's eye, I saw myself bent over my laptop for the next several months writing proposals for grants that would allow me to get out and finally do some shirtsleeves work. Given the other aggravations, it wasn't a pleasant prospect. I quit.

I felt badly about making the phone call. My two colleagues in Masaka are wonderful people with big hearts and big ideas, and having a Peace Corps volunteer on staff lends their little organization legitimacy. But when I phoned Peace Corps to say I was leaving I was told something that made me think it might all work out for the best. They told me a veteran volunteer was looking for a new home because the place where he had been had become unsafe. Would Masaka work?

After consultations that involved me, the veteran volunteer, Peace Corps staff and my boss in Masaka, apparently it did work. My boss emailed me that my replacement was scheduled to move in. My hope is that he and my colleagues will benefit from my experience there. In any case, I know that I made a whole-hearted effort. I don't ask any more of myself than that. ###

The people of Uganda love bananas, which is a good thing, because bananas love Uganda. The country's fertile soil and consistent rainfall sustain about sixty varieties. The newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer can sometimes feel that he's eaten all sixty during a single day's breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In truth, the mainstay of the Ugandan diet is not bananas but a starchy cousin, the plantain. Many species of plantain also flourish here but I've only gotten to know well the one called matooke.

For Ugandans, a meal without matooke is not a meal. At lunchtime during Peace Corps training we trainees could tell how many of our Ugandan instructors had preceded us through the buffet line by how much matooke remained, because the Ugandans took big helpings and most of us muzungos steered clear of the stuff.

For one thing, we had seen way too much of it. My first encounter came when I arrived at my homestay and we sat down for Sunday dinner and there it was, a mountain of yellow Play-Doh as big as Kilimanjaro. Feeling the need to be a good foreign guest, I took a large helping. Many, many weighty forkfuls later, I politely declined to take seconds.

It wasn't just the heft and the consistency. There was a slight bitter taste that didn't sit well, or the whiff of something sour. Later I traced this pungent annoyance to the banana leaf placed on top to keep the matooke warm. When I mentioned the leaf's distasteful smell to a Ugandan instructor, he said, "But that's what we're looking for."

It gave me pause. Was I missing out on something good?

I checked around and found out that although Peace Corps trainees turn up their noses at matooke, volunteers who've been in country for awhile eat it enthusiastically.

I say all this as preface to a startling development. The other day when I went for lunch at a local eatery here in Masaka, rather than my usual rice and beans I ordered matooke and peanut sauce and darned if it didn't hit the spot. So I've made matooke a midday mainstay.

Exactly how far is this acquiring of new tastes likely to go? The possibilities are large. Let me close with a recipe from the Peace Corps cookbook "Cooking in Uganda." May your home not be riddled with the essential ingredient.

Fried Rice with Peanuts and Deep-Fried Termites

rice oil

onions garlic

peanuts soy sauce

termites

Boil rice. Chop onions and garlic and saute with termites and peanuts. Add cooked rice, soy sauce and mix.

Bon appetit!

PS Friends: Your emails and blogger comments keep me from really going bananas! Webale nyo! (Thanks very much.)

I've finished Peace Corps training and am now in Masaka, where I'l be for for the next two years. I've been busy fixing up my small apartment of three rooms plus "bath" (tiled nook where I bathe out of a bucket): installing curtains, setting up my butane stove, shopping for cookware. Recently I spent most of an afternoon negotiating with a group of carpenters for the construction of a kitchen cabinet, a kitchen table and two chairs. Our extended conversation wasn't just about achieving a mutually acceptable price, though. We also had to reach agreement on aesthetic issues. I wanted the furniture left unfinished; to my mind a rustic look would fit best with the white walls of my concrete kitchen. But that notion didn't sit well with the carpenters. As one of them explained with a pained expression -- while holding his hand on his heart for emphasis -- their work represents them, so how could they leave it unfinished? The very thought of it made him so mournful that I relented. Hence my new table, cabinet and chairs will be shiny bright with shellac. And, by the way, the price they settled on was very reasonable indeed.

