My Strongest Single Memory

         New Hall at Makerere University College was, indeed, new and new to me. But I silently said, “Hey, I can do this” and went to bed. I awoke at 2:00 a.m. and looked out of my dorm room window at the dark dark and 10 lit rooms. “Brooks,” I said to myself, “What have you done? You’re 10,000 miles from home and only 1 day into a 3-year commitment. What were you thinking?” I went down to the bathroom to splash water on my face, looked out the window again and again, and ultimately went back to sleep. I never had another waking night while in East Africa.

         That night in 1964 was a watershed moment in my life because it marked the edge of my indecision. I was in that room in that institution in that country because I had chosen it and because I had survived momentary doubt. That night, in some way, defined me, not so much because of the doubt but because I went forward without doubt. I then taught and traveled without compunction and with great joy and interest. I began to explore what I now realize was my life and my way of being in the world. The bookend of that night in 1964 was a morning in 1968 when I awoke in New York City wondering why I wasn’t back in Kenya. That morning led to the first of several bouts with depression I have had over the ensuing years and was powerful to me in the moment. But in memory the event that stays with me is still that night in 1964 at Makerere.

         I suspect that the overwhelming feeling of positive engagement in my TEA teaching experience and the equally powerful experiences I had while traveling home in the first 5 months of 1968 (from Kenya to Ethiopia to India to overland to Europe) helped me to become a better teacher. Marrying my wife Jeanie in 1970 certainly made me become a better human being. Who is to say that the first didn’t lead to the second?

         By a strange coincidence I just finished reading Mary Bateson’s Composing a Further Life which documents what I (and we) am living: how do we re-create engagement in this newly-coined life stage of “adulthood II?” Thus the engagement I feel with TEAA is really an outgrowth of the engagement I made in 1964 and again in 1970 and explains why I look back on the 3 TEAA-East Africa trips of 2003, 2005, and 2011 with fondness that belies the difficulties of those journeys.

         I feel that I am in the midst of the ultimate existential life circumstance and look forward expectantly to whatever engagement is out there in whatever night I shall awake to.