all in a sunday evening

time travel

anti personnel explosives

Garden & Gun

we know how to do variety here at WHM S. Sudan.

we started our weekly Sunday evening time of team worship and prayer by praying for Michael, who is a self defined time travel enthusiast - one term I don’t think I have ever used to describe myself.  But see, that’s the beauty of this team thing...Michael is fascinated by time travel and is a dreamer, a visionary : time travel threatens my death grip on reality, the here and now, and ask me to come up with creative ideas about how things could be different than they are and I’ll draw a total blank - but need to implement some grand scheme you’ve come up with to change the world? I’m your girl.

This team I’m on here is rich.  Rich with gifts of creativity and vision and intellect and compassion and mercy and the list goes on.  It’s an humbling honor to be a part of it.  But I wouldn’t want to do this life in any other way - yes, we grate on each other’s last nerve, yes, we often see things from entirely different perspectives and approaches, yes we are very very different people but we each contribute immensely to one another’s lives and work and the lives and work of those around us - mercifully imaging facets of who God is that we would not be able to alone.  Now if I could only figure out what it is I contribute to the mix...

After our trip through visionary time travel accompanied by a few worship songs, Boris-the-lonely-South-African joined us for dinner.  Boris works for a company contracted by the UN to do de-mining activities...in this part of the world, that means going around and finding or using the community’s leads on the locations of potential explosives, determining what kind of explosive it is, whether it has already exploded or has yet to explode, and then either disarming or exploding the explosive in a safe-ish fashion.  He had all kinds of stories about friends losing hands and lives in this line of work that has taken him all over the world.  His family lives in S. Africa and he sees them for 2 weeks every 3 months. 

He used this term “anti-personnel” explosives a few times before I inquired about it.  It just seemed like a funny term to me.  Call the thing a bomb or a mine but don’t try to dress it up nice by calling it an “anti-personnel” anything...in my experience, personnel is used when describing a group of employees, it’s an official word used in official contexts to describe official activities - it’s a term of formality/respect. In my mind, the primary purpose of a bomb or a land mine is to destroy things...usually including people’s lives - not very formal or respectful it seems to me.  Turns out, the term is used to differentiate explosives that are used for killing people from explosives which are used for destroying tanks....anti-personnel and anti-tank...still an interesting use of words it seems to me.

Boris says most of the explosives they’re finding in the Mundri area are things that have been “chucked from airplanes” (a direct quote) but failed to explode when they landed...which, to be honest, is quite a sobering reality.  My day to day experience here in Mundri thus far does not often harken me back to the reality of the very recent history of this place.  The very recent history that includes “anti personnel” explosives being “chucked from airplanes” - most of which I can only imagine DID actually explode on impact...the absence of the care that Boris described in their process of safely attempting to disarm/explode these things, and the MANY lives that were lost in the process...I saw something recently that gave a number somewhere in the vicinity of 1 or 1.5 million lives lost in the civil war here between the Sudans...it lasted about 2 decades all of which occurred entirely within my lifetime.  My language tutor reminded me today that Wednesday is a public holiday honoring the day that the SPLA split from the forces of the North and became a rebel force... “It’s the day the SPLA went to the bush,” Alex said.  Hm.  Different spin on the idea of a “holiday.”

So, Boris wowed us with his dramatic stories of disarming explosives - it’s not just any day this is the topic of conversation at our dinner table.  Scott and Boris headed home and we all moved to the “more comfortable seating”... there was clarinet-ing going on by our very own Liana Hope, accompanied by her father on the guitar, there was an intense-ish rubber band war, and then there was me, lounging around wondering “what’s tonight’s actiiiivity?”  Bethany came back from sending an email, she and I chatted about nothing while dodging rubber bands, and I reminded her she needed to bring out this magazine she’d been talking about since returning from the US - Garden & Gun...who woulda thought such a publication would be found in the hands of the cultured Miss Bethany Ferguson, but it’s true.  And who woulda thunk the cover would have a red/white checked table cloth with a scrumptious BBQ sandwich deliciously displayed in the middle...not I. 

She had mentioned several of the articles in random conversations and I was kind of intrigued by what this publication would be like.  The byline is “The Soul of the South.”  Now, really truly I am a Yankee.  Caleb talked about a road trip he took with his sister across the south and of the places he mentioned I had only been to Atlanta and Memphis...pretty sad.  But maybe that’s why this magazine is intriguing with it’s stories about southern urban renaissance and pieces written by Emmylou Harris...a cultural education of sorts, I suppose.  As I read a few articles, looked at some pictures, chatting as I went along about what I found, tucking it under my arm as I headed to bed I was reminded of something...I do have another life...there is another life in which I have interests and experiences and things to talk about...it just has little to no overlap with my current life station!  

Whoever thought I’d thank a publication called Garden & Gun for reminding me of a bit more of who I am :)  Encouragement from the most unlikely of places.  Hey, I’ll take it.  All in a Sunday evening.