Abstract

            “The Baobab Diocese” had its first beginning as a nonfiction creative writing project and has been having new beginnings ever since. It is a work-in-progress, a reflection on a three-week long mission trip to Tanzania with a Lutheran congregation from Minnesota that I experienced when I was seventeen years old. Its disjointed, sometimes broken form reflects the nature of its content in several ways. Certain particulars are clear, while other, seemingly more important details are left out, in the same way that memories oftentimes come back to us through small, but very real sensory moments. It also reflects my ignorance as a young high school student at the very bottom of a church hierarchy—uninformed about both the culture in which I was immersed and the nature of the trip itself.

This piece is about identity and dissonance. It attempts to build bridges and it attempts to collapse them. It attempts to give the reader culture shock. It attempts to isolate and cast out its reader as other. It questions both old ideas of what is “improving life” in foreign cultures and new organizations like Bega Kwa Bega, which imposes its Lutheran visions of improvement on Tanzania specifically. “The Baobab Diocese” plants itself upside down; reaching its roots toward some distant, abstract moral ideal that never comes quite into focus.