Actually, by the end of our afternoon together the money didn't seem to matter that much. And the get-together gave me a chance to trot out a little Luganda. (Luganda is the language of the Baganda, the largest tribe in Uganda; Masaka, where I am, is in the Baganda Kingdom.) It also gave me a chance to have a look at a carpenter's finger nearly severed by a circular saw, examine his X-ray and discuss possible ways to prevent similar accidents. So in the course of doing business, we got to know each other a little bit because this is Africa, and in Africa you can never forget the human factor.

Africa's human factor can really put a crimp in the American drive to get things done. Like a lot of Americans, I'm results-oriented and individualistic to a fault, but Africa is all about the group, because it was the group that kept individuals alive through the continent's many centuries of natural and man-made calamities. So, while we Americans may act out our frontier myth by "homesteading" in the suburbs, Africans keep alive the face-to-face socializing of village life, even though these days cities set the pace for African nations, including profoundly rural Uganda.

And that raises some interesting conflicts in telling time. The country's millions of subsistence farmers live by the cycles of the seasons, but the long reach of the global economy means "progress" is hard on their heels so they have to keep one eye on the clock. But which clock? Two systems of time coexist here. There's the relentless "time marches on" clock that hangs on the office wall. And there's Luganda time, which divides the day into twelve hour segments of morning and night that start at 7 o'clock, with 7 a.m as "hour one;" 8 a.m. as "hour two" and on until six in the evening, which is "hour twelve." And then it starts all over at night with 7 p.m. as "hour one" and so on. (Usually it's understood whether you're talking about the daytime or the nighttime cycle but for clarity, you can specify "hour one at night" or "hour one in the morning" when needed for clarity; usually it's understood.)

This way of telling time makes a lot sense in an equatorial country, where the amount of daylight doesn't vary much between seasons, but the "sundial system" comes with a catch: the entire sixty minutes after a given hour is considered as "on time" for that hour. So if you make a date for "hour one" in the morning, the other person is on time if he arrives at 7:59 a.m. You can imagine what this does to the addled American mind...

Actually, it's worse than that in practice, because on top of the ambiguity built into the definition of time here, folks are chronically late. And often for good reason: it rains a lot and the roads are bad, cars break down, people get sick, kids have sudden needs -- and there are many, many kids.

Thus your honorable Peace Corps volunteer finds himself frequently reminded of the Ethiopian proverb that "if you wait long enough even an egg will walk."

Now if only those carpenters will only get that dang kitchen furniture done on time....###

"Poverty is a personal experience. No one can define poverty for you." -- Ali Mubajje, Christian Chidren's Fund, Wakiso, Uganda.

I've just completed my two months of Peace Corps training in Wakiso. I passed my test in Luganda, the Bantu language spoken by 20 percent of Ugandans, and have been duly sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer along with 22 of my fellow trainees. (Three dropped out.) I'm now in the city of Masaka, where I'll work for the next two years with a small nonprofit organization active in several nearby villages.

Training comprised techincal and language components. Both were demanding but for different reasons. On the language side, it took me awhile to catch on to how to study Luganda -- my first non-Indoeuropean language. But after a month or so I began to see that the words were made up of separate components that I could fit together like Leggo, and from that point on my language learning took off. In the end, I was able to achieve in my half-hour oral exam the highest language ranking that Peace Corps Uganda awards during pre-service training. Not bad for a geezer. (On the age thing, almost everyone in the training group was younger than my two sons, but we got along pretty well together because I didn't patronize them, and they didn't patronize me.)

On the technical side, I think all of us trainees got frustrated now and then by the erratic organization of our instruction. Training was done almost entirely by host country nationals, which is a good thing, but at times it seemed like our trainers were just throwing handfuls of information and activities at us in the hope that some it might stick! On the other hand, this hit-or-miss approach probably reflects pretty well the fitful nature of making "progress" in African development work. So perhaps the frustrations of training prepared us for the frustration that comes with the territory. Welcome to Peace Corps.

Now I'm in Masaka, a comfortable city of 65,000 in Uganda's southwest corner bordering on Tanzania, Rwanda and Congo, where I'm working with an organization called R.E.A.P. -- Renewed Efforts to Alleviate Poverty. The part of training that prepared me for anti-poverty work was living with a poor family for the entire two months.

