Memories. Livingstone. Day 186.

Ambroise Curutchague

Apr 19, 2026

Where are you?:

Currently listening to heavy rain from under the outdoor shed at Kubu Café in Livingstone, Zambia.

How long have you been there?:

At this table? A little over six hours. In Livingstone? Five days. In Zambia? Six months.

Why the heck haven’t you posted since December?:

Uhhhh…

January 19, 2026.

00:23.

It is not about success, it is about obedience.

Visions, works, experiences, miracles—obedience is prized above all the rest.

When you ask, “What ought I to do for God?” the answer is simple: be obedient.

Do your duty in a spirit of love and the rest will follow.

Tonight Fr. Cao shared with us that he basically got completely eviscerated by the financial “powers that be” and the mission is once again in rough water. This is on top of every other concern, with the school running a deficit, the government refusing to pay tuition, demanding income tax on untaxable income, some (soon-to-be-expelled) students in near riot drunk and publicly fighting each other and the teachers for the past two days, the staff completely underprepared for the school year, the farm minus, all the while having the same tensions and difficulties in the community.

So I tried to cheer him up. He likes to have a beer sometimes so I sat with him and we drank a couple of beers. None of the other confreres were with us for dinner so we made sure the table was extra lively. Afterwards, I asked to talk to him privately to offer donations and try and come up with a solution. The aspirants were eagerly watching the Africa Cup final, and we went and joined them. I slipped away to work on the wifi project. I somehow stumbled into having to write an algorithm ChatGPT described as “enumerating rational lattice points on the probability simplex intersected with a second affine hyperplane along a lower-dimensional polytope”. What? I bonked around some Python and ChatGPT figured it out. Above my pay grade… which is zero.

Earlier today I sat on a wooden stool outside of a mud-brick walled and thatch-roofed hut as a visitor at St. Paul’s Small Christian Community in the village. They read Proverbs 5:1-5 and discussed. The men sat on stools while the women and children sat on a large mat. Ants crawled around on the knotted tree trunks beneath my feet. Angela, our cook—in whose small yard we were seated— smiled at me.

On our way home, I spotted children from the oratory hidden in the trees and bush, peeking out of mud-brick windows, playing on distant porches. They called out my name as I passed along the main road. I heard it probably 15 or 20 times, often from unknown directions.

Today in the offertory, gifts included a boiled guinea fowl, five bottles of cooking oil, a 15 kg bag of charcoal balanced on a woman’s head, a live chicken, a whole tub of nshima, some greens, and a scattering of small kwacha. On Christmas Day, a similar offering had ended with the chicken escaping its bonds, running wild all over the Church, and generally causing a ruckus until Nate simply caught it and held it for the rest of Mass.

January 30, 2026.

22:59.

You can be an apostle

The apostles were not perfect

In fact, they were very imperfect

But Christ called them

And they were made great by their obedience

By their desire to do all they could for Christ, working with and in spite of their limitations

They were lauded for leaving their nets, leaving their father in the boat, and immediately following Christ

Love causing feet to run ahead of ability, heart to run ahead of head, love running even beyond where the road leads, where the path ends, into open air yawning over the abyss, upwards into everlasting sky

A young boy approached the gates of the Oratory today as Father Cao and I were watching the children. He addressed us in perfect English. We were taken aback. We asked him how he had learned.

“English is my first language,” he said. “I’m an orphan. I was raised in the Salesian orphanage in Kazembe. I learned English from the volunteers.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ephraim,” he said.

It was the eve of the feast of Don Bosco, and the young people had planned a big day. Ephraim had come from Kazembe to join in the festivities. The three of us stood there together while the Oratory bustled with life.

“Young man,” Father Cao began. “What grade are you in?”

“Grade five,” Ephraim said. “But I’m 15 years old.”

“What’s the matter? You stopped school?”

“Yes. My brother stopped, so I stopped as well. But then I realized that school is very important, so I returned. I want to get an education so that I can be successful.”

“Good boy,” Father said.

They continued talking, laughing and smiling. Ephraim, orphaned from infancy, a stranger in his native place; Father Cao next to him, a man worn thin by the yoke of responsibility, the crushing weight of isolation—laughing, his arm around his shoulder in a gentle fatherly embrace.

Youth from the Oratory spent the day celebrating Don Bosco’s feast. For big feasts they always do this kind of program where they camp out at the oratory for a few days and have activities from dawn to dusk. Literally waking up at the crack of dawn—like 5:30am, I can already hear them singing outside my window. People in Lufubu get up early. You’ll find kids no taller than my knee heading out alone to the fields with a mattock slung over their shoulder at 6:00am.

They had sports and other events all day, Mass. They didn’t eat dinner until 9:30pm—cooked by themselves over a charcoal fire—now they’re having a kind of dance party in the pitch dark, lit by the one small stripped-bare bulb hanging from a jagged wire in the apse of the Oratory’s iron sheet roof.

Here under the hall, music is loud. Remembering sober journeys inside bars and clubs, speaking to people lost and beginning to realize they are lost, speaking to people yearning, searching for something more, and not finding it, victims of their own weakness, drunken resolutions to do good, to change, followed by drunken forgettings, drunken excesses and lusts, a problem for tomorrow.

