Today the children in California return back to school.  We however are planning to move from this ancient fortified Muslim city to a village and to quieter beaches and a slower pace.  Yesterday we saw everything.

    After breakfast we lost our selves in the maze of narrow streets.  Periodically we would ask for directions to the Anglican Cathedral.  We found it just as the service was starting.  Priests and deacons were censing the altar while chanting in Kiswahili.  We sat close to the front on the left side.  Across the main aisle from us sat several rows of children, who were incredibly patient during the long service.  At one point a priest or server gave one boy the stink eye to encourage better behavior.  Their sound system had the same kind of problems that we sometimes used to experience at home.  Although this made me laugh my dominant feeling was a wonderful sense of awe.  Around the world living a form of life completely different from me, surrounded by a Muslim society, these are my brothers and sisters in Christ!  God is at work changing their hearts and in changing mine.  We share in the same baptismal promise.

    We stayed for the entire liturgy of the world during this time we sang something like five hymns.  Much of the singing was done without a hymnal, all of it was incomprehensible to us.  The sanctuary has these extraordinary five foot long copper plate images of the prophets behind the altar.  What a monument to people who labored in changing people’s hearts!  I wish I could show them to you shining so brightly.  They also had a Christmas tree with flashing lights behind the pulpit (the priest preached from a lectern in the way that we do at church).  I wish I could understand what he was talking about; he spoke in such slow measured terms.  The people in front of us looked a little bored.  It made me think about changing both my preaching style and content.  I definitely feel like I am in a major rut.

    After the sermon all the children left together and went to Sunday School.  Our children were so patient with everything and we knew it was time to leave too.  We miss our church home and hope that we might learn something that will be of use there.  In many respects this service does seem like what I imagine church was like in Los Altos during the 1950’s.

    The English were deeply involved in trying to eradicate the East Africa slave trade.  The cathedral was built in the 1870’s on the same site as a major slave market by the bishop who first translated the Bible into Kiswahili.  The English built the cathedral, a hospital and a school there.  We visited the chambers that held slaves for a month before being sold.  One tiny room the size of the sacristy at Christ Church held 75 women plus their children with a trough down the middle for all their wastes and tiny amount of space between the raised floor and the ceiling.  The basement room across from it held fifty men held under similar conditions.  Male and female slaves were whipped at a post and the ones crying out soonest received a lower price for their owners.  It seems that the volume of slaves sold in the East was vastly higher and yet as our guide pointed out there are no black people in the Middle East.  This slavery was more brutal and repressive and did not all Africans to congregate as families.  There has been so much suffering in this place and for the rest of the day I was haunted by the image of Africans with ladder-shaped chains connecting them by the necks, marching through the heat to Bagamayo (mayo means heart and bago means to pour, literally the place where one pours one’s heart out).  Spending so much time with Heidi and the children only made me feel the suffering of these brutalized and broken up families more acutely.

    But the safari continued…  In the oppressive heat and humidity, still wearing my heavy church clothes and without sunglasses we persisted on into the central market, now located on the place where a lagoon divided Stone Town from the rest of the island.  There were thousands of people, bikes, motorcycles and cars all pressing forward to their business.  We visited the fruit stands.  Heidi bought a few kanghas actually they were kikoys and then we did some more exploring.  They sell mostly all the cast offs from more prosperous societies, broken plastic toys and old used clothing.  I think Heidi was hoping to see more authentically African crafts.  The children were amazing during this hot forced march.  It so surprises us that the take all these crazy places in stride.  I’ve never seen anything like the narrow streets of Stone Town (I guess its like a massive version of Lamu, Kenya) or this massive market of junk, but the kdis are interested in being out in all this activity.  We found our way back via the cathedral and the narrow streets I first walked at daylight searching desperately for a telephone.

    We planned to have lunch at a nearby restaurant and went it; a smoker at the bar brought us outside, ants on the dirty table, hot sun and generally deplorable conditions sent us back to eat at the rooftop restaurant back home.  Once back in our cool AC room we stripped off our clothes and all four of us stretched out in a row on the two beds.  We thought we heard something in the hallway and then a knock at the door.