When I climbed the steep, muddy hill from the spring that supplies my homestay family lugging two twenty-liter containers of water, I discovered for myself that being poor is hard work. I also discovered that I didn't like the smokey taste of water purified by boiling over an open fire. Nor did I much care for squatting down to use a pit latrine. (Oh my aching knees....) And then there was the discomfort of living under a sheet metal roof that turned my room into an oven on sunny days. And then when sunshine gave way to rain, slogging through shoe-caking mud. I'm not saying that my homestay experience taught me what it means to be poor, but I did learn what it means for a guy from a rich country to live with poor people.

Actually, the big discovery was how rich Ugadan social and cultural life is despite the economic poverty. I must have unconsciously adopted the Western bias that associates a lower standard of living with a lower quality of life, because I keep getting surprised by the wisdom, humor, joie de vivre, empathy and basic human kindness that rolls over me every day I'm here.

Walking the mile or so to the training center every morning, I often met the smiling guy who rides his bike from farm to farm buying the milk that families get from their one or two cows. It was fascinating to watch him use just one hand to artfully pour milk from the families' open buckets into the small mouth of his jerry can and not spill a drop, but what makes him most memorable was his enthusiasm for teaching me Luganda. Ugandans have a long string of morning greetings they like to exchange, and this milkman took special delight in taking me through all of them -- and then heartily complementing my progress in learning his language. Later I found out that he carried out this ritual with all of us trainees who lived along the road that he traveled. Ugandans want to connect and won't let poverty stop them. By the same token, maybe it's our wealth as Americans that is disconnecting us. Money, money, money...

But I'm not writing in praise of poverty. Poverty breeds disease, perpetuates ignorance, causes pain. I got a little better sense of what poverty means to Africans when I spent an afternoon visiting homes where people with HIV/AIDS were being cared for by kindly friends and relatives. I was deeply moved by the helplessness of the seriously ill and the saintly glow of their loving caregivers. These scenes recalled my hospice work with the difference being that Uganda provides absolutely no social safety net for the most vulnerable, leaving those who care for them with a heavy financial burden. I asked one woman who had taken in a number of HIV-positive orphans to tell me her biggest challenge and her prompt response was "how to make money."

That brings me to my Peace Corps assignment here. Although I am a "health volunteer" supported by U.S. AIDS-related assistance, I will be working with an anti-poverty organization. This makes sense to me because I have seen first-hand that "health" and "wealth" can't be divided. Development is a seamless web.

One more thing about my homestay: the family I stayed with is poor through conscious decision. The household is headed by a man of 74 years who is the oldest male in the village and no doubt one of the wisest. At one time he was a successful businessman who traveled in East Africa and, together with his wife, maintained a large farm, but in 1987, in the midst of the lawlessness of the civil war that is known here as "the Bush War" ("bush" as in wilderness), their home was invaded by a criminal gang that shot him in the shoulder, physically abused his wife and stripped the family of valuables. The couple recovered from their trauma, worked hard and regained prosperity, but in 1994 their home was again invaded by thugs and their property stolen. Undaunted, they rebuilt their fortune but the same thing happened again in 1997. And then again in 2000.

After four home invasions in less than 15 years, my homestay father decided to throw in the towel and live poor.

Having nothing, he told me, pointing to the half-broken radio on which his wife depends for the Sunday Mass broadcast, is the best defense. So instead of traveling in the Volvo that he used to drive, he commutes to his small stationery store in town on the back of a "boda boda," or motorcycle taxi. And instead of watching the soccer game on a grand color TV, he squints at a tiny black-and-white that's probably forty years old. His house is in need of repair. His farmland has become infertile. He and his wife have health problems. And yet they appear to sleep well, enjoy their food, treasure their family and keep very good humor. In short, they've aligned their priorities with the lesson of loss. My homestay father told me that the one thing he and his wife value now above all else is "to fear God." And the only regret I heard him express is that by living to an old age he is depleting the family's scant resources.

