⎨éléphant⎬Days 12-13

What an experience these past 2 days have been. It feels like a week!

We spent the whole day on Monday with the German family at their home, hearing about their ministry and meeting a couple of the families that they know. First the our men went to greet the men on this compound, and then us ladies went to visit with the ladies. We received a very warm welcome and we talked with them while they were pulling the leaves off the stems to make their Haako.

It is tradition here that women are not allowed to leave their homes for 40 days after the birth of their child. This woman was visiting from somewhere else when she gave birth, and now has to wait 40 days to return to her home. In this picture mama is covering the baby's mouth as she was yawning:)

The women served us a spicy ginger tea and some dates as we spent some time visiting. I noticed that they were putting mud on the bottom of their pots and found out that they do this and let the mud dry in the sun so that when they cook, the pots won't get blackened by the open flame. This makes the pots easier to clean. The women take pride in having pots that look brand new.

It was really interesting to see subtle differences in the culture of the people in this town than in the town where Treven and Melanie live. One example is way that the women dress. They wear only a veil and not a headpiece. More women here wear a full veil that covers their entire face.

(Stephen here:) When I went with the men to visit, there was a lot of interest in Canada. I think in general the people have a very positive few of Canada and Canadians. The Canadians they know have been very helpful and being the only other bilingual country in the world whose official languages are French and English, I think there is a certain affinity. One thing that I found most interesting was to see black and white speaking to each other in Arabic. It almost seemed out of place. So interesting how many different languages and dialects there are here - and I don't understand any of them! (We are not in the region that speaks English)

We had a lot of fun with the kids of the family we were staying with. Even though they spoke German and we spoke English our universal language was laughter and play. Carlin taught the girl how to play the  cup game (you may remember it from camp, where all the girls around the table would clap and move their cups in unison and pass the cups around the table - you know what I'm talking about if you remember). Anyway, this is all she wanted to do from then on with Carlin. In fact she even taught the game to some of her neighbours - so if you ever come to Africa in the future and the girls all know the cup game, you can thank Carlin! I ended up playing a couple games with the boys. First was the slap game, where you hold out your hands and one person slaps the others' while they try and move their hands before getting slapped. Then we played Settlers of Catan - in German! It was neat playing a game that I recognized in another language. The boys really seemed to have fun - they practiced their English and I learned a few German words too!

(...and now back to Carlin:) At the house of the German family, boys from the religious school will often come by and say something like, "For God's sake, give me something to eat". They will take even the scraps of pineapple to suck out the juices. We were told that they are often sent to these schools from other towns and live with their teachers, but are on their own to find food.

Later on Monday we got to go to another wildlife park. We heard that there were still 4 elephants there out of 200 that had started moving away to look for water. We got into the park and drove for awhile until our guide told us to get out of the car and follow him. We saw footprints in the dirt and had to stay behind bushes as we walked along. And then...

An elephant! We followed him on foot for quite a while, just watching and taking pictures. Then we got back into the car and our guide told us we could drive right by him. Apparently elephants are scared of cars, so we were told that he would not attack us. Well... I think we got a little too close and we made him a bit mad. We only caught the tail end of us driving past on video...

But I got a couple pictures as we were driving by. Yes... we were that close.

So wild! I had the biggest smile on my face as we were driving back to the house. I'm maybe not as fearful of being gored by an elephant tusk as I should be...

Today was a long day of driving. 7 hours on that crazy road.

God brought us home though! We didn't have any major car problems for the duration of our trip, but as soon as we got into the town that we're staying at, the power steering blew out. We managed to make it to the mission hospital from where the car was taken to the shop and we caught a taxi home. It feels good to be back "home" and we are so thankful that the Lord protected us on our journey.

Until next time,

Carlin & Stephen

Tidbits:

- 44ºC today

- We slept outside last night under mosquito nets. It was really nice!

- On our drive today we played "20 questions" with the kids. When Micah was guessing, his main guess was "Jam?" I think that's his favourite food.