It was a strange, liminal life I lived for a while. Half-way between worlds, still with the memories of various bars and clubs fresh in my mind, but resolved to concern myself with all of that no longer. Nevertheless, finding myself here or there, on a trip, visiting a friend, hosting someone—sober or nearly sober in the midst of the hazy, artificial-light-induced brain fog of the Dimes Square dive bar, the grimy Chicago yuppie-havens where first year analysts and accountants and consultants and software engineers mingled, sprawling indoor jungles in Bali with dirt cheap drinks and expatriates from half the known world staggering around.

Yeah. Not perfect myself, but one who had already seen beyond the veil, one who had already peeked beyond the curtain, one who had already seen that all the world was empty, that meaning lay beyond the world, beyond the light, yet, intractably in the world in an unimaginable way. These were some of my favorite conversations. Grasping at those whose realizations seem to be dancing just beyond the veil. Those young hearts where, if you could only find the right words, might just listen—might just change. “Do you know there is a higher way?”

February 4, 2026.

22:13.

If there is no way, God will create a way. He will pull you up by a path that does not exist, because God is the Way.

“I am the Gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

God may as well have said, “I am the Ladder,” Jacob’s Ladder—

“Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

It’s a very simple mystical meaning. Christ is the nexus point between Heaven and Earth. Christ is the unity between human and Divine, between created and Uncreated. Christ is that by which God descends and man ascends.

Last week, a boy named Peter showed up to the Oratory with a nail in his head. Or rather, the gaping hole where a nail had just been.

We asked the kids how deep it had entered, and one of them held up a finger. Uh oh.

Nobody knew what to do about it—his parents were in the field, and in any case, one had to be careful with these things. If we tried to help him, and things went badly, the parents might accuse us of witchcraft.

We debated and waffled for a while until Nate put his foot down. We were taking him to the clinic, and that was that. If someone wanted to accuse him of witchcraft, they were more than welcome.

We set off to see if we could find Peter’s parents. We ended up finding his uncle. A crowd of Peter’s friends came with us. He walked stoically in the middle—Nate at his side.

Near at the clinic, we passed a woman looking deathly-ill headed in the other direction. There was some murmuring in our crowd. “What’s that?” I asked. Br. Philip responded. “That’s Peter’s mother.”

We turned and flagged her down. We quickly explained the situation to her and asked for her permission to take Peter to the district hospital, if necessary. The poor woman looked terrible. She took one look at Peter and left.

Peter continued walking like a soldier. Nate held his hand the whole way, then didn’t let go while the surgeon sutured his forehead without anesthesia. The kid didn’t make a sound.

While Peter was vaccinated for meningitis, we had an impromptu Oratory outside the clinic. Anthony and I had a Kung Fu battle against all the boys, and they ran and jumped on us and attacked us from all angles. We walked home in the light of the setting sun, passing villagers bent at their labor in the tall rows of ripening maize.

Though he hadn’t been a regular guest before, Peter came back to the Oratory the next day. Actually, he comes every day now. The hole in his head is healing up.

February 10, 2026.

23:38.

God has been very kind to bring me out to this unseen place.

Where I am hidden.

An arrow hidden in His arm.

Like Christ in Nazareth.

Today I woke up like any other day—5:00am—and sat down for about an hour at my desk to throw together lecture material. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants since the second week of January. Some days I’m so busy I literally forget to tie my shoes. Today, during my second class, and at 10:37 in the morning, I looked down to find both shoes untied.

Eating breakfast in under five seconds. Taking a few moments to suck down my cup of piping hot water. Walking out the door with a banana in my teeth and bread crumbs stuck to my face.

Yesterday, in the middle of my programming lecture, I heard a knock at the door. It was Madame Miriam, the school accountant & operations manager. She told me I needed to listen to her very carefully: stop teaching the class, pack your things, and hide yourself.

“What?”

“There are people from immigration here. You can’t be seen teaching—Fr. Cao thinks they might give you trouble. Please, just make yourself unavailable.”

I told her I had all of the necessary documents: work permit, University degree, invitation letter. She said it didn’t matter—they didn’t care if your documents were in order, they could give you trouble any way they wanted to. I said alright, peeked around outside, and assured her I would pack and leave immediately.

I returned to the front of the classroom.

“Uh, so, guys—class is dismissed. I guess immigration is here looking for me. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

Then I left. I spent the rest of the day in my room.

February 15, 2026.

21:24.

A vision of God

As Life

Ebullient, bursting life.

Creative life.

I understood what they said:

“Do not speak to us again or we shall die.”

I drained the beer and peered into it like a telescope. Fr. Cao: “Ambroise!” He held up his hands holding two empty beers. Big smile. “Oh, you took two!” I said. He laughed. “You can hold them up like this. Like binoculars.”

A man serious in fasting and joyous in feasting.

Lent begins tomorrow. Nothing but soup and beans for weeks.

“We have to make some days just eggs,” Fr. Cao says. “Otherwise, what kind of fasting are we doing?”