    It was Nick and Ali, his local Zanzibar contact who helps him to make arrangements here.  Nick gave our history as friends in Kiswahili to Ali.  We felt so happy to have found our friend or rather that he found us.  It ahs been several years since we last saw him.  Within an hour we were back on the streets of Zanzibar heading toward the old fort constructed in 1700.  The children were interested in the vendors inside.  The stifling heat on the other side of the center wall kept us off the large tattered lawn there.  We went in search of a late lunch, walked through the waterfront park and then along the beach, under  the anchoring ropes of the colorful wooden boats there.  We had lunch at Livingstone’s Restaurant, watching the African children and then our own as they played in the gently breaking waves.  Micah and Melia met other children there and also played soccer with kids in the narrow alleys as we walked back to our hotel.

    Next we fished the children out of the water and went to see the Palace of Wonders, the site of the shortest war in history.  The sultan there declared his independence.  A British frigate then shelled the palace (or the several buildings right next to it) from the bay and sent messengers to make a treaty.  The would-be sultan escaped to the German embassy.  The war lasted 45 minutes.  There was a large display on Princess Salme who met, married and moved away with a German neighbor.  Her account of life in Zanzibar seems like it would be worth reading.  The Palace with its huge ballroom-style stairway and central covered courtyard reminds me of a cross between the Peabody Museum and the Fogg Art Museum on a larger scale.  The children had been swimming in their underwear and must have been pretty sandy under their clothes so we took them back home.

    Nick and I went and walked the maze of streets until sundown.  We walked along the water at high tide to Africa House, a former club for Europeans.  A high spiral staircase took us up to a rooftop with a breath-taking view.  It was so good to have the chance to get caught up.  Nick worked for the UN and invented a method for measuring poverty so that aid can be distributed in a more objective manner.  Although this may seem like a modest accomplishment, because no one had ever done it and the importance of the $2 billion disbursement of funds annually and the severe problem with the political nature of aid, this has been a revolutionary innovation in his field.

    The model uses data from the field to designate a region according to five-category scheme (1. famine stroke humanitarian catastrophe, 2. humanitarian emergency, 3. acute food and livelihood crisis, 4. chronically food insecure, 5. generally food secure).  Aid organizations, the UN, local governments, etc. have all shown great interest in this project that Nick created while struggling with the huge needs and complicated politics of Africa.  At the time he was working especially on the problems of Somalia.  I’m so proud of this work and the effect that it has on millions of people’s lives.

    We talked about US politics, the deteriorating perception of people around the world for American institutions, principles and values.  We talked about recent conflicts in the Anglican church, about the growing Pentecostal movement, the Da Vinci Code, the Pope, our mutual friends, old times, the possibility that Nick might move back to the USA, his land on Zanzibar and building a house there.  The sunset and night came on.  After 8:30 p.m. we went back down the spiral metal staircase and out into the night.  The warm humid air felt so different that night as we walked past the palces that seemed so strange and unwelcoming the night before.  We went past the Serena Hotel through the intersection of Kenyatta Road near our hotel.

    The open park at night has scores of outdoor stalls selling food by kerosene lamp.  We bought some kebabs and chapattis.  A prostitute named Christina asked me to go for a walk with her away from Nick.  I told her that he was such a good friend and we hadn’t seen each other in so long that I wanted to be with him all the time.

    We changed our plans back in November so that we could spend more time in Zanzibar and less in Nairobi.  Nick didn’t get the message though.  Since he has a 9:00 a.m. meeting on Friday in Nairobi, we thought we’d join him there.  Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a direct flight there until next week so we’ll be flying through Dar es Salaam on Thursday.  This relieves our worry about missing our connecting flight to Ethiopia on Saturday (and having to revisit the dreaded Kenya Airways (“the Pride of Africa”) Transfer Desk.  Now we are outside the Kenya Airways ticket office on an old pile of rubble by a giant banyan tree with rusty looking boats anchored far out in the water with a small island in the distance.