How about describing what your program is supposed to /do/ instead of posting C code? What are the "buffers" for? This group might be more helpful if you did that.
If you really do need this sort of random-access character buffer, you have a couple of options. Python strings aren't mutable, so they won't work. To start with, lists of characters would suffice, or mmap (look it up in the global module index) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