Nate left a few weeks ago. It wasn’t quite sudden, and it wasn’t quite unexpected, but it hurt nonetheless. I mean, being compatriots is one thing, but even beyond that—people are different around here. He was the only one with whom I felt we actually understood one another.

There is an oppressive lack of empathy that hangs around this village, a kind of cloud of darkness. People’s lives are so difficult that they seem not to really value them. Death is only an inconvenience. The death of another person is an inevitability.

One of the altar servers had been sick for a few weeks. William. A lively young guy, always smiling. Maybe 16 years old. He had come down with severe typhoid, and was a long time in the hospital. Right when the news had broke, some children at the oratory were overheard talking about it.

“I hope he dies—then we can eat chicken at the funeral.”

Children so hungry that death to them seems an inconsequential thing.

A few days after we had heard about his illness, I went to visit him at his house. I tried to catch him on the day he was supposed to be at home while being transferred from Kazembe to the district hospital at Mansa. When I arrived, his neighbors told me that the ambulance had already left.

I found his younger sister to be the only one there. I tried to speak to her, but my Bemba is poor and she’s too young to speak English. I ended up giving her some lollipops and sweet rolls I had brought.

“For William, ok? Or for your family. Maybe you can bring them to William in Mansa.”

She smiled and gently took the bag.

“Natotela.”

A week or two later, we were all seated at the dinner table. Fr. Hamwetee was talking about William. Apparently, there was a huge controversy in the village. He was still in the hospital, and people were starting to think that he had been bewitched.

“This young girl,” Fr. Hamwetee said, “his younger sister—she had a dream. In this dream, she saw another woman from the village wearing black. She was wearing black and laughing. Black is an ominous color. It means death. She took it to mean that this woman had bewitched William. So, she told her mother. Her mother marched straight across the village and publicly accused this other woman of being a witch. Loudly! Screaming, shouting. And the thing is, this other woman—she’s a Catholic. They both are. The two of them couldn’t work it out, so they came to me. I tried to advise them, but William’s mother wouldn’t drop it. They took it to court, you know. It’s being judged by Mwata now. In his court—behind his palace. He sits there on his throne and judges. I have no idea how this thing will end.”

March 1, 2026.

09:15.

It was hidden and unexpected.

We hold this treasure in earthen vessels.

The salvation of all the world came in such a quiet, humble, and unexpected vehicle, which was at the same time a Voice that resounded through all the universe.

Lufubu sits sleepily under a wet and grey sky. Spotted showers cancelled this afternoon’s meeting of small Christian communities. No sound has been heard within the walls of Lufubu Mission for at least the last two hours.

The storms broke quietly. Rain bathed the earth in gentle showers, falling in sheets receding into the distance. The earth is exceedingly peaceful. All nature holds together like a delicate crystal. Birds sing, trees wave, grasses rustle.

It’s the mildest storm we’ve had in a while. Earlier this week, thunderheads crouched over the landscape like a menacing presence. Anthony, one of the aspirants, and I were walking to a meeting of the St. John’s small Christian community. We reached the house of the parish secretary and found the yard to be deserted. The benches where people normally sat could be seen scattered around the large mango tree near the road.

“It’s empty,” Anthony said.

Spotting us loitering, the woman’s husband came around from the back and invited us inside. We passed two boys playing on the modest porch and were led into a small sitting room. A simple wooden table with three chairs was pressed up against the curtain which divided this room from the main house. A large banner with a depiction of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope hung from the East wall, and an ancient television and sound set were tucked onto a shelf near the south wall. It was the first one I had seen in Lufubu.

The parish secretary poked her head out from behind the curtain and greeted us, then joined us moments later. Anthony spoke with them for a few minutes—enough to learn that the meeting had been canceled for fear of rain. We thanked them for receiving us, then left.

Rain began in earnest as soon as we reached the road, and its red, muddy clay quickly began to seep into our shoes and socks.

Anthony and I had both brought umbrellas, but we were huddled together under only one. Twenty minutes ago, as we were leaving the mission, we had spotted Nate and Cosmas walking only a few moments ahead of us on the road—also on their way to small Christian communities. Fr. Cao had sent us out two by two, taking neither scrip nor sack, the two Americans paired up with the two aspirants. Nate and Cosmas had forgotten their umbrellas, so I gave them mine.

“It’s like the Gospel,” Anthony said.

“How so?” I asked.

He laughed. “The foolish virgins brought no oil. ‘Give us some of your oil!’ they said.”

I finished the parable. “No, otherwise, there may not be enough for ourselves.”

There was indeed not enough for ourselves, as the rain splattered our exposed legs and shoulders.

Out of the blue, a gigantic bolt of lightning, seen an instant before it was heard, shattered the air around us. It had struck a house no less than 50 feet away. We dropped the umbrella and sprinted for the cover of an abandoned store. We waited for the storm to pass, then returned home unharmed.

Others were not so lucky. A Catholic woman from the parish was struck along the road and paralyzed from the waist down. Two village houses were lit and went up in flames. One of these burnings resulted in yet another witchcraft accusation.

Later in the week, bolts struck both the mission house and school, burning the overcurrent protection circuits in the electrical rooms and knocking out the power for several days.

