* not with ink

I have been back for four days. Toronto is hotter than Tarime, muggier, noisier, and more confusing.

It is also home.

In many ways, the past month feels like a surreal dream. It is separate, unrelated to this big city and my busy days of work, coffee dates, TV watching, sports-playing, and music-listening.

I know that isn't entirely true. I don't want that to be true.

But I also don't know how to make it so.

I remembered this morning that three weeks ago, I wandered into a river just outside the village of Kyoruba, my skirt held above my knees, but still skimming the water, and stood in the sun. My hand on the shoulder of a young woman, I listened and prayed as the priest baptized her after baptizing her husband and another young man.

I don't know how I had already forgotten this, the honour of being a witness to her baptism, the fear I felt about entering potentially-parasitic waters, the unity of being with brothers and sisters despite barriers of language and cultu…

Sometimes, in the evenings when I'm relaxing, or when I first wake up in the morning, I forget that I'm in Tanzania, at an agricultural centre, a half hour drive from the Kenyan border. It startles me to remember. And then it startles me that I've managed to forget, again.

Each time I walk past a mud hut and call "Mangana!" to the children staring at me, I am struck by how much of the world is deeply different from Canada.

Explaining snow to local pastors has become a bit of a hobby. What is an apartment building? And what do I mean, unmarried "bintis" live with neither their mother nor their father's families? No, pastors in Canada do not farm to supplement their meager church income. And people never bring eggs or vegetables to church as their offering. Yes, I am 29 and unmarried.

We are coming into our last week of learning, and I am still not sure why I'm here. I've walked through fields, up hills and through valleys, preached in clay b…