96.
Monrovia, Liberia:
It is hot and humid at the airport.
Kim’s parents meet the plane, repay the dollars I loaned him for his stay in Dakar and bring me the thirty miles from the airport to Monrovia in their fine car.
The two-lane paved highway passes through sparse forest and poor looking farmland.
In Monrovia they drop me off at the Lutheran School where my older brother, Joe, a Lutheran Missionary, works and lives with his family.
They say that old friends are the heaviest friends, and members on one’s family are usually the oldest friends one has. They have seen our changes from the beginning and have had the task of providing models of behavior and giving us the usual cultural conditioning that gives us a better chance of succeeding in our environment.
So, though we may disagree with some details and definitions, in deep and basic ways, my brother and I understand each other and wish each other well.
For me, after the stress of months of hard-scrabble backpack earthprobing, it is wonderful to relax with members of my own blood family, speaking our own language with the comprehension that was started in our childhood.
Missionary Brother Joe has lived with his growing family outside of the United States for most of his adult life, carrying on his own “earthprobe” in his own way.
We enjoy a lot of the same things and he makes a great tour guide for this, for me, new part of the world.
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