Looking into the distance from the mission yard where I walk and say my Rosary, I see wet hills rolling into the deep yonder, releasing a mist into the air. If one followed the great plateau upwards where it slants, they would eventually reach the Great Rift Valley and the Rift lakes beyond: Malawi, Tanganyika, Victoria, Mwelu. From a high place, the Congo can be seen in the other direction. It stretches into the sunset as a flat, green floodplain, upon which, scattered lakes and marshes flash in the dying sun.

Under cover of darkness, smugglers cross the Luapula river in hand-crafted canoes, carrying sacks of grain to sell at Congolese market. Boat teams of ten or twenty, paddling like a machine in unison, motor under manpower up and down the winding tributaries, searching at nighttime for fish. Along the river’s banks, entire villages squat among low reeds, rising from the mud—transient persons, moving as the river moves, floods, overflows its banks. Their children do not attend school. The Sacraments reach them only once-in-a-blue-moon, when a Priest braves the waters of the Luapula, bearing a portable Mass kit to the island outstation two kilometers out in the middle of Lake Mwelu.

This morning, after the 7:00 Mass, Fr. Cao and Br. Philip rushed into the chapel while I was praying. Fr. Cao quickly unlocked the Tabernacle, removed a ciborium full of consecrated hosts, and wrapped the entire thing in a corporal. Br. Philip peeked his head inside.

“No purificator?”

“No, I have everything else already.”

They scrambled past the armoire in the hallway, pulling out an alb, chasuble, and stole. “We’re late,” I could hear Father say as they descended the stairs.

They spun out of the driveway in the mud-spattered Ford Ranger, the mission car inherited from a previous rector. They went south towards Mununshi, an outstation 40 or 50 km down the muddy and torn up marsh road. The parishioners there receive a visit from a priest once every two months. The rest of the time, a presbyter leads them in a Communion service.

Lufubu Mission is technically an outstation itself—one of the 80+ satellites of Kazembe Parish, run by our sister community of Salesians in Kazembe. A few weeks ago, I found myself in the halls of their residence in the early morning hours of a Sunday. I was drinking a coffee when I spotted Fr. Joseph walking out the door in a motorbike helmet—with an alb, a stole, and a Mass kit in a small pack strapped to his back.

He looked at me and smiled. “Outstation.”

He mounted the motorbike and tore off down the road in the gentle rain.

March 16, 2026.

17:25.

The space in which we encounter God is much more liminal, chaotic, and beautiful than the neat lines of philosophy and categorical reasoning. Even Thomas recognized this when he declared his work of systematic theology to be straw—in comparison to the dangerous, uncertain, numinous, divinely luminous realm of mystical experience.

We find that all is chaos—too many initial starting conditions make our differential equations behave all weird, and anything can only really be an approximation. And yet, we find a pattern within the chaos—that we can somehow grasp and model the swirling beast that is reality and somehow make things that work. It is nothing less than a participation in a divine act of Creation, an example of God’s finger leaning on the scale, that God is in the chaos, in the darkness—as an inexplicably Good entity with whom we enter into a kind of dance of unknowing that ends in knowledge by way of an impossible transfer, a sideways precession by channels unseen to the human eye into a realm that exists beyond our understanding. We see glimpses and flashes and Cross-sections of this World in Love. World-in-Love. That is the point towards which all things tend.

This past Sunday, it was my turn to go to the outstations. Fr. Chisanga was in Lusaka, so he asked Fr. Cao if he would say the Mass at Mondo. Taking along Anthony as an interpreter, the three of us squeezed into the cab of the Ranger.

Mondo is just a short drive away, but transportation in the area is so bad that the villagers receive a priest only once a month—if they’re lucky. As we arrived, the parish chairman met us at the door. Fr. Cao informed him that we were there for the 9:30am Mass.

“Oh, there’s no 9:30 Mass! The program we received said 10:00.”

It was around 9:15, meaning we had 45 minutes to kill. The chairman handed Fr. Cao a handwritten note.

“These are the names of all of the sick people in the village. Would you take them Communion?”

Fr. Cao agreed.

We found ourselves shuttled between different houses, climbing firm, mud-brick stairs, bending under low doorways, staring up at thatch ceilings covered in dust and spider webs. Most of these dwellings were the same: four walls, four interior walls arranged in a cross, and a central dual-post supporting a thatch ceiling, the ribs of which circled from the top to the bottom around spines made of sturdy sugarcane. We would find an elder, sometimes with family, immobile and seated (usually on the floor) waiting patiently for the Sacrament they hadn’t received in months.

Anthony carried a backpack with the portable Mass kit, while I carried a lectionary and the small, Corporal-wrapped Ciborium that in itself contained the presence of the Living God. I held it tightly against my chest as we walked through bush-tracks on the winding trails that connected house to house in the village, following the parish chairman and Fr. Cao in a white alb.

I felt several times as if there was a heartbeat in that Ciborium. Most likely, it was my own heart reflected back at me, but the impression was made. Things like that are not accidental.

