The TV Tells Me About Myself

Do y'all ever feel that way, like you see uncomfortable glimpses of yourself on TV and realize there but for the grace of God, etc?

Intervention does that for me. I like to watch it with a drink and feel smug that no one has yet approached me to be in a "documentary about addiction." (By the way, when are the addicts going to catch on to that? I mean, they watch TV. Especially the ones on meth or coke where they stay up for 72 hours at a time, and Intervention likes to run middle-of-the-night reruns. You gotta know one of these days one of them is going to get approached and say "Waaait a minute, sucker, I've heard this song before" and it will be like Punk'd when Ashton Kutcher had to cancel the show because every time something weird happened to a celebrity they were like "Ashton?! ASHTON! Am I getting punked?")

On the other hand, as this week has shown, I am totally dependent on Klonopin which I've been on since I was 16 for Tourette's syndrome. I accidentally left my prescription up in Cambridge so I had to get a refill here in Houston, but it took several days. Meanwhile I had imsomnia, weird dreams, loss of appetite, irritability, nausea, anxiety, muscle cramps and fatigue, and tingling in my face. According to the interwebs, Klonopin is a Class 1 narcotic and has withdrawal symptoms similar to heroin. The things they don't tell you when they put you on mind-altering drugs during adolescence...sigh.

However, I am back on it and feeling fine now, and as I told my dad, we should just think of it as insulin, the kind of med you might be on your whole life but which enables you to live fairly normally and which, in my case, does a good job of controlling the Tourette's. However, I do watch Intervention now feeling like there's just a bottle of cheap wine between me and that shady hotel room with all my loved ones and the interventionist (who I will totally recognize from the show, duh).

So I'm switching my attention to Hoarders. I can still maintain my moral superiority there. There's a lot of crazy on that show, and I highly recommend it to those who need assurance that their little idiosyncracies are nothing to worry about as long as their back issues of Reader's Digest from the 1950s aren't threatening to take over their house and force them to find a new abode.

One Village Elder to Another

This post comes to you courtesy of a few hours spent studying at Starbucks while various yuppie parents let their children run around like they were at Chuck E Cheese:

Raise Your Damn Kids.

I recognize that saying that puts me squarely in the category of Cranky Old People, which I'm totally comfortable with because I'm 33 now and I've made my peace with it. But at some point when I wasn't looking, it's like a whole mess of people decided that saying "no" to their children would suppress their little ones' creativity and spirit and life force.

What it might suppress is their badassness, and I'm fully supportive of this.

The Starbucks parents--and there were several of them in a steady stream--let their children wander around, yell, throw things on the ground, touch strangers' computers (NOOOOOOO), and then gave me dirty looks when I said firmly to their kids, "Do not touch this. This is not yours." (I bet you those kids didn't come back by me again, though.)

Raise your damn kids.

Or when I was waiting for the subway recently and a kid who was maybe 3 or 4 was jumping around perilously near the train tracks, with nary a glance from his parents:

Raise your damn kids.

A friend of mine once complained that his teenage daughter, who was still in high school at the time, had stayed out all night and not come home until 5 THE NEXT AFTERNOON and hadn't told them where she'd been. I asked if they had grounded her. "How do you ground an 18-year-old?" he asked plaintively. Ummm..."you're grounded"? How about "since you are entirely financially and emotionally dependent upon us, you can forget about using your cell phone or the car or the computer or any other item that renders your existence non-Amish-like until you remember how the house rules work?"

I cannot imagine trying to pull that on my parents when I was in high school. When I say "I can't imagine," I literally mean "the human mind doesn't have the capacity to go to that dark space." I don't know what they would have done. I just know, you see the face of God and you die. The most you can bear is a glimpse of the shadow as you hide in the cleft of the rock. You don't test it.

Raise. Your. Damn. Kids.

People who know me know that I have a lot of children in my life, but there is one that I have a particular measure of responsibility for, who has lived with me and for whom I make most of the educational decisions. Phenias is 13 now, and recently his school cracked down on porn on the kids' phones. My concerns about this are one of the reasons I advised Phen's dad not to let him have a cell phone (if you have an emergency, you can use an adult's cell phone, because you are 13 and you should therefore not be out of the reach of a responsible adult). He was one of the few kids not caught up in the sting. When his teacher asked him why, I am told he responded solemnly, "Shannon said if I ever got caught with porn, it was gonna be a shitshow. (Note: my pastor has said of disciplining children, "Do not underestimate the power of an appropriately timed curse word" and I was using that technique here.) I don't know what that means, but she never lied." HA! A little appropriate fear and respect goes a long way.

Now I am the first to agree it takes a village. (That sounds so wise-African-proverb/ubuntu-y/Hillary Clinton, doesn't it?) But from one village elder to another: stop letting the village children run the village council. Stop letting them vote. This is not a democracy. It is a benevolent dictatorship.

And if you can't get on board with that, your village needs to not reach beyond the confines of your house. Certainly it shouldn't reach all the way to my Starbucks.

Of TB and PhD

I mentioned to my pastor back at City of Refuge that I was interning at a homeless shelter for my field education component. "Are you up on your TB testing?" he asked, which is an inside joke for all of us who have worked at the Star of Hope, where your annual performance review included a TB skin test. City of Refuge: if you haven't worked at a shelter and tested positive for TB, we probably won't hire you.

Here's the thing: I miss my annual TB test. And that encapsulates the struggle I am facing.

In the last year of my M.Div program, I am working on a thesis that I really find fascinating. And it has all these little tentacles which I also find fascinating: how churches can redeem a racially corrupted theology; what our theological resources are for doing so; how churches interact with other civil society agents and with government in developing societies, particularly young democracies; whether some kinds of Christianity seem to promote democracy and justice better than others; what role their theologies play in this or if we are in a post-theological dispensation when it comes to this; the emerging role of reconciliation and forgiveness as tools of statecraft, particularly in places like Burundi and Congo where punitive justice would mean incarcerating half the society, and the notable absence of theologians from these discussions about what are fundamentally theological concepts.

