Lions and Tigers and Bare Feet; Oh My!

We just got back to Blantyre two (or is it three?) days ago after spending two and a half weeks in Tanzania, where we visited Jen's roommate Bethany, who is volunteering at an orphanage there.  As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't really post over there, so this one will hopefully just be a fairly brief "fill in" of what's been going down.  These are the highlights:

                    We...

• Celebrated Christmas the day we arrived with Beth, her brother Beau (just arrived from Canada), and a bunch of other volunteers at Beth's friend Sonya's house.
• Explored Arusha and ate some of the best pizza I've eaten in my life. (Beau thought so, too, so it's not just that my taste buds have been corrupted by poor African food.)
• Went to a Masai market where we bought lots of cool stuff.
• Held babies and played with toddlers in the Cradle of Love orphanage.
• Rode motorcycle taxis all over everywhere. One of them took off with Jen, and I had to get my guy to go chase him. (Actually, by the time we got back to where Jen's driver had taken off, he had already figured it out and was on his way back.)
• Took a trip to the coast, where we all got burned. Badly. (I have pictures of the massive white blisters which covered my entire neck, chest, stomach, and arms, but have decided to spare you.)
• Went and slept in tree houses at another location on the coast.
• Rode bikes into town there.
• Did a bunch of other totally cool stuff that I no longer remember.

                   And...

• Went for a short walk into a nearby game reserve the last evening we had there, and saw giraffes!

This last bullet point actually induced me to actually get out my camera and take some pictures.  Furthermore, I am actually going to post them for you.  Shocking, I know.

Hmm...as long as I'm posting, I guess I might as well post what are just about the only other three photos that I took while there.

Okay.  This is Jen and Beth on a pikipki (motorcycle taxi) going somewhere that I no longer remember.

This is a shot of the Indian Ocean, though I'm sure you knew that, as it has such a distinct look from all the other oceans of the world.  (It was taken on the boat ride back from a sandbar about thirty minutes by motorboat out to sea that appears and disappears according to tides.  Gorgeous.)

Here is the way I have been walking since my first month and a half or so of being in Africa.  I had been using shoes, but one day just randomly decided that I was sick of shoes and wasn't going to where them to town.  So I didn't.  And the way people reacted was just awesome!  Where before they had glared at my smiles and became silent when I greeted them in Chechewa rather than English, they now greeted me with dancing eyes, and taught me ten times the Chechewa I could hope to retain.  It was as if my bare feet removed a barrier, told them that I wasn't just another rich stuck up tourist who doesn't care.  They do tend to think of me as slightly insane, or at least extremely quirky, but that's okay; it makes for a great conversation starter, at the very least.  I have, it is true, cut my feet I think four or five times now, gotten things embedded in them many more times than that (I've got something in my right heel right now), and bruised them a couple of times, but I think it's worth it if it helps the people here feel less inferior, or rather keep them from feeling as if I think they are.  Anyway, there is a point to this picture other than to allow me to spout in such a lengthy manner, as you will later see.  (I also have a video of my bare feet walking that I wanted to post, but Jen advised against it.  Really very sorry, but gotta keep the sister happy, you know?)

Ah!  Here we are.  A giraffe.

And Jen and Beth.

This one makes me happy, regardless of the fact that you can hardly tell that that twig-like thingy is a giraffe.

Here is one to illustrate the giraffe's distance from us.  I'm a [really, really, really] bad judge of distance, but I think it was thirty-ish meters, maybe?  Let's just say somewhere between fifteen and two hundred.

This little dude made Jenny very, very happy.  (Okay!  Fine.  Me, too.)

I tried to work around to the other side of them so that I could get Mount Neru in the shot, but failed utterly.  In the ones that include the mountain, the giraffes are invisible, and in the ones where the giraffes are slightly less than microscopic (as in this one), the mountain is out of the frame to the left.

I took twenty five or thirty shots of Jenny while in the game park, and none of them really turned out.  Jo, I need you to photogriphy my skillage, okay?

