MacGyver would be proud

So I am sure that everybody else has updated their blogs and you have read them all several times, so I won't go into great detail about what we saw. I will just say that Mac would have been proud this weekend. When we got to the village for service, we were delighted to see that the place we were going to worship was full...only of bovine and not humans. So since we had some time to kill (I mean come on, have we ever started "on time"...the answer is no and we never will) we went for a nice walk to check out how the cows were watered. It was quite the set up when we got there. There were two water troughs and water was pumped from a a nearby underground river. It was by far the most high-tech set up I have seen yet. So for we watched hundreds of heads of cattle come and rehydrate. It was fun and entertaining.

We ate goat for lunch. Now this is where I will stand on my little soap box in praise of the Swiss army knife. I don't know how they thought to put those particular things in the handy dandy tool, but whoever put the toothpick in there needs a free ticket to heaven. I never thought it would come in handy, but it certainly has and it has saved me hours of me trying to get meat out with my tongue. Also, the bottle opener/screwdriver brilliant and has saved many young Maasai teeth trying to open soda bottles. MacGyver would be so proud.

The service went well. There were some children that started to cry and run away at the sight of us because we were white. They thought we were blood suckers, and rightfully so. This made me start to think about being a minority in Africa. To be honest I don't feel like a minority here at all. I was told before coming that I would get to understand what it is like to be a minority for a while...whatever that means. I mean yes, I am a minority here as far as the census between black and white skin colors, but I don't feel like a minority. I feel like an outsider, and that is because I am. When I walk down the streets of Morogoro people aren't looking at me like they have never seen a white person before, they look at me because they know I am American. Whether that is good or bad it depends on the person, but I don't feel out of place because of my skin color. I don't even think about it most of the time to be real honest.

Tim has not been feeling well the past couple of days. He has had some pretty sharp abdominal pain. We speculate that it is kidney stones because Tim has been consuming considerable amounts of meat lately at the villages and when we go to different places where all we have for a meal is meat. This is why I am almost a carnivore Tim. Carnivores win one way or another, unfortunately for Tim it could possibly be with little crystals trying to pass in his body.

Seriously though keep Tim and all of us here in your thoughts. We are finding out that the numbers of people contracting malaria and typhoid in the Morogoro area are rising rapidly. Speaking from first hand experience, malaria isn't any fun and if gone untreated can be fatal.

On that happy thought I will leave you.

Peace,
Peter