So I am thinking about going on for a PhD. And I am thinking about doing it in Africa. The University of Cape Town has a great program in Christianity and civil society and a slate of scholars I really admire, and I'd be within striking distance of the theological faculties at Stellenbosch and University of the Western Cape. I've talked to some professors and advisors here and they are enthusiastic: they think it's a logical next step given my interests, that UCT would be a good fit academically, that it would open a lot of doors both in academia and nonprofits depending on the route I wanted to take.

It makes sense. I'm seriously considering it.

But here's the thing: I really miss that TB test.

I miss being in the midst of lively, messy community. I miss feeling like what I did every day mattered. I've started playing the Christmas music, and one of the songs on my iPod is the London Philharmonic's version of "O Come All Ye Faithful." In my Star of Hope days, this was the song that the wise men processed in to as the grand finale of our Christmas pageant. We started practicing in October; every day after school, most evenings, some weekends, up until our December performance. I'd practice with the boys who were the 3 kings--we had a Red King, a Blue King, and a Silver King, with costumes I made myself, because there is nothing that cannot be accomplished with double-sided tape, Velcro, and a stapler--to make sure they came in at exactly the right moment, that they walked the right way, held their heads the right way, that they were *regal*. I prepared them over and over to ignore the crowd that would be there the night of the performance, to remember that they were men of great stature and wisdom, men who quested after knowledge, who carried themselves with dignity. And my rowdy 8-year-old boys, boys who were rarely in their school programs because their behavior was bad and their teachers didn't want to take a chance on them, became those kings. The first time we did it, when the music swells before the last verse and the choir sings "Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning," my Silver King made his dramatic entrance and the place erupted--cheers, applause, tears. And he never wavered. He didn't ham it up, he didn't wave to his mom; he kept his precise, stately gait, he looked straight ahead, he made it up to the stage and bowed to the Christ Child right at the perfect moment, as the choir says "Christ the Lord."

It. Was. AWESOME.

That kid's in high school now. All those 1st- and 2nd-graders are middle schoolers and high schoolers now. But there isn't a Christmas season that goes by that I don't remember how regal my little kings were, or how the wild-haired little girl who played Mary could make you cry with her version of the Magnificat, or how everyone fell in love with the angel-cum-gospel choir's rendition of "Jesus What a Wonderful Child" while the shepherds danced.

The kids were part of the salvation story that night, and as I told them over and over during rehearsals, it was because of this story that they were part of the salvation story that was unfolding over time and space, where everyone had a role to play and, as C.S. Lewis said, "each chapter is better than the one before."

Star of Hope had its frustrations--two of my friends took bets on how long it would take me to break a major rule, and I think the outside bet was two weeks--but I felt like what I did mattered, that every day I did something of eternal value. It's the way I feel at City of Refuge too--when I walk in, it's like realizing I'd been having trouble breathing and hadn't realized it until I could breathe freely again. What they do in that little corner of Third Ward matters. They are a glimpse of the Kingdom for those among us who have lost the vision.

I know my giftings are academic. I am a reader and researcher and writer and analyst; that is what I am gifted to do. And while I dread the prospect of being an academic who just writes in academic journals that other academics read--a community far too incestuous for my liking--I think maybe there's a place for those of us with those talents to delve into the theology and history and study and come out with the nuggets of wisdom to give back to our churches and communities, to say "Hey! This is where it went wrong, and here's how we can fix it."

That's the kind of academic I'd want to be. But the truth is, I've never been happier than I was at Star of Hope, playing Twister and nurturing the image of God in children and getting my annual TB test. And while I write this in my house in Cambridge listening to Christmas carols, I really wish I was trying to teach an 8-year-old rowdy boy to see with the eyes of a king.

Because one day, that is exactly what he will be.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

We are an arguing family.

Growing up, I thought all families argued. In mine, we like to get the last word in. I remember realizing that perhaps this was not conventional when my little sister had a friend over in high school and he watched in horror as my dad and I yelled and shook our fists and stomped our feet about school prayer and carried the argument out of the house into the driveway until I ended it by slamming the car door. (After launching a particularly strong argument. Because I like to have the last word. And the first, and most of the ones in between.)

I was thinking of this recently because I think we, as a church, have gotten sloppy as arguers. We proof text. We throw around words like "liberal" and "conservative" as slurs without really knowing what they mean. And growing up in a family where vigorous debate and reasoning was valued and where you'd better be able to defend your position (as my dad has said, "Your mama may have raised a mean child, but she raised no fools") has made me realize that it's a rapidly disappearing art, and the church is suffering for it.

I have a friend recently who said the arguments against ordaining gay people or blessing gay unions were the same ones used by racists to justify apartheid. It's an argument I've heard before, and it's sloppy and inaccurate. Apartheid theology twisted Scripture to see something that isn't there: a vision of race before race existed. The Biblical writers had some concept of tribe, but not of race as defined by color; that was a European invention about 1500 years later. Even many evangelicals took issue with apartheid theology: apartheid apologists used the Tower of Babel and Pentecost as examples of God wanting people to remain separate, while evangelicals typically see Pentecost as setting right what went wrong at Babel--the sin that caused division was now being set right by the Spirit, speaking to all in their languages so they were brought together, not pushed apart, the beginning of this radical new venture in inclusion that was the early church. (Flawed and faulty, as we all are, but still radical. And an adventure. I do love adventure.)

The parallel doesn't quite work with homosexuality. You can say Scripture doesn't refer to homosexual relationships as we now understand them, but then that does one of two things: 1) you are inverting the race analogy and, rhetorically, putting those who support full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the same position as the apartheid apologists. In one case, we argue that the Bible is misused to justify an argument about race that didn't exist then; in the second, we turn around and use the Bible to justify an argument about homosexuality that we assert didn't exist then; ie in either case, we are alleging the construct of race or sexuality *as we understand them today* did not exist in Biblical times, but in one place we are using it as a critique and in another as a justification; or 2) you're wrong, and no less a Biblical scholar than N.T. Wright says it, who says that "there is nothing that we know now about either the condition or the behavior of homosexuality that was unknown in the first century." It was not just pederasty or sexual use of slaves, he asserts, but also "read Plato's Symposium: they have permanent, faithful, stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, all sorts of things--Paul, in Corinth, will not have been unaware, in a world in which private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic, everyone else does what they do pretty much in public--Paul will have known the full range of behavior." The dismissal of first century understanding of homosexuality is, he says, "Enlightenment arrogance."

