This wasn’t an easy move this time. It is one thing to go to Africa for one year, and rent out your house to one of your best friends, and come back to the same neighborhood and same church and same friends.
It’s another thing to leave a house you love, a church you cherished, friends and neighbors who have been so part of your life, a great job, good income and stuff.
Some stuff you are anxious to get rid of....
The last day of school started interestingly. Two little girls asked me to help them get a foot long lizard out of a tree because they wanted him for a pet. I couldn’t reach him, so I put one of the girls on my shoulders and she got him. As she was getting him, we had the following conversation:
Me: Do you have him yet?
Her: I’m so close.
Me: Do you have him yet?
Her: Oops.
Me: What do you mean?
Her: I had him...
I am doing a really bad thing this week, and I can’t quite get myself to stop.
This is alumni week, and grads of RVA are coming from all over the world to come back to campus for a week. There is really quite an attachment between the students and this place, and it is easy to tell who is an alum.
I can’t stop finding out names of alums, and then going over and saying `MIKE! How the heck are you?...
How do you sum up a year like this?
I don’t even know where to start! In some ways, I feel like a teenage boy who grew 8 inches in one year and nothing fits anymore. I’ve seen so much that I’ve never seen before. I’ve done so many things that I’ve never done before and some that I didn’t think I could do. I’ve changed some of my ideas about myself, my family, my country, the world and God. So...
Many of the children at the hospital have their mothers stay in the room with them. And African culture is much different than American culture in many ways, but perhaps in no way more different than breast-feeding.
My experience with many African women is that they think nothing of having a conversation with you, and in the midst of that conversation, drop their blouse and began feeding their child. And that is fine; I am grateful for the differences in cultures.
But...
Did you ever have a dream that you didn’t even know you had until it came true? When I was in high school, I had a gym teacher who began every class period with the phrase `Line up maggots!’
RVA is a kind of place where you might be asked to do different things at different times. As our time here draws to an end, I have come to a place where I have been asked to use my special skills...
It has been a tough week at RVA.
The father of one of the seniors died on Friday. A death of a parent is always so brutal; to have it happen a few days before Father’s Day and a few weeks before graduation is almost too much to bear; there is a real sadness on the campus, and a real fear. If you are a boarding student, your greatest fear is something will happen to your parents. It came true, and...
Always ask first.
I went to visit my friend Florence on Saturday. She is one of the women who sells me vegetables and she came to the Bible study I led last term. She is a special woman who loves Jesus deeply. And she had been asking me for months to come and visit her. I really can’t make an off-campus visit while the boys are here because it takes almost all day. But it has been midterm and the boys...