Hearing this Ugandan version of the Job story made me see cultural differences as trivial. All of us sharing this planet are grappling with what it means to be human. And as my homestay father observed while the two of us ambled home in gathering darkness following a community social event, "human nature is something difficult." But I don't think it's too difficult for him anymore, not after what he's been through. I feel fortunate to have spent two months in the home of a man with a satisfied mind.

One last thought about this anecdote. When I heard that the home I was living in had been overrun by criminals several times, I was shocked. I've worked as a journalist in dangerous parts of the world and I can sense threatening situations. Uganda not only feels safe; it is safe. Kampala is considered the safest African capital. I heard a story the other day about a woman who had her purse snatched in Kampala by a thief who apologized even as he was tugging on her property. And yet my homestay family was brutally attacked. What's going on here? I don't rightly know. All societies brim with contradictions. But one perception I want to caution against is the Idi Amin image of Uganda. The barbarity of Amin and his successor, Milton Obote, was state-instigated. Uganda's violence for the most part has had political, rather than social, roots. Uganda, like many, many African countries has had some very rotten leaders who through their greed and power lust have seriously depleted resources badly needed for development.

But it's not like Africa can't produce good statesmen, or even a great one, viz. Nelson Mandela. I just finished Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," and what comes through is his astoundingly good judgment over some forty years of militant leadership in a very complex situation in which he was assailed by enemies both inside and outside the movement to end apartheid. But also evident is his profound self-discipline and humility, and I'm not seeing much of that in African capitals these days, or in Washington, either.

Regarding the quote that begins this piece: perhaps it caught your eye that someone named "Ali" is working for a Christian organization. Yes, Ali Mubajje is indeed a Muslim. Tolerance prevails in Uganda's religions. Perhaps the U.S. will move in that direction once someone named "Barack" is president. ###

17 September 2008

I just met my future in Uganda and it looks good. As it turns out, I won't be serving my Peace Corps years in a mud hut village reading "War and Peace" by kerosene lamp light. Instead I've been assigned to work with an NGO in Masaka, Uganda's 4th largest city with 65,000 souls. (NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations, are what we in the U.S. would call nonprofit organizations.) Both the city and the NGO surpass my expectations.

Masaka is two hours southwest of the capital of Kampala in the rolling green hills of the Lake Victoria hinterland. It sits at the junction of the main trade and tourist routes to Rwanda, about six hours to the southwest, and to Tanzania, about four hours to the south. The city gained notoriety after Idi Amin launched a vicious raid into Tanzania that provoked a retaliatory strike by the Tanzanians that laid waste to Masaka in 1979. I had heard that it was still not properly rebuilt and I didn't expect much. I was pleased to find a crossroads trading center with lots of amenities, including Internet access and a hotel swimming pool near my office, a well-equipped business and shopping center and enough plenty of people and ideas and products circulating through to keep my well fed and intellectually stimulated. Masaka is enough of a city that few people gave my pale face a second look. The anonymity was blissful after the high-profile we Peace Corps trainees have here in the small town of Wakiso, where we are in training, which is mostly language study, technical stuff and feel-good, getting-to-know-each-other stuff.

I traveled to Masaka from Kampala, Uganda's capital, on a mid-size bus holding about 40 people. It was a more comfortable trip than I would have had on the ubiquitous, packed-to-the-gills 14-passenger Toyata Hiace mini-vans called "taxis" or "matatus." Matatu drivers have a nasty habit of going too fast and occasionally colliding with something or someone. Traveling with me was my two Ugandan co-workers: Paul, my future supervisor, and Molly, his associate, who had come up to Kampala to attend a Peace Corps orientation that paired us trainees with out future jobs and bosses, and to bring me back with them for a visit.

Paul and Molly are trained, dedicated and highly professional community organizers who worked together for years with Save the Children. When that organization pulled out of Masaka, the two of them struck out on their own, continuing to work in the nearby villages that they had being visiting except that now they finance their work through monthly membership dues paid by villagers and though consulting work that Paul and Molly do for other NGOs. I'm to be the third person in their team. It will be a close working relationship, and I expect to learn a great deal from them.

