Carlos in Tanzania

It's funny how life works out. I always make fun of the absurd fetishizing hyperbolosity of going abroad. Everyone always talks about the inspiring and life-changing moments that happen. It's inevitable. As if foreign countries were built to have these life altering exchanges and moments to be shared at dinner parties and look "cultured." And then I'll talk about the people I met - the guy who made me a mango smoothy on the sidewalk in Puerto Plata with the eyes of a voodoo Orisha sage who probably couldn't give a fuck about me. How a little girl pressed her delicate hand against the window of my cab in Calcutta and how it made me...blah blah blah blah

I hate that shit. All that said. I am all hyperboles right now. As I've come to realize though - every moment of life, wherever you are is full of the beauty, humanity, and inspiration that we often only allow ourselves to feel while we're abroad or on an "adventure" - we seem to put our kid glasses on then. Maybe we should do it more often.

In any event, right now I'm in Imbaseni, Tanzania, a village just outside of Arusha, staying with Mzee Pete and Mama Charlotte O'Neal. Two Black Panthers who have been living here for almost 40 years since Mzee Pete was forced into exile after a trumped gun possession charge. He was the founder and chairman of the Black Panther Party in Kansas City, Missouri.

This community center they've built is a dream. No other words to describe it. There are murals snaking their way around all of the seemingly endless walls, with drawings of Malcolm and Martin shaking hands smiling, east African emcees and Masai families, inspiring words, and a red, black, and green painted recording studio with egg crates sound-proofing it. When I got here from Nairobi on Friday, I went into the studio with Mama Charlotte and her producer, Kami, and we cut this crazy track with Mama C chanting, singing, me emceeing, and Kami laying down one of his ill beats. Today I hung out with Mzee Pete for a while in the afternoon and he told me all kinds of stories from his youth and childhood and what life was like growing up in KC. Tomorrow I'm planning to watch one of the trials of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that is convened in Arusha to try accused war criminals of the Rwandan genocide.

Being here gives me some real hope after a summer filled with some sobering reminders of the less inspiring character or settled-for mediocrity that seems to plague adulthood. It's made me less enthusiastic about growing into this supposed "man" that I'm viewed as.

But then I meet Mzee Pete and Mama Charlotte on Friday.

And these two revolutionaries (and I really mean it when I use it for them) LIVE what they speak. And 40 years since almost having their lives taken away for what they believe they are enacting all the things they spoke about - workshops for the local community on everything from computer science to reading and language study to dance (and everything and anything in between), a water purification system they have set up that is accessible to everyone in the surrounding villages, and a space where creativity and well-informed ideas are not only nurtured but constantly demanded of those who stay here. You should see Pete's book collection - insane. Stuff out of print, stuff just printed - I have no idea where he gets all this stuff. And then the photos of Pete and Mama C in their hey day - with rifles in their hands and berets. Wow. I know how cute and fun it is for folks to romanticize all that shit and all the "crunchy grassroots activists" (like me) back home who put on a cool t-shirt and yell loud and think we're "revolutionary," but they lived in a time where it wasn't halloween or a costume ball party folks called a "protest."

To see the peace and careful listening of two people as imperfect and human as Mzee Pete and Mama C really teaches me something. I don't even know right now what the full scope of it is, but these last few days I've been feeling like someone reached into my ribcage and sort of washed off my dusty heart. The stars really sing here at night. I feel like I don't look up enough.