In Africa, do NOT touch the white man’s radio
Last week, I was pretty impassioned about one of the RVA kids getting into Harvard, and loudly proclaiming that he was the first kid at RVA to get into the Ivy League. I checked this with the former superintendent, the present superintendent, the guidance director and the principal.
However, I did not check this with the coolest person on the planet, the person who did this job before me. She informs me that lo, not even two years ago, a student was accepted into Brown, another Ivy League school. In fact, there were probably THOUSANDS of kids accepted into the Ivy League.
What have I learned from this? Secretaries know everything; always go to the source. He is the first into Harvard, but not into the Ivies, so please forgive my error. Another student was accepted into Stanford, but no claims on the first ness of it all.
People ask if we ever get homesick, and I tell them not often. We’re so busy that it’s hard to find time to BE homesick. But something happened this week that made me VERY homesick.
Stacy is getting married this summer, and I won’t get to see her wedding.
I’ve known Stacy since she was a baby. Always a nice kid, she became something more a few years ago. We became nursery partners at church. For five years, we worked together in the nursery once a month.
We were an ideal pair. I would lie on the floor and eat pretzels, and Stacy would do all the work. Because she was such a cute kid, lots of young boys would come back to visit her, and I would enlist them to do more work, so I could get on with my laying and pretzel eating.
I’ve missed James’ wedding, and Megan’s wedding, and I’m probably going to miss David’s wedding. I even hate going to weddings, but those kids were special to me and it was so hard to miss that special day.
So, this is an open invitation. Since I can’t go to Stacy’s wedding, everyone who reads this is probably invited in my place. If you can sing Neil Diamond songs for her on her special day, so much the better.
Just tell her that one really sad guy in Africa sent you.
We delivered more food for the school lunch program this weekend. All in all, it will be almost 70 tons of food. We are so grateful for what you have enabled us to do.
Coordinating twelve schools without phones is a nightmare. The bean truck didn’t show up for five days, and we found that we had so much maize that we had to deliver it in shifts; the trucks just couldn’t support that much weight. Because the headmasters were waiting for us and we were running late, one of the pastors and I started driving to schools to let them know we were behind.
Pastor Jeffery is a young man, and so he felt obligated to turn my radio up loud enough to scare away dangerous wild animals. I am an old man, so I turned it down lower, so it wouldn’t damage the nearby plants. This went on several times, until I got to say a line I realized I had ALWAYS wanted to say:
In Africa, do not touch the white man’s radio.
Pastor Jeffery didn’t understand why I was laughing so much, but I sure cracked myself up.
I had a weird goal this time out.
My goal was to lift the bags like my Kenyan friends do. In the past, when I lifted the 200-pound bags, I had to do it with someone.
I didn’t even tell Nancy, but for three months, I lifted weights every M-W-F at 6am trying to increase my strength so I could do it like the other guys. I just didn’t want to be the old white guy who took pictures; I wanted to be more of a part of it.
When the first bag was put on my back, I tottered over to the door like I had been drinking, but I got the bag put down without a problem.
So I did it again. And again. And was able to lift ten bags.
I wish I could explain why it was such a thrill. I don’t understand why it was such a thrill.
But it was.
The biggest thrill of all is that the cost of feeding a child a lunch 6 days a week is a little over a dollar a month. When we counted transportation, the cost of the maize, beans and oil, our helpers that helped us lift the 70 tons, the cost is $1.06 per student per month.
What a great thing you all are doing.
Your pal,
Steve