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

We found ourselves in a small thatch-roofed house behind the Church. A man and woman sat on the floor. They were both old and obviously homebound. We greeted them and told them we were there to bring them the Sacraments. Through Anthony, Fr. Cao asked if they were prepared to receive Communion.

“He would like to make a confession,” Anthony said.

I quickly pulled the alb and Mass kit out of the bag, while Anthony handed Fr. Cao the stole. In a few moments, Fr. Cao was vested. We waited outside while the man’s confession was heard. Then Fr. Cao anointed him with oil, and they both received Communion.

We went from house to house, and soon, there was a crowd of kids walking with us. The same scene was repeated: a smear of oil, a statement of faith, reception of Incarnate Wisdom. I felt like I was floating.

After Mass, the parish council hosted us for a meal in the chairman’s home. It was a larger structure than the other houses in Mondo and had a dedicated dining room—which simply meant a few plastic chairs and a little table. They passed around the nshima and we dug in. Afterwards, we thanked them and left.

March 21, 2026.

22:35.

Your mind can ponder the mysteries and not understand

Your heart can hope for the answer of a prayer for something you desperately need

You can be in a place of darkness and unknowing

And then suddenly it’s there, and all is well. Light illumines and you understand. A prayer is answered and you breathe a sigh of thanks and relief, and you go forward in joy with your lease on life renewed.

The love of God, that sublime and universal vocation has led me here—reading Jeremiah by the light of a flashlight under a mosquito net hung with socks and underwear, itself under two paracord laundry lines drying the rest of my clothes. An unfinished Yagi-Uda antenna of my own design sits on the shelf next to me, soldered together with scraps and junk and connected via a quarter-wave transformer (aluminum foil wrapped around the outside of a coax cable) to a hacked Wi-Fi repeater, alongside bundles of ethernet cable, wire, a soldering iron, Raspberry Pi’s, two of the cheapest 15V power supplies on eBay that shock me when I use them, a digital oscilloscope, a multimeter. A crucifix hangs above the door, and the blessed Sacrament is in 15m to my right.

The antenna is kind of a mess. The matching is terrible and it’s probably not even resonant at the right frequency, but initial tests indicate that I made at least something that radiates in a relatively directional pattern.

Until the spindly piece of junk on my shelf is operational, I have a regular rubber-duck antennae’d Wi-Fi repeater pointed in the general direction of an outdoor access point 100m away from my window, which I recently zip-tied to the roof of the school. In this way, I have been successfully stealing Wi-Fi from myself. It’s extremely unreliable—power goes out at the school about twice a day, and somewhere in the janky software stack I wrote, my IP address timeout service has been a bit overzealous. That same software stack is currently regulating the data usage of 50+ students and staff at the school. It’s hacked-together, but it’s functional Wi-Fi —and it’s the same connection I use to write this post.

The past three months have been a kind of weary blur. The heavy-hitting experiences, sufferings, and spiritual discoveries of the first two months long ago gave way to a kind of Divine Silence. Late nights in the chapel blended into late nights at the desk. The numinous, sultry mists of autumn Lufubu gave way to darker, bleaker days—clogged and splattered by rain, heavy rain, and more rain.

As I sit at my desk, thunderheads roll in the distance. Lightning illumines the grey sky.

March 27, 2026.

15:03.

It is impossible until it is simply being done. The heart rejoices at what it already knew while reason is playing catch-up. Faith seeking understanding. The foreknowledge of faith being squared with doddering, linear, slow human knowledge. The electrifying light of faith, forming impossible connections in the ether by dead reckoning, by the tunings of the heart, electromagnetic coupling with the divine—an antenna attuned to the most impossible reality, reacting in jumping, fluttering love to fluctuations in a glorious, imperceptible medium.

Today, our third year students had their graduation.

During the intentions at Mass, a girl prayed to God that there would be no rain today, so that we could enjoy the celebration. Only a few moments later, we could hear rain falling on the chapel’s tin roof. Everyone laughed.

At breakfast, Fr. Cao brought it up. Everyone laughed again.

“Ah, these people. They think they can command God!” Fr. Hamweete said.

“He can do what He wills. If He wants it to rain, it will rain.”

As I walked around the campus—helping students carry chairs, decorate the stage, hang up the banners— I looked up and noticed a clear blue sky.

The ceremony was supposed to begin at 9. At 9:15, they were just putting up the tent. Mr. Sokoni whipped a tractor with a grass cutter around backwards, slicing the five foot tall bush that had sprung up around campus.

At 10:15, a line of nice cars appeared parked on the grass between the classrooms. The District Commissioner, the District Secretary of Education, and other guests of honor filed in and took their seats. Students were still carrying in chairs when the MC started speaking.

A photo tent with a backdrop containing a prowling lion, a banking 747, and a poolside set of cabana chairs waited for the students after the ceremony. Warm-up music screaming in Bemba about private jets and money banged over the muddy and torn up speakers that I helped set up—tapping power by sticking bare wires into a socket.

The second tent we had paid for was never put up. It sat in a crumpled heap in the midst of the chairs.

The MC was a friend of Mr. Kunda, a comedian from Mansa in a Ceaușescu-esque suit, a Mao suit. The microphone buzzed harshly with evident DC pollution at 50 Hz.