Now. It seems to me if he is right, and I tend to trust him as probably the leading NT scholar alive and certainly one of the leading authorities on Paul and Romans, then the question is not so much what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, but what weight and authority we give it. And that is a valid discussion to have. But let's have that one and not the one in which we try to force Scripture to say what it doesn't.

As for me, I'd like to think I'm probably not so easy to pin down on this issue as some might think I am. Where I am unsure, I prefer to err on the side of grace; I think it unlikely that God will ever say to me "You took that grace thing too literally, you over-graced the world, it got out of hand." I am tasked with loving people; the Holy Spirit is tasked with transforming them. I am less concerned with whether homosexual behavior is or is not a sin and more concerned with how the church has isolated it as a sin beyond others while ignoring the sins in its midst. We have way bigger fish to fry, folks.

I am sorry that in our shouting at each other, we miss the opportunity to articulate what a Christian vision of human sexuality and sexual mores might look like. At least the evangelical tradition is still clear: it is covenantal, to be exercised within the sanctuary and safety of marriage, because letting someone quite literally inside your skin is not to be taken lightly and not something we do with just anyone. It's a very high view of marriage, of sexuality, and of the body. It is also, in a world where marriage now may occur 15 or 20 years after the onset of sexual maturity and may not occur at all, a very demanding view--which doesn't make it wrong, but it's worth exploring. And for those Christians (I hesitate to say liberal just because I think liberal and conservative are unhelpful terms in this context, they've become so polarizing and stereotyped) who have unloosed sex from marriage, what does a Christian vision of moral sexual behavior look like? What do Christian principles look like incarnated in our most intimate relations? That is also a conversation worth having and we're not having it.

When an activist friend and I have talked about it we get mutually frustrated because she frames the issue of gay inclusion in the church (in her case, the Anglican Communion) in terms of human rights and I say the church isn't about rights; rights is political language, Enlightenment language, but not Biblical language and not faith language. By that I don't mean I think the church should stand in opposition to human rights; it has just made me think that it isn't the question we are meant to ask. Scripture talks about laying rights down, not taking them up. And I think a better question is not "what are my rights" but "what is my responsibility to my neighbor"--which in the end is the more demanding and costly question, and hopefully one that leads us to the same place of protecting and celebrating human dignity and worth ("rights," in political language) in its fullness but gets us there together, each of us looking out for and protecting the other over ourselves.

We don't argue well anymore. I mean we as a church--perhaps it is the degradation of our political culture that has seeped into the churches, perhaps that we don't value reason ("Come, let us reason together") and the premise-evidence-logic strand anymore, perhaps that we haven't the discipline and attention for it anymore (remember Paul talks of discipline as a prelude to faith); but we are sloppy, lazy thinkers these days, and I am frustrated by it. And it wasn't always this way. The Anglican construct of the three-legged stool posits that Scripture, reason and tradition are the three legs that hold up the stool of faith, which becomes wobbly when any one of them is missing; the Methodists added experience but held on to reason. Because these things matter, they are worth reasoning through and reasoning through well; they are questions about who we are and what it is to be human and how to live well in this world. Our conversation is so impoverished and we do it so poorly.

I am postmodern enough to believe that these are not our only tools or the only legitimate way of arriving at a conclusion, that narrative and art and experience are also resources, but a well-disciplined mind is still so vital--I am just not willing to give that weapon up just yet.

"In the church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians."--Karl Barth

Anglicans, Everyone Else Is Making You Look Bad

**OK, I know it's been forever since I've blogged, so the next few blogs are going to alternate between finishing up my thoughts on South Africa and ruminations on the last year at Harvard. By the way, my housemate doesn't believe in using the heater, so I'm wearing sweatpants over flannel pajamas with an electric blanket. And still the mornings are painful.

Anyway, this blog post reflects on a project I was working on in June and July, viewing a major anti-apartheid march from 1989 through a theological lens.
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I love Reformed theology and thought. And I am not one who is usually enthralled by theology. I have little interest in debating the finer points of TULIP or whether Jesus became Christ before or after His crucifixion and resurrection; they can be interesting intellectual challenges, but in general, they are things we will not know the full answers to while we are yet on this side of life. I have come to the point where if a certain precept doesn’t help me in my basic mission to follow Jesus and not hurt other people—a mission that keeps me fairly well occupied most of the time, because sometimes it feels like I look up and totally unintentionally I have left mass carnage in my wake and I think, hmmm; that did not work out as well as I’d hoped—then it’s going to have to take a back seat to those things that do.

But spend a little bit of time with Anglicans and you’ll come to have a whole new respect for a robust and vigorously articulated theology, because it’s so sorely lacking in some of their circles. (I don’t say all, because they still have N.T. Wright, and that counts for something.) Even if you disagree with it, at least it gives you something of substance to actually disagree with.

As part of a project I was working on, I interviewed two former Anglican priests, both of whom served in fairly high positions in Cape Town’s diocese. One of them, when asked about the theological themes that drove church resistance to apartheid, said dreamily, “Faith.” Errrr….what? What did that even mean? Is that seriously all he’s going to give me? Not even a verse of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which would be more profound than anything I’d hitherto heard from him?

Unfortunately, no.

Then he launched into an explanation of how we were all energy moving at different frequencies and when we come together all that energy…blah blah blah my ears are bleeding…something about E=mc^2…and he rambles on and I think, do I still remember the Nicene Creed? Or the lyrics to “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”? Because I think he is actually sucking the faith right out of my spirit. Along with my will to live.

Then I talked to another Anglican who freely said, “I don’t really do theology, it was never my thing. It used to worry Tutu, he was always asking me when my next retreat was.” But, he continued, he just really wasn’t into the whole spirituality and theology part of being a priest.

Huh. I'm thinking the spirituality-and-faith part of being a priest is, I don't know, A MAJOR PART OF THE JOB. Who was in charge of ordination during these years? Because someone seriously fell down on the job, and apparently poor Tutu was trying to hold it together with string and duct tape. Anglicans, you should be pissed. This doesn’t show well.

So you can only imagine how I felt when I interviewed Allan Boesak a couple of weeks later. Boesak is one of the anti-apartheid luminaries, a founder of the United Democratic Front, fiery speaker, and a pastor in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. He did his Ph.D in the Netherlands and has done some great research on Bonhoeffer.

