The weekend has been busy with visiting, getting the routine stuff done as well as getting ready for the course I will be attending in a week.
We celebrated and recelebrated Kieran’s birthday. He is definitely initiated into his third year. Yesterday we had cake. Tonight we had a picnic at the Little Red Park and more cake. Grandma and Kieran climbed a very tall hill, got bitten by mosquitos and got very dirty feet. It was fun.
This morning in the morning service we watched part of the DVD on Paul Carlson. Besides the fun of singing again in Lingala, the movie Monganga Paul brought back all sorts of memories for me. I was a teenager when Paul Carlson was killed and I already had aspirations of going into missions. I remember clearly the tension leading up to the day the news broke of the paratroopers landing in Kisangani and Carlson’s death.
Eleven years later, there we were. I guess it was another year before I visited Wasolo. Then we were given the task of reopening the mission, going up to the hospital where Leo was the first medical doctor to take up residence there since Carlson. People in the area still carried guilt for what happened to him, powerless as they had been to do anything to prevent his death.
Memories – it is weird the things the are prominent in that storage bank: the sermon or series of them, very similar, same text, that went on interminably on the theme of ‘women obey your husbands”; Eric running around wild as usual falling on a stick and pushing it into the roof of his mouth, Leo sick as a dog with TB coughing so hard he threw up almost every evening yet going off to do an emergency appendectomy for a Swiss lay missionary pregnant with her first child, parking the LandRover on the hill so we could push start it, Tim falling through the roof as he worked on getting another house ready to live in. The stuff of a missionaries life.
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