There was a burst of sound, and a band began to process in from behind us. They wore matching blue tracksuits—a group hired from a local boarding school. The graduates walked behind waving their caps. A crowd of schoolchildren followed in their blue uniforms— many of them kids from the Oratory.

The DJ began a song, and the graduates started to dance. They had prepared something before, and they stepped and swung around in their gowns. I noticed the lyrics—“In the Name of Jesus, I can never be the same again.”

I stopped to watch a few of them in particular: John, a talented cook who had helped me put on a feast for the students at Christmas, dancing with a serious face and sunglasses on; Peter, one of my computer students, almost a head taller than the others around him; Mortone, a talented musician and producer, who produced his tracks on the school computers with a trial version of FL Studio, whose music I heard everywhere from Kazembe to Nchelenge; another John, a talented choir director and youth animator; Blackson and Aron, self-described “drunks” who had asked Nate for his copy of the Young Pioneers book when he left.

Each of the guests of honor was introduced and cheered for in turn. A large cheer came for Fr. Hamweete—who walked up to the stage in a suit, fashionably late (“ba Black Fatha!”). The largest cheer, to everyone’s shock and surprise, came for Fr. Waldemar, who came even more fashionably late, in—against all odds or expectation—a crisp suit with a starched, open collar’ed white shirt, despite walking around the setup no less than an hour before in the same short shorts and stained gray tank top.

The cultural dance group came and, against the booming drums, danced their typically scandalous, gyrating dance.

Finally, Fr. Cao gave a speech, the gist of which went like this:

“You will leave with far more than a certificate. You will leave with a heart formed in the Spirit of Don Bosco… you have learned the spirit of sacrifice… you learned that strength is built through perseverance. You learned to be a community— ubuntu. You became, at Don Bosco, a family.”

As his speech ended, clouds began to form. The DC came next to begin his speech. He encouraged them—first decrying the decline of the institution, lamenting the days past when produce came in plenty. He encouraged the students to apply for loans from his office, tapping into the something-odd 40 million kwacha that was currently sitting idle in CDF accounts.

Then the students walked. They shook hands with each of the honored guests in turn before receiving their diploma from the VP.

The best student in each program of study was honored with gifts and cash prizes from the guests of honor. Brian—far and away my best student, and also the best student in the school— was given a cash prize of 1500 kwacha by the mayor of Mwansabomwe. I gave all of my students a present, and Brian a little bigger one. There was more dancing, more speaking, and finally—things were wrapping up.

Toward the end of the ceremony, the MC disappeared for a moment, then reemerged— no longer in the Mao suit, but in garb resembling an artistically liberal impression of a Depression-era hobo.

“It is so paramount and tantamount, it is so comprehesivient, so electroplastisic. It is French as well, ‘Je vais a la madame que tort, que le petit poid’.”

We closed with a word from the VP, and a prayer from Fr. Chisanga, and it was over. The comedian gave a closing instruction.

“I would like to direct the guests of honor toward the high table near the cars there. That is where you can sit to chill a bit. To…soak enough your throats, to soak enough your stomachs, to soak enough your—medulla oblongata.”

After we ate, I went around congratulating some students. I found a girl named Faides there who had not yet graduated, but was sitting behind me at the ceremony. She was a friend of mine, having made a great first impression by asking if I was drunk when I injured myself after first seeing the stitches on my cracked-open head in November. I asked her how she was.

“Oh, I’m great. I hope that it is this nice on my graduation.”

I remarked how a girl had prayed for no rain during the Mass, and it seemed that God had heard her.

“Yes! He heard me. I prayed for no rain, and He listened.”

“Oh, it was you that made that prayer!”

“Yes, it was me!”

I left the grounds and walked towards the residence. As soon as I entered the house, thunder boomed. A heavy rain began to fall.

April 5, 2026.

14:43.

‘Behold! I am coming soon…’

Said again and again, in cycles, in ever expanding blossoms, flowering of the Kerygma across reality, time and space. A spiritual posture, a mystical key, a sublime truth, and eventually… a physical reality. If there is repetition, if there is a cycle, constructive interference, resonance, negatively damped oscillation, exponential growth at one frequency, Fourier transform finding the pattern, probability density function spiking into infinity like a white hole.

Maranatha.

He appears.

On Good Friday, one of my students—Chanda—was in the exam room writing my Computer Architecture final. I had asked him and the other students if they wouldn’t rather write an exam on a day they weren’t fasting. They shrugged. One meal a day isn’t so uncommon.

Six hours later, Chanda was carrying the Cross in a Passion procession that led every Catholic in Lufubu two kilometers from the roadside to the Church. The bush-track running through the village leads right to its doors. It stops there as if in awe of the edifice, the largest structure for miles, hidden in the dish-shaped depression of the river valley. Sitting on the Church steps on a Sunday, one might see all the way across Lufubu, a river of living color streaming towards the Lord’s house, people in their finest blues, reds, greens. This day, they wore red.

