Bob finishes correcting final exams and changes the oil in the car before he has it greased in town. We’ll safari out tomorrow and won’t be back till early January. We’ll carry gallon jugs of gas, sleeping bags and plenty of boiled water. I fill two of the five-pound powdered milk tins with peanut butter cookies and graham crackers for snacks with bananas. I wrap spice cakes, coconut wafers and orange hermits to leave with friends along the way. We’ll be packed tightly but plan to make room for one schoolboy who needs a lift to Njombe.

If we get stuck on muddy roads, we’re hoping there’ll be PWD workers along the roads to help. By seven a.m. tomorrow we plan to be headed toward Kenya and as far as the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda. Just two or three days to ICE CREAM!

Odom, a husky schoolboy, knocks at our door about 6:30, and the three of us leave the mud puddles of Songea in a cloud of mist following a rainy night. The haze so densely covers the hills we can’t see the trees that nearly touch our front porch. The umbrella branches and grasses look jungle-like. Birds dart ahead of us; one is summer-squash yellow with charcoal wings and a red band at its throat. Beyond the eroding humped hills surrounding Songea we drive atop woodless crests, making our way up the Lukumburu escarpment. Although we slither and skid, I hold my breath as Bob keeps his foot on the accelerator. We slide through waves of mud and make record time, barreling through one hundred eighty two miles to Njombe in five hours.

On the morning of November 23 we sit at a white linen-covered table in the dining room at Iringa’s White Horse Inn and stare into saucers of grapefruit. The seedy white centers have been neatly cored and heaped with sugar. As we’re spooning the segments, the Greek hotel proprietor rushes to our table. He tells us the news he’s just heard on his ham radio. Napkins in hand, we follow him into his office, and in disbelief, thousands of miles from home, listen to the announcement that our president has been assassinated.

Our host grasps our shoulders. I feel far away and wonder why we’re here.

We push on toward Dodoma, and join the Great North Road to Arusha. In one day we motor past sun-beaten plains, sand-swept valleys and lush forests. Near Arusha the landscape stretches into a green carpet dotted with wide-leaved banana plants and immense hardwoods. We drive by sisal fields, where giant tractors creep over plantations. The plains feed into vast grasslands before the rising pyramid of Mount Meru. Three twiga (giraffes) graze ahead, our first sighting of big game.  

By late afternoon we stop at a hotel in Arusha, a fair-sized town with high-rise buildings and three movie theaters. In the city center bead-bejeweled Masai wander among Asians and Europeans. We notice a snack stand selling hamburgers, hot dogs and doughnuts, but no ICE CREAM.

Sunday afternoon we step quietly beneath the tolling bell tower of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for a memorial service for President Kennedy. Heavy silence fills the packed stuccoed sanctuary where we stand arm to arm black, white, tan—people of the world. The air echoes with Bach and “Lord, have mercy.” We return to the African sun with eyes downcast and learn the suspected assassin has been shot.