It was late. All was dark, and I was walking on a back country road without a light. Barefooted, of course. The road was one of those most unpleasant to walk on without shoes. It was dirt, with rocks of all shapes and sizes embedded in it, and with thousands of walnut to egg sized rocks scattered across its surface. These are rather disgusting to walk on at any time because they are not big enough to actually step on, but neither are they small enough for your foot to contour with somewhat like it does on sand, and at night, well... (I'm pretty sure that this kind of terrain is why, in the armor of God, it is the "sandals of gospel of peace" rather than the "bare feet of the gospel of peace."  Of course, in heaven, all shoes will be outlawed as abominations that cause the feet to stink, but here on earth, Paul had a good reason to advise the use of sandals.) 

But I had no sandals, and I minced along, trying to keep in view of the two shadows wafting out of sight in front of me. I picked up the tempo and lengthened my stride, and almost immediately, yet another of those walnut-sized rocks placed itself directly beneath my heel just as my body weight transferred over to that leg. I gasped, and quickly hopped the other foot up to take the weight off. It, too, landed on something very sharp, and I let out a sharp breath, then gingerly hobbled over to the grass at the side of the road. “Be a man,” I hissed to myself, “suck it up!” I managed alright for a while in the grass, then suddenly I stepped into I patch of thorns with my left foot and immediately kicked a stone the size of a fist with the other. “Aaaaaahhhhherrrrreeeeeeeeeggggguuuuuuuuuooooooummmmmmmaaaa!!!!!” said I, as I fell in a heap into a patch of thorn bushes in a fetal position, and then began to whimper.

How did I get here? Well, you may have noticed that in the last picture I posted, it was, well, getting dark. You may also remember remember that I told that I go barefooted everywhere now. Well, I was indeed barefoot at the game park. And as I had just told Sonya, I “used to carry shoes with me, but I never do now.” And so, pride goeth before the fall. (Actually, I can't really remember being proud of it, it just was. Anyway...) So as we left the game park, intending to go by back ways to Sonya's house to bake cookies, the darkness found me and my bare feet. I suffered the whole way home, because I had let my light that I always carry with me be broken in the rigors of the day (by an adorable little tyke at the orphanage named Joshua), and had not bothered to fix it. (The Bible says for good reason to never let your lamp go out!) In the midst of my trouble, I managed to fish it out of my pocket and found that if I took the batteries and bulb out of the casing, and pinched them between my thumb and index finger as though I were holding a teacup, it shone dimly on the path ahead. (See? But God will never desert us when we call in our hour of need, though we desert Him time and time again.  But that doesn't mean that He will remove all the trouble; just that He will enable us to get through it.)

And of course, being in the dark in a place I did not know, I had no idea how to get home (home is where the cookies are, no?). But Beth did, and she led us straight into Sonya's kitchen without a wrong turn (See the importance of finding experienced Christians to help you as you grow in Christ? Or of just following Christ, as He ALWAYS knows the way.), where I was able to drown my sorrows in cookies, and fix my light properly. (See the importance of having a shelter and time away from the troubles of life, so that you can reconnect to God?)

Okay, sorry for the lousy storytelling, but when I first thought of telling this story, it was as a one-person play-acted children's story, and most of my parenthetical statements are possible lessons that I could draw from it depending on which way I spun the story and what I emphasized. It's actually pretty funny because the day before this happened, I had been wracking my brain for a good personal story to act out like that (I had some fictional ones, but nothing real-life), and it's like God said, “Okay, then; how about this?” Well, anyway, sorry again for the lazy writing. I could probably do better if I spent some more time on it, but I've been kept from posting this for so long now, and I finally have a good internet connection, and at least I've written the jist of the story so I'll remember it, and I've got work I have to finish, so you can go back to your seats now, and remember not to be prideful, or let your lamp go out, and always remember that God loves you! :p

Ugh.  So much for being brief.  I'm done now.

Woops!  I lied: I'm posting one more picture.  This was taken on the way to Tanzania, but is intended to represent our trip home, so pretend I didn't write this sentence.  Thanks to everyone in Tanzania who made our holiday so much fun!