Holy Saturday found me swaying and about to pass out from keto-flu on the top rung of a ladder swapping out light bulbs twenty feet up in the rafters of the Oratory. Martin (the councilman for the parish youth) and I then spent about an hour swapping the solar light on the front façade of the Church, the only light visible in the bush-dark of the Lufubu night. The same light illumined the Easter bonfire as the sun fell. After the last light died, we were left in neon-glow.

Reading after reading came in the dark. I sat next to some girls from the school, following along with the English readings on my phone while they dozed.

I felt a tap on my shoulder as I nearly dozed as well. I turned to find Cosmas there in altar server garb. He was whispering intently.

“We forgot to charge the microphone. Do you have an adapter and a USB-C cable?”

I left the Church and sprinted inside and grabbed what we needed, then clandestinely handed them to Cosmas in the dark at the altar. Right as I reached my seat, the Gloria began. Light returned, in the midst of darkness. A long-absent joy filled my heart.

April 19, 2026.

18:23.

“That’s just part of discernment—being confused.”

— My mom

A Danish or Norwegian or otherwise Scandinavian girl sits in front of me on the other side of the Livingstone café it seems we are both regulars at. Yesterday she and her friends were also here and were having some conversation involving Norse deities in Danish-Norwegian-Swedish that I imagined (since I couldn’t understand it anyway) was a lively discussion of one of my favorite crazy theories about the Iliad taking place in the Baltic or the theological overlap between the Hindu Vedas and the Icelandic Skalds.

My phone just recently pinged with a message from one of my programming students that graduated and it seems that he is also in Livingstone. Maybe I’ll go say hello. Another student recently told me that he is in Choma. It would be nice to see him, but the bus to Lusaka is tough to get on, and it stops in Choma for all of five minutes, so the manner in which the meeting will be accomplished is as yet indistinct.

One week ago, Stefan (my Austrian traveling companion (and also Salesian volunteer in Lilongwe)) set out from Kazembe for the 1600 km to Livingstone. We hitched the first 1000km with Fr. Jacek in exchange for helping him haul some benches to a mission in Masansa.

The priest in charge of the mission was none other than Fr. Zenon, a Polish diocesan missionary I had previously met when he came kayaking with us on the Luapula River. Nate was still here in those days, and we had shared a kayak while the Fathers took the other.

In the marshes along the Luapula are a series of transitory and often unoccupied villages. We drifted among these, stopping to take some lunch in an abandoned hut. Fr. Zenon was joking with Fr. Jacek about the way he interacts with his German girls, the volunteers in Kazembe.

“Jacek, you are always calling them ‘princesses’ very sarcastically! Someday, you should say to one of them, very earnestly, ‘Today, you look like a princess.’”

I laughed and joined in. “Yes, but Father, that might cause a very serious misunderstanding!”

“For Jacek, maybe, but for you! If you were to try that…”

“Vocation gone,” I said, quoting Fr. Cao.

“Vocation gone!” he said. “I like that…”

When we saw him again in Masansa, he hosted us incredibly well. I was well-used to sparse Lufubu fare, so I was utterly shocked when his lay volunteer, Kasia, pulled out a huge assortment of Polish baking. We were plied with coffees, cakes, cookies. I felt like a parched wanderer suddenly finding himself in Calypso’s halls.

The next day, we unloaded the benches and completed the trip to Lusaka. I cast a look at my watch as we entered the city and noticed the date. It was six months to the day since I entered Zambia.

Stefan and I were hosted at the Salesian post-Novitiate house, which ended up being a gigantic compound with space for hundreds a few kilometers south of the Provincial House. Br. Philip and Br. Mark were there as well preparing for a Brother’s retreat, and we took them for burgers and beers. In the morning, we had a quick coffee with Noreen, Danielle, and Alma—in Lusaka and staying at the Provincial House—then boarded the bus for Livingstone.

We had settled on a cheap option with terrible reviews:

‘These guys are not serious’

‘Terrible service’

‘Bus left four hours late’

Without much surprise on my part, our bus left two hours late and broke down an hour into the trip. While the other passengers screamed at the driver, I spotted the driver from the bougie bus company (which had been completely booked) also pulling into Kafue station (jarringly on-time). I went over to them.

“Any space?”

“Give us 400 kwacha and you can squeeze.”

I forked over the equivalent of twenty bucks and we changed over our bags for the last 500km of the trip.

We arrived in Livingstone at night. For me, it was cultural whiplash. Livingstone has nice streets, pretty buildings, cafés, shops, resorts, landscaped sidewalks—in short, things that would be eye-poppingly out of place in the Zambia I know.

Seeing all the money and trappings of money is… kind of gross. You can stay at a luxury resort and pay Bellagio prices, drink expensive liquor, fly in private helicopters over Victoria Falls. I think that somebody in Lufubu would probably cry if they saw me drinking a 200 kwacha cocktail, and even 50 kwacha for a coffee seems painfully expensive.

Fr. Cao recommended me some Sisters to stay with, and I’ve been at a convent for the past six days. They’re incredible ladies, but I think some unfortunate mistakes on my part have left them thinking that I was rather foolish. On the first morning, right before Mass was about to start in their Chapel, I squeezed in just before the Priest was about to enter. Everyone stood, thinking I was the celebrant. I went pink with embarrassment, then tried to squeeze against the wall so that he could pass, but the chapel was so small that I ended up cramping a poor Polish nun so that the priest had to go around the both of us to get to the altar.