What I am telling you is, Allan Boesak has some theology.

He immediately started talking about Calvin and Kuyper and Bonhoeffer and about how the Reformed understanding of Christ’s Lordship of all things is the paradigm under which he operated. There is no private zone for the church separate from society, because society is also under the Lordship of Christ, whether it recognizes it or not. And Christ is steering things to His desired end. (A little bit of Calvinist predestination kicks in here.) I wasn’t sure if I should clap or kiss his ring.

And we were mutually smug about the nebulousness of much of Anglican theology.

I'm reading his memoir now which reflects on a major public scandal in which he was involved, so I don't want to comment on that until I've read his defense. But Boesak-Part II is coming soon.

Faithful

Sometimes, in spite of yourself, you end up exactly where you need to be.

I was tired the other night after a day that included working furiously to meet a deadline and two meetings, one of them with the same people who made us fingerpaint about apartheid so, you know, I was already on my guard. I wanted to come back to my room and take a shower and fall asleep early. Instead I let myself get dragged to some church in Athlone, one of the Coloured townships (as opposed to the black townships). There was a 20th anniversary memorial service for two young people who had been killed by the security police in 1989, my friend said. She is a struggle veteran, so one feels it is poor form to say “I don’t really care about your history, I was kind of hoping to find a rerun of ‘Gilmore Girls’ on TV,” so I went.

We arrived at a church already packed with people. Desmond Tutu was there; so was Trevor Manuel, who basically runs the country (come on, we all know it’s not Zuma) and Farid Esack. They gave great speeches, passionate and pleading, their power to sway a crowd undiminished after all these years.

But it was not the luminaries who fascinated me, though I am something of a hero worshipper. It was the crowd.

Many of them—perhaps most—were struggle veterans. Some had been part of the nonviolent, civil society resistance; others had been part of the guerrilla armed struggle. A handful of them were dressed in the fatigues of Umkhonto weSwizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the pre-1994 ANC that led the armed struggle. We tend to think of the South African freedom movement as very like our own civil rights movement—nonviolent in its orientation, convinced that violence only begets more violence. For many in the movement, this was true. But others believed without the fear instilled by an element of insurrection and violence, they would never achieve their desired ends.

The violence gave the police a reason to come down ever more harshly and a way to justify it to the public. The two MK kids who died were 20 years old. They were killed by a security police bomb. Their bodies were almost unidentifiable. And their stories are unremarkable. Things like this happened to struggle activists all the time. Someone I interviewed said, “There was a time when we thought we’d never stop going to funerals.” Twenty years on, I think I would still be filled with rage—corrosive, poisonous rage.

Instead, they rose as one and sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

Perhaps you haven’t heard the lyrics in a while; so few churches sing old hymns anymore.

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father
There is no shadow of turning with Thee
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

I struggle with the armed resistance. I understand, of course, why 20-year-olds rage against oppression that brutalizes their parents and families and communities. But I wonder if it didn’t do more harm than good. People died, went into exile, were detained and tortured; of course, this happened to the nonviolent activists as well. Yet I wonder if MK wasn’t the best propaganda tool the apartheid state had: concrete evidence that the revolution was at the doorstep and any means was justifiable in pushing it back, even if it meant killing kids and deploying the army into people’s neighborhoods. And on a moral level, I struggle with armed resistance. Christian tradition is not monolithic on this—Aquinas writes of just war, while the Franciscans and Mennonites and others are pacifists; Bonhoeffer struggles to hold the two together and ends up realizing that one can only act, in the full knowledge one may be absolutely wrong, and then throw oneself on the grace of God. There is no way, in a broken world, to get it perfectly right. And that’s no excuse to sit it out on the sidelines.

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love

Robbie and Coline, the two cadres being memorialized, were bright, brave, ambitious kids, by all accounts. They still have friends and family who miss them, who know that there is a seat missing at the family table at Christmas, who know they lost grandchildren and nieces and nephews as well when they lost Robbie and Coline. They are frozen in memory as they were at 20: hopeful, determined, with all the zeal and idealism of youth. The comrades at the service—those who fought in the same struggle, whether armed or not, and made it through to the other side—did not meet the same end, but they are not unscathed either. A woman I interviewed said they are “a scarred generation. But we wear our scars like badges of honor.” It may be true, but though they have built up normal lives for themselves, have kids and jobs and mortgages, the scars are never far below the surface. Some are tormented by what they’ve seen. Some are tormented by what they’ve done. Some are tormented by what was done to them. All are, in some way, tormented. And yet they sang.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside.

I grapple with the armed resistance from a moral perspective; I believe it’s essential for Christians to do so. And I don’t think you can easily dismiss a Jesus who says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” But it is theoretical for me: I am not in a position that requires me to make such a choice. And as David Russell, a former bishop, said to me, his nonviolent protests were protected by MK. Our ability to take such a stance is often ensured by those who have taken a different one. The pope is a pacifist, but is protected by the Swiss guard, after all. So I am learning to temper my tendency to pontificate with a bit of humility. Those who fought, in whatever way their consciences led them, bear the scars of their suffering on behalf of others. Is that not part of being remade in the image of Christ?

When people went up to light candles, they sang the MK anthem that was sung when a cadre dies. I looked at two of my friends: one who was an organizer for UDF; one who, though a priest, ran MK missions into Botswana. Both are scarred. Both are luminous. Both challenge my understanding of Christian witness. We clasped hands to sing “We Shall Overcome,” the old civil rights song, and I found myself hoping desperately that they would—overcome their own hurts and scars, but also that this wonderful, wounded country would overcome, that the deep challenges it faces will be turned into opportunities for moral imagination and agency. Because the price they have paid has been so high, and I want the reward to be commensurate.

In some form, perhaps not the one any of us envision, I am confident it will be. Because our faithfulness falters; but there is One who never does.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Gonna Be a Lovely Day

as Kirk Franklin would say. If you are on this site, you received an invitation to be. I had a couple of, shall we say, unexpected South African visitors to the site (feel free to email me for more info on that one), and it was hampering my ability to talk about what I was doing here and, more importantly, my ability to be snarky about it. New readers are welcome, they just need to email me for access. So take heart: you're a small, select group, the elite in-crowd, just like you wanted to be back in middle school.