The work addresses public health in the broadest sense: human rights and HIV/Aids education along with classic community development aimed at generating new sources of income for subsistence farmers. That job description may sound a little general, or even vague, but I'm coming to understand that what the Peace Corps develops is not projects but the capacity of people to believe that they can improve their lives. Therefore, any point at which a "change agent" (me) can successfully get this process going is valid.

I saw the results first hand when, after spending one day with Paul and Molly in their neat little office, we hired a car and driver to take us out to see one of the villages where they've been conducting trainings in improved health hygiene and more productive agricultural methods. It was obvious to me on our walking tour that those who have applied the trainings are increasing productivity. I was particularly impressed by the work of one grandmother who moved back to the village from her small shop in town to care for two grandchildren, one of them an orphan, while at the same time energetically upgrading the way she raises chickens and goats and cultivates her small plot. What she's doing fits in with Paul's vision of setting up model farms that will inspire emulation.

(Of note: I saw tobacco being grown for use as an an organic pesticide. The farmers squeeze the leaves and mix it with urine and ash. Apparently pests, unlike humans, have the good sense to perceive that tobacco is dangerous to their health and stay away.)

After our tour of the farms was over, it was getting on into the hot afternoon and, thinking it was all over, I was relieved to see that we were heading back to the car. Ha! Foolish muzungu! (See last blog entry for definition of "muzungu.") As I followed Paul and Molly into a long, low meeting hall, I discovered that we were just getting started because there inside, sitting on benches and on colorful women mats laid out on the dirt floor, were some 35 villagers in orange T-shirts waiting for...me!

Yup, I was the main act. So, with a little urging from Paul, I got up on a raised dais and introduced myself in passable Luganda, the language of the Baganda, Uganda's largest tribe. And then, speaking in English, I related the Peace Corps' history and methods ("I don't have any money to hand out...") as Paul translated into Luganda and Molly wrote key phrases on butcher paper taped to the bare walls. Meanwhile the villagers took notes on blue books that Paul had handed out. Yes, they took notes! I was amazed at their eagerness to learn and to know. (In the U.S. we talk about "TMI," meaning "Too Much Information." In Uganda its NEI, Not Enough Information.) Paul went on to deliver in Luganda what appeared to my eyes and ears to be an eloquent speech on how my arrival confirmed the progress of the organization when just about then the heavens opened up and rain poured down on the tin roof in buckets. Next thing I knew women were scurrying in with baskets of food (plantain, potatoes, yams, fish, beef). And then we ate lunch. Afterward the villagers sang and drummed and danced. Fabulous. Paul told me they performed because it made them happy to have a visitor. It made me happy to be a visitor. So a good time was had by all.

I'll close with a few words on Ugandan hospitality. We Americans think of ourselves as generous, and we are generous with money, but we have gotten pretty stingy with time. Life in the U.S. of A. is so sped up (thanks to our idolized and damned near unregulated free market system, viz. Wall Street meltdown) that we don't have much all that much time for each other anymore. Here in Uganda, people have open ears. Even in the noisy, busting-at-the-seams capital city, people passing by are perfectly willing to stop and give you their complete attention. Out in the villages they'll feed you as well because Uganda-- and Africa, from what I hear -- is all about people. Man oh man, these African people.

I am in a country new to me on a continent that I've never been in before. I'm staying in the village of Myombo, on the edge of the town of Wakiso, about 45 minutes northwest of Kampala, capital of Uganda, which is in East Africa and borders on Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Congo and Sudan.

So that’s where I’m at but sometimes I still can’t believe it, even though I’ve been here a month. I’m in Africa? Really? There is plenty of evidence that it’s true.

For one thing, I have a new identity: muzungo. Muzungo means “white person.” Our Ugandan Peace Corps trainers tell us that muzungo is not derogatory and is, in fact, even positive, since Ugandans consider white persons pretty shrewd operators. We trainees are not convinced. We might prefer that the swarms of children cheerfully calling out “Muzungo! Muzungu!” from the houses and small shops we pass on our clunky Peace Corps-provided bikes would address us as “Honorable Peace Corps Volunteers.” No such luck. It’s "muzungo" until we finish training and get to the towns where we’ll be for two years. Once there, we will tell everybody our real names and they can shout that out instead.