By the end of the Mass I was able to laugh at myself. As we all were standing outside, I made a joke to Father Hakim and Sister Agnieszka afterwards and they laughed merrily.

The next morning, I was forced to send Sister Eveline an apologetic text, as I had washed my one pair of pants in the wee hours of the morning only to find (not so surprisingly) that they were soaking wet when I got up for Mass. The same day, my room key fell out of my pants while I was reclining in a chair at Stefan’s hostel, and Sr. Eveline had to drive me there in the middle of the night to get it. Since these events, she has been calling me at least once a day just to make sure—I don’t know—that I’m alive? Given recent events, I’ve decided that her motherly concern is probably a good thing.

On our second day here Stefan and I visited Victoria Falls, got soaked, had our biscuits stolen by a baboon, and ate a nice Indian meal for dinner that, surprisingly, didn’t blast my intestines.

The next day, we saw some rhinos in the national park, then afterwards, met three Americans traveling with an unclerical looking man en route to the same Zambezi sunset cruise we had booked. They ended up being Benedictine Volunteers taking a little vacation accompanied by a Benedictine priest from a mission site near Mpika.

They were at the end of their time of service and were traveling a bit before heading home. We had a grand time rediscovering American-style banter and talking about God, and after the cruise went for a while to shoot pool and have a few drinks. Sophia—one of the two girls in their crew—taught me how to Salsa dance and explained that being Hispanic is a mindset. Dominic and Fr. Gabriel and I talked about vocation and played crappy pool while Stefan and Elizabeth (the other girl) powwowed at the table and hung out with Chanda, the birthday boy of the evening who we had met on the cruise.

Yesterday, as I walked to the hostel where Stefan was staying, I noticed that the police were closing the main road. I asked one of them what was up.

“The president is coming today. His convoy always passes at very high speed. We close the road for him to travel.”

I asked why he was coming to Livingstone. He said that he was here to attend a conference of engineers.

“Maybe I can go. I’m an engineer.”

He laughed.

“Yes, you’re invited…”

After I reached the hostel, I accompanied Stefan to the bus station, where I packed him, along with the three Americans and every other person, it seemed, that we had met in Livingstone, on the bus back to Lusaka. I remained at the terminal, alone.

After losing Nate (he’s alive, just back in Illinois) it was really nice to be traveling with Stefan. But, as I have learned to accept, sometimes God uses only short friendships to change our hearts. Among the hundreds of friends I have made since quitting my job in July 2024, I have been with none of them longer than a year, and most of them only weeks or months.

As a prime example of this phenomenon, Stefan and I had met at a workshop for all of the international volunteers in ZMB Province that took place two weeks ago in Kazembe. As had happened with the American SLMs, I became incredibly close with these people in no time at all, and just as soon after was forced to leave them forever, or at least, indefinitely.

The workshop was, unexpectedly, something my heart had really needed without me knowing. Fr. Chris Kunda, our sort of spiritual guide and charismatic leader, led us on activities around Luapula, and we spent the week living and praying together while sharing our experiences.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one having a tough time. Kasia, a Polish volunteer in Makululu, described the crushing isolation she felt among the boys, all of whom had been picked up from lives on the street, who could love her one day and be completely indifferent to her the next. Somebody asked her what she thought she had changed while in Makululu:

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can do whatever you want, Makululu will remain the same.”

Stefan and Alma described the difficulties of working in Malawi, where the people in the capital city were even poorer than the people in Lufubu. Noreen talked about the hair-pulling stress of writing projects for the Project Development Office; Danielle described the difficulties of being the only woman in a house full of men. Everyone had troubles. In this, we all found consolation.

Not that it was a competition, but I certainly felt as if my struggles in Lufubu were put in perspective. Serving God is not about running to the place where human suffering is the thickest, but rather about committing to the particular place in which he has placed you. It’s not grit that gets you into Heaven—obedience is prized above anything else.

For sure, Lufubu had been gritty. But at the end of the day, there are still beautiful things there. The kids at the oratory are incredible. The Christians at the parish have a simple faith that would put most American Catholics to shame. And my life is still ten times easier than the least jacked-up street kid in Makululu. My suffering is voluntary. Theirs isn’t.

There’s no big fat theological treatise in this blog post (sorry to those who wanted one?), aside from the small reflection that we are more powerless than we think. Really we are just confused creatures, stumbling around and falling constantly while Christ the Rock and His Immaculate Mother sort of lead and guide us along like lambs. The sooner one realizes this, the sooner they can let that sweet sweet love pour over them like sunlight.

I’ve had to butt up against this fact pretty directly in these past days. Vocational confusion is at an all time high. God sends incredible people, then they disappear. Three different religious orders contact me on the same day, and the same evening I meet a girl that knocks my socks off. We walk faithfully into an indefinite future. I sit at a café typing in the rain.

There are more things I could write. But as a beloved disciple said:

“If every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”