SO: what's been going on? I am working on two projects here in Cape Town. The first is creating a document for an organization called The Foundation for Church-Led Restitution, to be used by churches becoming interested in a restitution-vs-charity paradigm. It's very interesting, although I have some ideological problems with it the deeper in I get. I'm eyeballs-deep in finishing a draft of it by Tuesday so I'll write more reflectively about it later.

The second is the script for an exhibition St. George's Cathedral--known as "The People's Cathedral," or more colloquially to most of us, "Desmond Tutu's church"--is creating to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Peace March of September 13 1989, which was one of the biggest marches Cape Town had ever seen and one of the death knells of apartheid (it happened just a few days after F.W. de Klerk, who would ultimately win the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, had taken over from P.W. Botha--apparently Afrikaner politicians are only allowed to have initials, not actual names). The Cathedral is creating a Space of Memory and Witness, which is a nice and slightly theological way of saying a museum, to commemorate the role it has played in justice movements over time, and this is its first exhibition, so I'm pretty excited to be the author of it. It's also allowed me to meet and interview some really interesting folks, including Allan Boesak--there's a post coming up on him--and the then-mayor and a lot of struggle activists. Who are a screwed-up lot as a whole, an observation which deserves its own post.

I have a script due tomorrow for them, which is obviously why I've chosen to blog now.

Anyway: welcome to the newly selective Cape Town to Cambridge! Consider yourself a VIP--I sure do.

And the Bible Metaphor of the Day Award Goes to...

Dionne, for this advice when I lamented the occasional moments of surreal, "are they crazy or am I? am I really here? can you see me?" absurdity that threaten to intrude on my placid life:

"When you get your boarding pass at the airport, keep facing forward. When you walk up to the gate, face forward. When you sit on the plane and take off from South Africa, face forward. Don't look behind you, lest there be a pillar of salt in your future."

Bwahahahaha.

Happy Sunday.

I Have a Patron Saint!

I passed a church today called St. Martini’s and I almost passed out from the wave of reverence that came over me. Surely the presence of the Lord is in that place, y’all. I can hear the rush of angels’ wings, I see glory on each face…I was overcome. I have a patron saint! My PresbyBaptist self can still embrace liturgical traditions! On his feast day, do you wear little black dresses at swanky bars or lounge around the house in silk dressing-gowns drinking martinis from one’s own sterling silver cocktail shaker? (I’m a shaken-not-stirred kind of gal.) Then I found out it was just St. Martin’s in Afrikaans and my religious aspirations wisped away like so much gossamer. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

Also, I am acutely feeling the sadness of missing Michael Jackson's funeral. I tried to stream CNN but there wasn't enough bandwidth. Or as Runako said, "Lots of little South African students couldn't do their homework on Wikipedia because you were using up all the bandwidth trying to watch Michael Jackson. I hope you're happy." Which I absolutely WOULD HAVE BEEN if it had actually *worked*.

And now I am trying to pull an all-nighter, or at least a late-nighter, to finish a draft of a project due Friday. But how am I possibly to do that in a land without Starbucks? And no coffee maker in my room? This is going to be a subpar product, South African friends--that's right, I know you're reading--just prepare yourself for it now.

Hey Kim, Farid Esack remembers you. Which suggests to me you did not maintain our hallowed undergraduate tradition of sleeping/not paying attention in class. I'm gravely disappointed.

Random Encounters

I'm having communion with Desmond Tutu Friday morning. Eat your hearts out, suckers. I'm secretly hoping for a better picture with him than I got last time, because as you can see, I had kind of Mufasa hair in that picture.

Also, every photo I take has that glare off my Tyra forehead, I can't do anything about that. I can't be cute at 7 in the morning, it's just asking too much. I do wish I knew what happened to that fleece I was wearing, it's one of my favorites.

Also, at the laundromat today a couple of old men actually just stopped and watched while I was sorting my delicates. Apparently no one told them the rule about how in public places like that we all keep to ourselves and, if we must look, we do it surreptitiously. It was creepy. Yes, dude, it's red lace underwear. Keep moving.

And I ran into some of my people today. I was going to get lunch, and two 40-something men approached me. In an accent you could cut with a butter knife, one of them says, "Excuuuse me, maaaa'aaam, buuut will thiiis strate take us to Laaawwng Strate?" I immediately recognized him as my people and made a quick guess: Mississippi or Alabama. "Where y'all from?" I asked. "The U.S.," he responded. Yeah I get that. "Where in the U.S.?" I clarified. Sure enough, folks, we have a winner: Mississippi! "I'm from Texas!" I exclaimed and we immediately started to taaawwk sloooowweerr and with bigger hand gestures, and use phrases like "like to had" and "fixin to" while lamenting Cape Town's lack of barbeque or Mexican food. (I did tell him where he could find Dr. Pepper, for which he was appropriately grateful.) The second guy piped in, "I'm from Colorado." Dude, who cares? Mississippi is Faulkner, Elvis, civil rights workers, and brilliant writers who drink themselves to madness. Colorado is...skiing. And Focusing on the Family. No one's impressed.

I even walked them part of the way to Long Street, since they were nowhere near it. I kind of wanted to ask the Mississippi guy, who was *definitely* Old School Mississippi, not part of the New South AT ALL, if he was freaked out by all the Coloured people, since at home they would just be black. (He might identify some as "high yella" or "redbone," but beyond that, probably not making a lot of distinctions.) But I'm a nice Southern girl so I figured it was best to stick to safer topics. He was already a stranger in a strange land.

If Desmond and I take a better photograph tomorrow, I'll be sure to post it.

Mark Sanford is Determined to Destroy The Last Shreds of Hope for His Marriage

That is all one can deduce from his fatal proclivity for continuing to talk to the press when he needs to just pipe the hell down and ride out his last year as governor before disappearing quietly from the political landscape. This latest round of “tearful, emotional” interviews (per the Associated Press) has him saying that this wasn’t just any affair. Oh no y’all, nothing so tawdry as that. This was a “tragic and forbidden love story.”