In my case, they will shout out "MJ! MJ!" because I've decided to revert back to my family nickname. People here have too much trouble pronouncing "Merrill." (What the hell; so do a lot of people elsewhere.) So it's "MJ." Or maybe "MJ the muzungo" for the next two years. Actually I have another name here as well: my fellow Peace Corps trainees -- almost all in their twenties -- have dubbed me "O.G." For those not raised on hip-hop culture: "O.G." means "Original Gangster." I know that I should be flattered, but it makes me think of the venerable O.G.s with whom sat meditation in San Quentin State Prison, and how much they yearn to keep home boys out of gang life. But that's on the other side of the world for me now.

Here on this side, regarding Uganda: It's got about 25 million people, is about the size of the state of Oregon, is green and well-watered, sits mostly about 3,000 feet altitude and has a manageable level of bugs and snakes. The country has been politically and economically stable for more than a generation, so set aside the image of Idi Amin. Instead, think Christian (85 percent, the rest mostly Muslim), multiparty, free-market democracy with a potpourri of languages (English widely spoken). Think richly diverse cultures set in an agricultural society that produces a wide array of fruits and vegetables and values education. Think also of an astounding variety of wildlife ranging from mountain gorillas to one thousand (1,000!) species of birds. (Yes, I brought my binoculars.) That said, this is Africa. So you must also conjure up AIDs and malaria, people living on next to nothing, bad public transport, bad water, bad roads, etc. Which is why I'm here.

Peace Corps training is demanding. The days are long and sometimes disorganized. The food is strange, the language is strange (not Indo-European) and we twenty-five health volunteers were strangers to each other just a month ago. So constant adjustment is required. At night we stay with local families, which requires additional adjustment because the conditions in most of our homes are consistent with the poverty of the country: hand-carried water, pit latrine toilets, sponge baths, shaky or no electricity. But we are treated well by the people we live with. I feel a genuine bond of affection for the "tata" (father) of my family, the village patriarch and a survivor of the Bush War of the 1980s which raged through the region where our training center is located.

For me, the salient feature of the war, and of the bloody Amin and Obote eras that preceded it, is how quickly Ugandans have recovered from the communal violence. They seem to have a wonderful capacity to let go and move on, which is a huge resource for a developing nation because developing countries can't afford to waste time, lives and resources on endless spirals of revenge (viz. Colombia). I raised this observation with a Ugandan doctor and he told me that his neighbor had killed his father during the war but that he, the doctor, held no grudge. Perhaps it is that attitude that lies behind the many smiles I meet everyday here. I doubt there is anyone who visits this green and temperate land along the Equator who doesn’t come away thinking Ugandans are good people.

Consider this. Walking back from the town of Wakiso at twilight yesterday I met a grandma wearing the colorful traditional dress (which was designed by Italian nuns in the early 20th century; like I said: it's a Christian nation). She was carrying a chubby baby boy perhaps eight-months old. With a glowing smile, the grand old lady held the child out for me to hug. As I held him, I put the boy’s hand on fmy face so he could satisfy the curiosity in his eyes about my miraculously white skin. Grandma and I had a good laugh. Good people indeed.

With encounters like that commonplace here (at the market on Saturday morning I had small kids hanging from both hands), it is not hard for me to imagine that once I get out of training and engaged in real work here I will want with all my heart to do what I can to help Ugandans help themselves. That's the Peace Corps model, to strengthen the capacity of the country to meet its own needs. For me, a health volunteer supported by U.S. funds for fighting HIV/AIDs, this will mean finding creative ways to help people live longer and better in the midst of the pandemic. From what I've learned so far in training, this could mean anything from improving the village water supply to getting transnational truck drivers to use condoms when they rendezvous with hookers on the border.

