Tasty Animals and Ministry Things.

It's late and I just sat down to write this blog. A few minutes ago, I heard a huge explosion outside. Naturally, I went to check it out. Steve Sherman just shot a rabid jackal in his front yard. Never a dull moment in Tanzania.

Speaking of shooting things…

I went on my first hunting trip. Ever. I figure Africa is as good a place as any to learn about hunting. So, we borrowed Sumry's hunting truck (Sumry is a friend of the missionaries here and he owns one of the biggest bussing/trucking companies in Tanzania) and left for the wilderness early Monday morning. We drove five hours north, up through Katavi National Park, and camped just a few miles from its edge.

In Mumba we don't have to worry about lions or snakes (there are puff adders here, though) or tse-tse flies. So of course, I had to ask our guide, Bila, about everything I could possibly be afraid of. The seasoned veterans laughed at me a little bit. Still, I noticed that Steve slept with his shotgun at his side. Bila told me in broken English that, "Of course there are lions and they are very danger." Also among our friends: Big hairy spiders, cobras, black mambas, hyenas, bee swarms, wild fires, and hot African sunburn. It's also a bad idea to touch pretty much any plant. They all have thorns, and even the grass is so tough and stringy that it will cut your fingers if you try to pick it (this, I learned, with a bloody index finger.)

I don't have a hunting experience from the United States to compare this with but as I understand it, back home you put up a tree stand or a blind, sit down and fall asleep until a deer wanders into range. You shoot it, track it, cut its guts out, and haul it back to your cabin and string it up in a tree. I guess you could probably do it like that here. But we had a well-outfitted hunting truck, and we spent all day driving over the bush looking for delicious animals to blow away. In the end, the two young guys shot a reed buck each (reed buck are like small white tail) and three of us shot small fowl, which we cooked for dinner. We gutted the second reed buck and threw his remains about 100 yards from camp. It didn't take long for vultures to show up, and Trevor promptly shot one with a .22.

It is hard to sleep in a tent with just a shred of nylon between you and an animal appropriately called a man-eater, especially with a large tasty animal hanging from a tree just outside. Fortunately, the lions never visited us – they stay away from fires at night. But the hyenas showed up in the middle of the second night. We heard them yelp. It's a loud, ascending Ow-Woo-oot! And it's even better when they do it 20 feet from your tent, where you just peed. It's unsettling to hear things breathing, romping in the dry brush, looking for food. When they came, I went rigid in my sleeping bag and laid still and wide-eyed. Josh, next to me, slept through the whole thing. Hyenas, Steve tells me, can bite through an elephant's femur. We heard them crunching the bones, absolutely shattering them. Still, they're more like raccoons than bears. They're mangy and ugly, like big rodents, I guess. After about an hour in camp, around 4 am, they went away.

Since I've been here, I've eaten topi, rone, and now reed buck. They're all really tasty, if you're wondering.

Last week, we got out to show some films in Jangwani, the nearest village to Mumba. We didn't show the Jesus film because, as I understand it, that village has already seen it 37 times. We put up our screen and started some music and people came. There were probably 500 people at one point.

In the past, they had film reels. Pastors could preach while they changed reels, and people stayed to wait for the end of the movie. If you preach after the movie is over, everyone will leave. So with a DVD player and a projector, you have to pause it in the middle to let someone share the gospel. Lots of people tune out, and some of them leave, but movies are such a rarity that the majority will stay to watch whatever you show. So people get to hear a message. We could show pretty much anything and they'd stick around, but they really want stuff in Swahili. One of our films is from the US in the 70s, dubbed in Swahili. It's about a man who learns to serve Christ with his business. I'm not sure how well village-dwelling farmers identify with Christian warehousing strategies - it seemed pretty boring to me - but people ate it up. I guess that if people are hearing the message in whatever way it's a good thing. We have a pretty limited selection of Swahili language films to show as alternatives to The Jesus Film. If you find something good, send it this way.

We had some sound problems that night and we got started pretty late, unfortunately. The next night, our speakers died in the middle of a health film we were showing for the Caraways here. They could really use some quality sound equipment out here. It would be nice to have some good speakers and a nice amp. But you make due with what you have. Hopefully they'll all be fixed and ready to go soon.

See you all soon,

jim