I KNOW. I KNOW. I’M DYING TOO. CAN. YOU. EVEN. IMAGINE. When did he start taking his cues from the back covers of Harlequin romances? When did the A.P. become his pastor/therapist/bartender? And don’t you feel like he’s somehow trying to create a moral high ground in which this is not in the same class with other people’s affairs, because it was True Love?

And then he said that she wasn’t the first woman he had “crossed lines” with.

Well, of course she isn’t. Who ever is? She’s the first one you got caught with, Mark. We were all clear on that without you saying it and further embarrassing your wife.

And THEN, because apparently he has never heard of the phrase “no comment,” he said that he would “go to my grave knowing I have met my soulmate” but that he owed it to his kids and 20 years of marriage to “try this larger walk of faith.” He is, and again I quote, “trying to fall back in love with Jenny.”

Well.

Well then.

I bet Jenny is awful grateful for that, Mark. It must have warmed the cockles of her heart. Why don’t you toss her some more crumbs from your table?

Remember how people got upset when Bill Clinton wouldn’t answer questions like these and said he was irate that people even had the nerve to ask? A little of that outrage would stand Sanford and his family in good stead right now. Why won’t he just stop answering questions? Why the public confessionals? Aren’t we all uncomfortable enough?

This guy doesn’t need a press corps, he needs a therapist.

Favorite tweet seen on this: “We can’t judge until we too have slept with a woman in Argentina. Who’s up for a road trip?”

Maureen Dowd at the New York Times is apparently sharing a brain with me on this, and does it better than I do, so go read her column "Rules of the Wronged" at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1.

I will post about actual South African things soon, including my work, and how I am hoping to mobilize some people to put on our Barack T-shirts and go be obnoxious Americans for the 4th of July. Even though I really try and live as if loving one's neighbor transcends all borders and nationalism leads us to war and destruction, there is a tiny (but, it turns out, oftentimes loud, particularly when it's had a couple of drinks) voice that feels like on general principle, but *particularly* since the November election, I should get free drinks on July 4. Like on my birthday. Come on, we're the country that brought you brilliant constitutions with kickass bills of rights, Michael Jackson, blue jeans and iPods/iPhones/iMacs. We deserve to be a superpower.

Coffee, Winter Days, and My New Political Crush

Sometimes, in quiet moments, I reflect on John Newton’s statement that “I know but two things: I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great savior.”

Other times, I reflect on how I would take just about anything from the Starbucks menu right now, and on what grave desperation must have driven the man who invented Nescafe.

I used to wonder why South Africans seemed to adopt the worst aspects of British culture. Like tea. I mean, I like tea fine, and I certainly like it a lot more now that I’ve figured out you can put a lot of cream and sugar in it. But why weren’t people here coffee drinkers, I asked in bewilderment? And then I realized that if all you knew of coffee was Nescafe, you would turn to tea as well. (Theological analogy here: you know how we’ve all been told that “you’re all of Christ that some folks will ever see?” And you think to yourself, wow, that is unfortunate for them, because I am not Jesus’ best foot forward, as it were? We are the Nescafe to Jesus’ Arabian coffee, y’all. Ponder that rich insight for a moment.)

There used to be a coffeehouse in Cape Town that served real coffee, but it closed down, no doubt because of my patronage. I am the Typhoid Mary of Cape Town coffeehouses; two of the ones I frequented in the past have since closed. I almost want to apologize to the café I’m sitting in right now because they are just darling and obviously their days are numbered. Now all I can find is Nescafe, which lo, is an abomination unto the Lord, who hath made all coffee good in His time. But people don’t *call* it Nescafe; they call it coffee, so I am deceived. Then I saw “filter coffee” on the menu and I thought, score! Nescafe is not made with a filter, right? It’s instant, that’s the whole point, so this must be the real thing. But then it came and it had that distinctive light brown film over the top of it. You’ve never seen real coffee with that film, right? It’s the Nescafe giveaway. So all I could figure was maybe they filtered the water before they mixed it with the Nescafe. Or they put Nescafe in the filter basket. Either way, there was no mistaking that bitter taste. My hopes rose briefly when I saw “café americano” on the menu because I thought OK, American coffee. That’s what they call filter coffee in Egypt to distinguish it from Nescafe; maybe Cape Town is taking its cues from their neighbors to the (far) north. But it arrived with the same light brown film. Hopes: dashed.

A young friend of mine here, who is 20, drinks the stuff like it’s the last drink on earth. I honestly want to stage an intervention for the kid. “We’re all here to let you know we love you but we can’t enable this lifestyle anymore, because it’s so far beneath you and you’re not living up to your potential and we just can’t watch you do this to yourself. Have a latte.”

I worry that I’ll eventually get used to it and even come to like it, the way the Israelites in exile forgot the old ways and assimilated into Babylon. I try to hold on to the memory of real coffee, so that like Nehemiah, I’ll be ready when it’s time to return. (I’ve been spending some time in the Old Testament lately, if you can’t tell.)

On another note entirely: you know who’s glad Michael Jackson died? Mark Sanford. That guy’s news cycle got drastically abbreviated by Jacko’s death, and you know Sanford is lighting candles in church for him in thanksgiving and remembrance. I’m kind of sorry, because I was really looking forward to the inevitable parodies of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” after he said he’d spent five days crying in Argentina. Of course that was after he’d said he was just clearing his head in Buenos Aires, driving down the coast. My friend said that’s when he knew a woman was going to come out of the woodwork: he’d been to Argentina and said, “There’s no coastline in Buenos Aires. I knew then we didn’t have the whole story.” Which was itself after he said he’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail, after leaving without telling anyone where he was going or conferring his gubernatorial powers upon the lieutenant governor. I guess it’s a good thing no one needed a death sentence commuted or the National Guard called in for those five days.