On that note, I should mention that Uganda has had remarkable success in reducing the HIV infection rate from 30 percent in the early '90s to around 6 percent today. This came about in good part because the current president, Yoweri Museveni, had the wisdom to go public with the problem, which was made clear to him by Fidel Castro, of all people. As it turns out, Uganda had a military exchange program with Cuba, which had the Ugandans tested for HIV. After the test results came in, Castro called Museveni and told him that AIDS was going to kill 60 percent of his officers in two years. Museveni got the message. (This story was told to us by the U.S. ambassador here, a career foreign service officer and old Africa hand who left me with a very favorable impression. Damned if he isn’t a good guy.) Uganda launched a sophisticated prevention and treatment campaign. Much remains to be done. The critical point now seems to be that Ugandan husbands are bringing the virus home to their wives. I would guess that the key is not to try to stop them from playing around but to get them to use condoms both away and at home. And this, it would seem to me, has to do with family planning education.

The fertility rate is nearly seven kids per mother which makes sense because this is an agricultural society and farm families tend to have large families. But with reproduction highly valued, people may tend to overlook birth control methods that prevent disease, i.e. the noble condom. I would like to work on this issue with Ugandan men but what I actually do here depends on the situation I get assigned to by Peace Corps.

This week I will learn a whole lot more about what I'll be doing. We are going to visit the place where we'll live and we are going meet the co-workers in the Ugandan organization that Peace Corps has paired us with. Up to now, all this has been kept a secret, so we eagerly await the news, which I will pass on to all of you when I can, given my limited access to the Internet. (I hope that will improve when I get to my permanent “site” here.)

In the meantime, thanks for the many messages of support. I’m sorry that I can’t respond to each of your personally, but please know that I’m grateful. Really.

May all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety. MJ.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago on a train pulling out of New Orleans, where I spent a very enjoyable two nights. I drove from San Francisco to Bisbee, Arizona, to dump my stuff at my place there and then sold the Subaru in Tucson and got on Amtrak. Big problem with train travel in the US. is the delays caused when a freight train comes through and Amtrak gets stuck on a siding because the freight lines own the tracks. Nevertheless, train fares are cheaper than air travel nowadays, especially for families (kids under 15 pay half-fare) so the trains are full of working class folks, early evidence of how higher energy costs are reshaping America.

New Orleans is a fabulous place. Inexpensive by SF standards and, unlike SF, still thoroughly authentic and brimming with soul. The dot-comers did in the SF of my youth with their greed and their logic-bound minds but New Orleans endures. New Orleans is the anti-efficiency

America and proud of it. Great food and great music everywhere in a laid-back, very culturally complex, tolerant and ancient city (by U.S. standards).

I heard excellent jazz at the famous Preservation Hall, where the old

guys keep the tradition alive, and at a new club where I heard a riveting alto sax player named Wes Anderson, reminiscent of Charlie Parker's hard bop style. The taxi driver who took me to the station when I left was from Sulimaniya, Iraq. I apologized to him for the suffering the U..S. inflicted and he touched his hand to his heart to express appreciation. Let's hope Obama can clean up our act.

In any case, Obama has already accomplished a lot for U.S. race relations just by achieving the Democratic nomination. If it is stunning for us to imagine that an African American could be in the White House think what a powerful message of hope this sends to the world. Not very long ago at all it was so much different. At a photography show in the fine Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans I saw a photo of a black man bending down to drink at a "Colored" fountain right next to a "White" fountain. At first glance I thought that was all there was to it: the usual "separate but equal." And then I realized the "White" fountain was chilled by a water cooler but that the bare pipe that ran from the cooler to the "Colored" fountain was not. Separate, yes. Equal, no.

On my train ride I rolled through Mississippi, which in the early 1960s was one of the most terrifying places on Earth. Here's a measure of how things have changed for the better. I was standing in line at the snack bar behind a young black man when an older white woman with a beehive hairdo passed by. The train lurched and tossed her into the arms of the black guy, who held her briefly and then gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way. Such familiarity forty years ago could have earned a threat or worse. Instead the white woman gave the black guy a smile and a "thank ya." It cheers me to think I've lived long enough to see such a thing happen on Mississippi soil. Obama's taking us to the next level. How fortunate I am to be representing my country in Africa at this time.

I've just finished two days of Peace Corps orientation here in Philadelphia. The training was really excellent. Tomorrow the twenty-five of us in our group take a bus to JFK in New York and board a plane for Brussels and then...Uganda!