on safari

A few weekends ago, the men of the Miller family offered to take Ellie, Mary and me to Uganda to Queen Elizabeth Park to go for a safari. I really like animals, but I didn't feel any great need to drive around and see them when I got here. However, when you are in Africa, you should probably go on safari at least once. You have to. It's safari. Also, turns out that it was insanely cool and definitely felt like being in The Lion King.

We stayed at this amazing place right outside the park called Queen Elizabeth Bush Lodge. The food there was amazing and we were treated to a veritable symphony of hippo grunts and groans at all times as we were just above a waterway. This is the amazing tent palace that we stayed in courtesy of the Millers.

It was crazy driving in from Rwanda to go from mountains to absolutely flat land.

We saw buffalo.

These are cob. They were everywhere and made it feel like I was actually just driving through my neighborhood on a particularly deer-filled night. I wanted to stop and say, "I bring greetings from your brothers in America!"

We saw water buck.

We saw the circle of life in action.

We saw two, young, male lions.

The headed into the bushes to escape the heat of the day.

The second day we were there, we went on this long drive through a host of craters that are in the park. It was so beautiful. It's actually impossible to tell you how insanely beautiful it was. Each crater had one or two groups of elephants in it. These were big groups, too, and full of baby elephants that I really wanted to take home so that we could be best friends, but they would not have fit in the car, and I didn't want to separate them from their mamas.

There is a herd of elephants down there.

Is this even real life?

God is one incredible painter.

Giant crater.

Then all the elephants were crossing the road right in front of us.

Wah! Baby! Elephants are so cool.

Not pictured here are the other animals that we saw that I didn't take pictures of: warthogs (my spirit animal), hippos, baboons, various birds, mongooses (mongeese? Why is English so hard?). The animal that really blew my mind was the hippo. Cognitively, I understand that hippos are huge, but they are actually SO MASSIVE. We went for a night drive and saw loads of hippos out on the plains because they come out of the water to graze at night, and I spent the whole time wondering how an animal of such size and girth could possibly support its weight on land. Literally, the most rotund animals that I have ever seen, even more rotund than Gerty!

We even got to stand on the equator. 

I was in two hemispheres at once.

I basically lived that scene from  A Walk to Remember.

Only my version was much more grand and awesome. Take that Nick Sparks.

mostly pictures

I have just a few things to catch up on, and I promise it will be mostly pictures. The first is when the teachers and a few of the kids with us took a trip up to this really fancy hotel where there are traditional dancers. I know I already posted dancer pictures, but these ones have incredible clouds and mountains in the background, so look at them.

You could be called up from the audience to dance with them, so there Ellie is making it look easy.

The next thing is that I went on a women's retreat with some of the ladies here. We went to a center on Lake Kivu that was absolutely gorgeous. I even went for a little morning dip in Lake Kivu, which was refreshing to both my body and my soul. The setting was incredible, and we were able to continue studying the book of James. We've been doing this Beth Moore study of James that I have really been enjoying. 

The view from our table.

This is the fallen tree upon which I took a personal retreat of silence.

I got to witness this sunset during my personal time.

And it just got better and better.

Until the beauty was overwhelming.

So blessed to have these women around me.

brokenness

I've had this song stuck in my head for days. Specifically the verse about brokenness, but the chorus, too:

Take My Life

Take my heart
Mold it
Take my mind
Transform it
Take my will
Conform it
To yours
To yours 
Oh, Lord

I can't assert this with absolute certainty, but I think that my grandmother must have prayed a prayer like this song before they moved their family to Zaire. She must have said Lord, It's your will and not mine, so let's do this. Because it's crazy, right? No one in her right mind would pick up her family and move to some random place and live there for so many years and make so many sacrifices simply to serve those many years ago.

But she did do it, and it wasn't crazy. I think I've been struggling with uncertainty? She live uncertainty in a way that I can only fathom and knew that she could do all things through Him who gave her strength. His perfect Love cast out her very real fears and she followed the Lord to Zaire. She sent her kids to boarding school so that she and my grandfather could keep a rural hospital afloat. She hacked off the head of a snake right at the neck in order to preserve its head so that another doctor (and snake proficient) could identify what kind of snake it was. She traded tennis balls and knickknacks for baby monkeys and nursed them to adulthood because every time she said No More Pets, she didn't really mean it. She then named most of those monkeys Mud because they just loved dropping deuces on the coffee table. She must have turned to the Lord and said Take my life because no amount of preparation or planning could have foreseen any of that.