Which brings me to what I loved best about this story: I loved Jenny Sanford. Y’all, Jenny Sanford is my new favorite political wife. (Before her, Bill Clinton was my favorite political wife. Hee.) All those press conferences where betrayed political wives stood with pained smiles plastered on their faces while their husbands publicly copped to various forms of infidelity, be it with men (Jim McGreevy, I’m looking at you—FYI he’s in seminary now to become an Episcopal priest), women (John Edwards and a whole raft of others) or boys (that one’s you, Mark Foley), had become so painful to watch. I love that Jenny basically said, “I’m going to the beach house, and you need to man up and take your licks on your own. Peace out!” I saw a parody of a Facebook page that cracked me up: it said “Mark Sanford has added ‘Buenos Aires, Argentina’ to his ‘Places I’ve Been’ application,” followed by, “Jenny Sanford has added ‘Not Your F****** Press Conference, Mark’ to her ‘Places I’ve Been’ application.” (See it here at http://www.slate.com/id/2221581/. Ha! If Jenny Sanford ever runs for office, I am working for her campaign, and I’m not even a Republican. That girl’s got spunk. (And personally I think she's the one who sent the incriminating emails to the newspaper, since they were forwarded from Sanford's private account. She went all Thelma-and-Louise-driving-off-a-cliff on him: if we are going down, it will be in a blaze of glory and press coverage, mo'fo'.)

And to end, it is about 70 degrees here today. In the dead of winter. And people are actually walking around in scarves and mittens. Every time I come here, my Cape Town friends warn me that “it’s freezing! It’s bitterly cold! You must bring warm clothes!” And I think, hmmm, I seem to recall Cape Town winters as being quite mild, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. Maybe they’re worse than I remember and it’s just that they pale in comparison to Boston winters, where it actually hurts your skin to go outside. And then I get here and no, it is as mild as I recall. It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, in which I am Charlie Brown and either my memory or my local friends’ deeply skewed sense of “bitterly cold” is Lucy. Here’s how Cape Town looks today:




And here's how Boston looked as recently as April:


Exactly.

Cape Town Catch-Up

Hey peeps! I know I’m grossly late on the posting, and it’s been a busy 4 weeks so I won’t try to sum it all up. But here are some random musings over the last weeks:

1) Lauren and I are in locked in a death match to see who can gain more weight for her wedding. Counterintuitive for most brides and bridesmaids, I know, but we never claimed to be a normal family. She wants to be fit and toned for her wedding, which has spiraled into an obsession with weight-lifting and protein supplements. (Money quote: “I eat as much protein as a mid-size Texas ranch. If you slaughtered every animal on that ranch and ate it, that’s how much protein I take each week.”) Never one to be outdone, I am also lifting weights and eating at McDonalds nearly every day in an effort to pack on the weight and not look skeletal in the strapless bridesmaid’s dress she has chosen for me. Clavicles can be sexy but not if they’re jutting out three inches from the skin. So far she’s winning, but I have hit 111 pounds!—which puts me over the 110-pound mark I have not been able to break in well over a year, and within reach of the 115-120 pounds that is my normal weight. We’re both drinking the protein shakes but I haven’t ventured into the territory of the pill supplements because they all seem to have a lot of testosterone, and I’m afraid I’ll grow a mustache. And maybe a penis.

2) I have located a store—possibly the only one in Cape Town, lo, in South Africa—that sells Dr. Pepper. Behold, the beauty of my dietary staples:

Yes, that is a can of Dr. Pepper—doesn’t it just gleam with the promise of goodness?—and Nutella. I eat them both, frequently together.

3) It has been pointed out to me that every time I leave the country, significant Americans die. Last trip, it was Tim Russert (oh Tim, I missed you all through the elections). This time, it’s Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and the guy who sells OxyClean.

And Michael Jackson.

Y’ALL. MICHAEL JACKSON. I can’t even tell you how done in I was. “Thriller” was the first real album I owned, along with the soundtrack to “Annie” (the Smurf and Strawberry Shortcake singalong albums I had earlier in my childhood do not count as real albums). I was 5, maybe 6 years old. I wanted the floor to light up when I stepped on it like the street did in the “Billie Jean” video which technically I wasn’t supposed to watch since I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV but which I watched in total awe at friends’ houses and at my grandparents’ in the summer because they didn’t know the rules. (This, children, was back when Music Television actually played music videos. I know it’s hard to conceive. Also, gas used to be less than a dollar and there were only like 30 cable stations. And we walked to school uphill in the snow and we liked it.) And even as he brought the crazy as the years wore on, that early luster couldn’t be tarnished.

Frankly I felt like Cape Town wasn’t sufficiently mournful. I mean, my friends back home were all talking about commiserating with people on street corners and parking lots, and here? Nothing. I had a brief moment of connection with a car park attendant who sang “Beat It” with me in the middle of the sidewalk, but otherwise nothing. Possibly, though, it’s because Capetonians are simply holding to the same belief as the guy who sold me new earphones for my iPod the day after Michael died. I mentioned the sadness and he informed me MJ was not really dead. He just needed a rest, so he faked his death and has gone to Cuba with Tupac.

Clearly, this man is my new boyfriend.

Can I briefly mention how excited I am for the funeral? Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli—it’s going to be like every VH1 diva concert rolled into one.

I will finish by noting that I attended a meeting recently in which people were asked to fingerpaint their emotions regarding apartheid and the struggle. Maybe for my next act, I’ll knit my reaction to the Holocaust. Or perform an interpretive dance about Tianenmen Square. I’m a lot more cautious about the meetings I attend now.

Bridal Shower Hilarity

I was in Philadelphia this weekend for my little sister's bridal shower. Lauren is moving on up, guys. To a de-luxe apartment in the sky. No seriously, a 10th-story condo in the ritziest building in Philly. The Jeffersons only dreamed of such grandeur.

(You're all humming the song, aren't you? "Fish don't fry in the kitchen, beans don't burn on the grill, took a whole lot of tuh-ry-in', a-just to get up that hill...")

So the bridal shower. Lauren doesn't like to be the center of attention; in fact, when she has to be, she actually channels her alter ego, who is named Rhonda (sort of like Beyonce becomes Sasha Fierce, except imagine Beyonce without the talent or, you know, anything resembling rhythm). She refused to let my mom's friends give her a shower. She told her mother-in-law she didn't want a shower. The mother-in-law, whose name--I lie not--is Wenchie, decided to host one anyway.

So Lauren? A little peeved.

But Matt, the peacemaking fiance, assured her she would like it because the theme was Mexican food and margaritas. Our girl does like a good margarita. Or a bad one. Any margarita really, she's not terribly discriminatory.

We arrive at the shower, and it turns out the theme is not Mexican-n-margaritas. The theme is Ladies Who Lunch. There is a lot of pink everywhere, and food like curried chicken salad and brie, and not a bit of liquor in sight.

