Work and Play

These last few weeks have been a mix of work and play. After several weeks of uneventful work at the hospital, we took off for a few days in mid-October to drive to Victoria Falls, which is one of the seven natural wonders of the world, at the junction of four countries- Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, and Botswana. Lisa's parents accompanied us, as they had just come for a two week visit. 

On the way to the falls we stopped at Hwange National Park, a huge game preserve with 39,000 elephants! We took a 2 hour game drive through the bush during which we saw giraffe, zebra, cheetah, hippos, ostrich, kudu, impala & springbuck, and of course MANY elephants. We survived a "mock-charge" by a mother elephant. I tend to think of elephants as docile creatures, but try to imagine sitting in the back of a small pickup truck about 30 feet from the largest land mammal (20 tons or so) as it is trumpeting loudly with its trunk in the air, pawing the ground, and flapping its ears at you. 

It gets your adrenaline pumping. Our driver stood his ground and revved the engine of our tiny truck, and the elephant backed down. Afterward he told us, "they usually give a mock-charge before a real one." Not sure what would have been the result of a "real one"...

We spent many hours driving on our recent vacation, and saw so many kinds of wildlife along the roadside and crossing the road that we came up with our own African wildlife road game. If you hit a cow, you earn 20 points. If you hit a goat, you get only 5 points. For hitting a donkey you get zero points because the animal is not smart enough to know it shouldn't be in the road. If you hit a lion, you automatically win the game, because your odds of that are so small, and finally, if you hit an elephant, well... you lose.

On the way home at dusk Lisa thought she saw a lion running off into the bush. Lions are rarely if ever seen on game drives, as they sleep during the day and hunt at night. Because we had to drive across most of the country to make it to the Falls, we spent a night at Antelope Park, a game reserve that breeds lions and teaches them to hunt in the wild. There we had our fill of lion interaction, as we were able to take about a one hour walk with three 10 month-old lions. 

At 18 months they release them into a large fenced in acreage filled with zebra, impala, etc. After several months of learning to hunt, they are sorted into groups and released into much larger game parks. 

Lisa loved having her mom here at the hospital this past week for encouragement and companionship. Her Dad helped us out by designing a frame to use in applying screens to the windows of the hospital guesthouse. The windows here are odd sizes and not made for screens, but with malaria, hot weather, and no A/C, screens make a huge difference. 

We also participated in a "hog butchering" with the Siamukwari's, an African family we have learned to know, and later that evening had a feast of grilled pork with them and other friends from here at Karanda.

I learned the hard way that I shouldn't have worn flip-flops to slaughter an animal in Africa. A nest of large black ants came running at the first smell of blood, and I happened to be standing right in the middle of their highway between home and a feast of pig remnants.

The weekend before Lisa's parents left Karanda, the local church invited an evangelist from Harare to speak to hospital workers as well as at the local "shops," which is a collection of bars and small stores near the hospital. 

There are small churches in the area, including one next to the hospital, however many local people practice only traditional animistic African spirituality. Alcoholism is definitely a problem here as well. The evangelist held meetings on the hospital grounds during the day, and at the shops at night for several nights, with a good turnout of local people each night. Many people including thirty hospital workers committed their lives to Jesus Christ. God is at work here at Karanda.