Then, in a very real way, she broke. I don't even know how many strokes left her a woman that I could only know through stories. The fracture lines of that break have been a part of my life from the earliest I can remember. On no other topic did the Lord and I do/will we continue to do such heated battle than in my attempts to understand why a woman who gave Him everything would be left the way she was. Why  did I have to watch my mother's heart break every time she remembered anew that her kids would never know her mom? The fractures run deep.

But the faith runs so much deeper. The echos of her life are a very real part of who I am and a very beautiful part of my relationship with my mother. It's the reason I am here in Rwanda. It's the reason that I long to be a mother myself one day and why I so genuinely desire to care for people. She is likely the reason I faint when I'm stuck with a needle. She loved old movies and musicals. Really the only thing I clearly didn't inherit is her intense hatred of goats (they are just so cute, I have no idea what she was thinking). In the years that she was so far away from herself, my grandfather had dinner with her every night and watched old episodes of Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke. He loved her with a faithfulness that I don't know I will ever understand, but it's so good to hear the echos.

Mom and I were talking on the phone, and she said, "I hope I am as good a mom to you as she was to me," and I said, "I know that you are." "How can you know that? I could have been a total loser mom." (YEAH RIGHT.) All I could say was, "I just know." The faith and the love seep into the fractures and hold the broken pieces in place. This is the kind of brokenness I will never get enough of. The kind that can only be healed by the most Perfect Love.

SO, Lord
Take my heart and mold it
Take my mind and transform it
Take my will and conform it To Yours

because she said it first.

The Lad Pad

"Lad" being the British version of calling someone a boss and "Pad" being the British version of a room (Roger's British, so we try to blend him in with the rest of us), we have thus dubbed the room where we play cards one night every week. (Shout out to the illustrious Rosy McLean of Belfast for the actual naming of the room.) We aren't just playing any game of cards, we are playing euchre. It's a fast-paced version of games like Hearts, Spades, or Rook. There's something about trump cards and winning hands and getting points. This isn't even the best part though. Every week, we have a different theme, and we all dress for it. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Let me take you on a visual journey through the Lad Pad. Close your eyes. Wait... Keep them open, read my description, then close them and think about it for a second. Yeah, that should work. Also, know that this room is he brainchild of Eldon, an older missionary from the DC area working as facilities manager at a school run by the Anglican church. He and Roger put the whole thing together.  It's a small atrium room that has two bedrooms and a bathroom off of it, which together consist of the back house in the compound. Two of the walls are a deep forest green. One of them is covered by stained plywood paneling. The last wall is split firewood surrounding a window with forest green curtains. Eldon even got a flashing neon "Welcome!" sign. Basically, imagine the most manly man cave you possibly could, and that's the Lad Pad. There are two rehabbed old tables and small, wood shelves hold empty bottles turned candle holders and a book entitled "Teach Yourself to Play Cards." When I first walked into it, I could just hear the song "A Woman's Touch" from the movie Calamity Jane running through my head. The ladies' contribution is four page-sized drawings of king card with Eldon as the king of each suit. Yep, it's perfect now.

This is how the whole dressing for a theme thing happened:

This is how Jesse and Roger showed up at the inaugural night of the Lad Pad. Yes, they are doing their best Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd from that SNL skit of the Czechoslovakian brothers, and, yes, it was amazing.

They picked the next theme: 20s moonshiners in the boonies (based on the movie Lawless, which I haven't seen). Their outfits were amazing. They had brewed their own ginger beer to really hit the "moonshiners" concept home. They had even cut each other's hair to get the perfect 20s style (don't worry, us women folk fixed 'em up later). The ladies donned denim shirts and long skirts, and one of us even had the boots to tie it all together. It was a beautiful thing.

Cam and Roger have already changed, but you get the gist.

The next week was Gatsby. We figured we'd let them get one more week's use out of the hair. One of the missionary teens helped me sew a dress. A black box of a thing to which we attached strips of red lace (which was manufactured in New Jersey... America!). I was Thoroughly Modern Millie, if just for a moment.

We all planned to be serious, but Ellie just couldn't help herself.

This is serious business.

This week is Fresh Prince. I am too hyped. I need to get in touch with my 90s Will Smith side.