Olives and Showers

So I've been a sickie lately. But I'm feeling way better. There's this awesome missionary lady staying at the guest house with us and she's kind of taken the role of mom for the team. It helps that she's a nurse too. She works with the Bozo people (they are nomadic and live along the Niger) with her husband. They've been here for 17 years as church planters. She's a beautiful lady doing beautiful work.

I substitute taught yesterday at the school for mk's. That was exciting. Sometimes I doubt wether or not I want to be a teacher for real; it was nice to feel reassured. And I got to teach history... to jr highers. My favorites. We had fun.

The team went grocery shopping together for the first time last night. We went crazy. We've been living pretty frugally for the past three months so we decided to splurge this week. We went to a grocery store that's pretty Western but fairly expensive. Our shopping cart consisted mainly of candy, ice cream, cheese, sliced bread, and juice. We each got to pick out what we were missing most... I grabbed olives, coke zero, chocolate pudding, and swiss cheese. Life is good.

We've started making contacts for our ministry time here. The school I taught at has a need for a third grade teacher... that age isn't too appealing. Little kids terrify me. But we will see what God does. Also, the team is looking into starting a Malian tea shop. It would be a place for students to come and speak english with us. I'm thinking about taking off for a week and just going somewhere. I might try and visit the Bozo tribe. I'm getting restless in the big city.

I recently read the Poisonwood Bible. It's a novel about a missionary family who went to the Congo- what it did to their family, how Africa gets inside of you and effects the rest of your life. The book wasn't written by a believer so it highlighted a lot of the mistakes that they made. Their zeal for converts over rode their sensitivity towards the people and culture. It was an interesting read, especially in this context. Then in American History yesterday we discussed missionary tactics during the colonial period and how they've changed over the years. Missions is an interesting phenomenon. People are interesting.

Us girls are staying with a missionary in her house right next to the Avant Guesthouse. And she has hot water. I've taken 2 hot showers a day since I've been here. It's amazing how little things can make a day.

"Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use.
I find it impossible to bear.
Ripe fruits, Acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I've never even seen-- I can't say what goes into the composition, or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here on this island, in our little town, in a back alley where sleek boys smoke in a stairwell amidst the day's uncollected refuse. A few years back, it found me on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where I'd returned for a family funeral; Africa rose up to seize me as I walked on a pier past a huddle of turtle-headed old fishermen, their bait buckets set around them like a banquet. Once I merely waled out of the library in Atlanta and there it was, that scent knocking me down, for no reason I can understand. The sensation rises up from inside me and I know you're still here, holding sway. You've played some trick on the dividing of my cells so my body can never be free of the small parts of Africa it consumed. It seems I only know myself, anymore, by your attendance in my soul"
The Poisonwood Bible, Barabara Kingsolver