I know this because as I am making do with raspberry lemonade, Lauren is practically looking under the tablecloths for the margaritas. Alas, there were none. (This could be an issue in their marriage, based on what I saw the rest of the weekend, ie "Lauren, will you walk the dog?" "No, Matt, because you said there would be margaritas and there were no margaritas and I hate you.")

The rest of the time was spent watching Lauren fake enthusiasm over carving knives and serving trays, though by the end I feared she might commit hara kiri with one of the knives. Boy, it is wasted on a girl who is perfectly happy to eat pizza off of a paper towel.

However, the photos are cute, particularly the one of her wearing the hat made out of all the ribbons and bows from the packages. I like to call this photo "I'm smiling on the outside, but I'm slowly dying inside."

And here is a cute one of the two of us in our springy dresses, which I will take with me to Cape Town and admire all through the next two months of winter, because I am resigned to the fact that summer has disappeared from my life.

Really, South Africa? Really?

Today I received an email from a church where I have worked in South Africa warning against unnecessary travel due to swine flu.

If this is a subtle invitation not to come because living in the same hemisphere as most of the swine flu victims obviously makes me a threat, I would like to remind the AIDS capital of the world that they have bigger fish to fry. I'll be just fine.

And I'm still coming.

I'm Baaa-aaack...

So...I haven't blogged all year. Brief rundown: there was school, and then there were tests, and more school, and some papers, and sometimes I skipped class, and it snowed like I lived in the Arctic tundra, and then it snowed more, and more school, and did I mention it snows a lot here? Because it does.

HOWEVER. Today it is in the mid-80s and sunny, and I laid by the Charles River in my shorts and bikini top and read a mindless novel that had nothing whatever to do with the loads of final exams and papers about to descend upon my head, and I ate ice cream and now I will take a nap. And as I write this, I am eating chips and queso while I wait for a pizza to cook. And then I might eat ice cream again. It's how I get ready for swimsuit season, y'all.

SPEAKING OF swimsuit season, I could not be more excited for the next several weekends. Here is my rundown: May 2, I will be chilling at the Country Home with Kim and her family for her sister-in-law Mandy's baby shower (Mandy, fair warning: I find newborn gifts to be a wee bit boring. They are pastel and lack panache. I am hoping to find a disco-ball-themed mobile for the crib because that? Would RAWK.) Weekend after...so far nothing, but I've not given up hope. Weekend after that, I fly to Philadelphia for my little sister's wedding shower. We fully plan to drink our way through the shower anyway, but just in case we're not *completely* slobbering drunk by the time it's over, we'll be heading to Sonic for a cherry limeade with rum. Mmmm, summertime. Then comes Memorial Day, which is in Atlanta with Mijha and Runako and also involves rum, though perhaps not with cherry limeades, and laying by the lake. My tan will be killer, y'all, and not just in the melanoma kind of way. And then the weekend after that I am going back to Philly to hang with my sister and her fiance at the Jersey Shore. Somewhere in there are three 20-page papers to write and two final exams to take, but I haven't really figured out how they fit in yet.

And then...I head to South Africa. Where my tan will disappear like so much gossamer in the wind because it is winter there and it is wet and rainy and gets dark at 5 pm, much like the last six months of my life.

So in an effort to fend off the anticipatory Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD...awwww) brought on by the prospect of YET MORE winter, here are the things I am really, really excited about my return to SA:

1) The minibus cab. Oh, beloveds, the minibus cabs. I don't have words for the glory of a vehicle that is meant to seat seven, easily seats 15 along with children and sometimes livestock, and blares hip-hop music at rocket-launching decibels, all while adorned with airbrushed pictures of Tupac. And costs you roughly sixty cents to ride.

2) The little bakery that sells lemon meringue puffs and milk tarts, which I ate every day last summer and are exclusively responsible for the fact I didn't die of malnutrition.

3) The Labia Theater, which is NOT EVEN A PORN THEATER, Y'ALL. The name misleads, no? Instead, it is a fabulous mix of first-run releases from the US and artsie/independent flicks from all over. Love. It.

4) South African soap operas. To die for.

5) Learning to drive a stick shift. Those of you who know that I can manage to get in wrecks in my own country, where I (ostensibly) know the rules and the roads are wide and flat, can only imagine how I might fare learning to drive stick shift while also remembering to look the opposite way for traffic (an omission that has nearly cost me my life on more than one occasion) and remember the Capetonians regard traffic laws as suggestions more than rules. Hints, if you will. But I have been told I should learn to drive a stick shift there and get my international driver's license, and I might just undertake it. Or I may just rely on the aforementioned cabs.

6) Evensong at St. George's Cathedral. Beautiful, mystical, as high-churchy as you could want.

7) The beach, which is stunning even in winter, and watching the sun set into the water is one of my favorite experiences in Cape Town.

8) Breaking the code for the 14-step tea making process that one of the Cathedral parishioners has. My tea making process has three steps: 1) boil water; 2) pour over tea bag and sugar; 3) add milk. I am dying to find out where the other 11 steps fit in.

9) Eating lemon meringue pie on the floor of Lynette's office. I eat and crack jokes, she works. It's a system that works for us.

10) And finally, the experience I most hope to recreate in Cape Town: the last time I was there, Lynette, an older gentleman named Jack and I went to eat fish at Hout Bay. As we drove back, comfortably full of fish and chips, Jack put on his favorite CD. What was it, you ask? Was it the music of the resistance? "Amandla," perhaps? Bob Marley? Gum shoe dancing? No, friends, no, don't be so provincial. It was "Kenny Rogers Sings Your Favorite Love Songs." Now they were not *my* favorite love songs, or they would have included the classic "Islands in the Stream." Also? "Back That Ass Up." Timeless love songs both. But as we drove past the beautiful Cape Town coast, Table Mountain looming above us, and Kenny crooning "Endless Love" (for the record, Kenny is not as adept as I am at singing both parts of a duet. See my version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" if you really want to know how it's done), I got tickled, y'all. I was like: it's AFRICA, and I still can't get away from Kenny Rogers.

And then he launched into "Unforgettable," because you know what? IT TOTALLY WAS.

So there you have it...10 things I am really excited to revisit in Cape Town. 5 weeks and counting!