My shoulders have a slight sunburn from swimming in the Indian Ocean, I've fallen asleep under mosquito nets to the sound of waves, can properly identify a mango tree, and have marvelled at how wrinkly an elephant really is up close. 
We've finally made it to Iringa after spending a few days along the coast,getting to know eachother and to shake off the jet-lag.  We now live in the shire...or at least in a beautiful campus which houses us in small, thatched-roofed bungalows that all certainly look like the shire.  One of my friends even brought a tin whistle to play the shire song for us in the mornings.
Driving through several towns on our way to Iringa, I've watched Africa through the car windows, and am amazed at the rich colors of this place. The red dirt is a deep teracotta color, the women's Kangas are vibrant and mismatched, and the skin of these African people is such a beautiful and rich darkness.  It's been interesting to be a minority, really for the first time in my life.  Here, I am known by my color.  When we drive by, women stare out of their doorways, children pause their play, and men look up from their work to notice the truck of white students driving by.  Never before have I been known for my color, but here that is exactly what identifies me.  (how about that for an anthropological concept to contemplate?!)
I've already been on my first safari and saw just about every African animal you'd hope to see, except a lion.  Elephants came right beside our window and cut us off from the road as they crossed to be with their family. (did you know that an elephant have 105,000 muscles in it's trunk?)  And my fingers and ankles have trails of bug bites crawling along - I try not to think about what this means when I sleep.
Speaking of sleep...the night sky here is incredible.  With hardly any light pollution, Orion's Belt is the clearest I've ever seen it, and every inch of the sky seems to be covered by stars.  It's quite breathtaking really.
I realize this update jumps around...my mind is quite distracted what with the 20 other students typing away in the cafe.  But to finish, let me share one quick insight:  I worried for a bit that I made a mistake coming here.  Some of the other students on the trip have wanted to come to Africa for years, and cried upon landing in Dar...and I found that this isn't me at all.  So the first few days on campus I coulnd't figure out what I was doing in Africa.  Of course I'm here to study, but that simply didn't have enough purposefullness to satisfy me.  I work off of vision, and I didn't have a clear vision for my time here.  But I was meditating on  a passage in  Isaiah...Isaiah 43:18-19 to be exact   'Do not remember the former things, or consider the  things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?'
This part about a new thing really gets me going.  Even hough I function off vision, the Lord still had promised to do a new thing in me here even though I don't perceive what this will be.  And even though this ambiguousness can be frustrating at times - because it can look like purposelessness - I rest in the assurance that this patience and dependency of the Lord will be worth it.
So I continue to walk the dirt roads and hike the mountains here, unsure of why this semester is happening, but certain that a new thing is springing forth.