We unanimously agreed that Family Camp 2016 was one of the best ever.  And why was that, you ask?  Many factors were involved, not the least of which was "Old Time Fair Fun".  

Thursday immediately following lunch, all 40 of us spilled outside to take part in a hugely successful event that lasted right up until supper.  There were games and relays and races for all ages.  There was somethings for everyone:  bobbing for apples, three legged races, gunny sack races (or in this case, rice bag racing...we live in Cameroon; we improvise), and on and on it went.  The older children and adults were divided into teams of 3 for one event.  When the whistle blew, they took off running like crazy all over the large compound, chasing chickens.  The first team back to the starting line with a live chicken won a prize.  We did worry that the entire brood of chickens might succumb to heart attacks!  Those men and teenage boys who wanted to participate in another race were divided into teams of three.  Each team was given a large three wheeler.  They were not allowed to start the motor.  Instead, when the whistle blew one man jumped on the bike while the other two pushed from behind.  They had to race down to the finish line, turn the three wheeler around and push it back up to the starting line.  Like I said, there was something for everyone.  Even old grandmothers could stand on the sidelines and laugh ourselves silly!   

Family Camp 2016 is now history.  It ended with breakfast this morning, followed by clean-up.  But we always skip that part, and not just because we're lazy.  It's imperative that we rush down to Bamenda early in the morning. If we're not on the first bus out of town, we won't be back at Shiloh until nighttime.  We do all to avoid that.  It is safer to arrive during daylight hours.  So we left Family Camp early, and eleven very long hours later, arrived back at Shiloh. 

We've taken showers (hot water...such a novelty), had a bite to eat, and read through some of the backlog of emails.  Now it's time to get some sleep.  More about Family Camp tomorrow. 

For the last number of years we have spent the last week of  April up in the mountains above Bamenda, in the NW Region.  We gather together with a group of missionaries for a week of Family Camp.  It is one of the high points of our year.  We love the fellowship and the spiritual refreshment.  The food is always fantastic, and the wonderful mountain setting is breathtaking.  

The suitcase is already packed.  The taxi is scheduled to arrive at 6 a.m. tomorrow.  But there is just one thing wrong with this picture.  Jim came down with a bug last evening, and in spite of every effort, is still running a small temperature, and is still suffering from other symptoms.  Earlier in the day when it became obvious that he would not be making the trip, he insisted that I go on without him.  In fact if he recovers in the next day or two, he plans on joining us for the last half of Family Camp.  I am certainly praying to that end.  Family Camp just won't be the same without him.

  

The call came at 5 p.m. today.  Would there be a room available at Shiloh for a couple who needed a place to stay for two weeks?  "Sure, come on over," I told them. I gave them directions, and then the fun began. They took first one wrong turn and then another.  They phoned for direction clarification time and time again.  They could have walked to us in 15 minutes or less, but it took them an hour, driving around in circles, to find us.  I finally went outside our gate and made myself as visible as possible.  Of course they were three blocks away at that time and could not see me!

Turns out this young Cameroonian couple is fresh off their honeymoon.  The new husband has given up a good paying job to go into mission work.  They are here in Yaounde for two weeks of training and are eager to learn all they can.  In fact when they learned we have been missionaries for 46 years, they were in awe of us.  They hesitantly asked if we would be willing to counsel them, pray with them, and help guide them as they make decisions.  What an honor for us to have input in their young lives.

 

It was a request I just couldn't ignore.  A missionary family, living walking distance from Shiloh, put out a plea for a "missionary plumber."  They had a problem with a toilet.  In fact a local plumber had been hired to fix it a couple of times.  But the problem just kept coming back.  And then there was water coming up through the floor in another place in their house.  Their young plumber assured them it wasn't a serious problem, unless it got worse.  

They just needed help.  They didn't know if they should trust their plumber's judgment in this matter.  So I hastened to let them know that I live with a "missionary plumber" who doubles as my husband!  They were very surprised.  While Jim is no stranger to them, they knew him only as the one who runs Shiloh.  They had no idea he is Mr. Jack-of-all-trades.

The toilet problem was an easy and quick fix.  The young plumber had done an OK job as far as he went.  He just didn't know to do the final step.  But as for the water coming up through the floor, that was a different matter.  From a strictly plumbing standpoint, it is good advice to just keep an eye on it and see if it gets worse.  However if one knows something about house construction too, one realizes this is a serious matter.  The house foundation could be compromised.  The floor could even cave in. 

 

Missionary plumber Jim will be going back to their home soon to drill a small hole in the floor with his long drill and see if he can learn anything.  Hopefully this won't turn out to be too big a problem.

I am happy to loan my "missionary plumber" out to others.  It always reminds me of how terribly spoiled we are here at Shiloh.  When we have any maintenance problem we just holler "JIM!!!" and he comes to our rescue.

 

It's sort of strange how we bumped into each other again after all these years.  

On Monday afternoon I promised a missionary friend I would phone her soon and set up a time when we could have them over for a meal.  So bright and early Tuesday morning I phoned her.  But her phone was turned off.  Well, I could send her a text message, even though I truly hate texting.  I labored over a rather long text and then sent it off.    There was no response.  On Wednesday morning (that's today) I tried phoning again.  After several tries I finally got through.  Since my friend is an American, I naturally spoke in English.  But the man who answered was having trouble understanding me.  When I switched to French he quickly figured out that I had the wrong number.  Now what was I supposed to do?  I didn't have any other way of contacting our friends.  Of course I could always go to their house.  They don't live too far away.  This afternoon I was knocking on their gate as the rain started.  No response.  Finally I noticed a door bell off to the side.  Pushing it I could hear a loud buzzer.  About that time a neighbor lady called over to me to say that they were not home.  She had just watched them all drive out the gate.  I asked this Cameroonian lady if she happened to have their phone number, which she did not.  The only thing left to do was to go back to Shiloh and try again another day.  As I turned from the gate, someone opened it.  I turned back around and there she was!

"Amelia" I exclaimed!  We hugged and stood in the rain laughing.  How long had it been, I wondered?  I asked how old her baby girl was now.  When she replied "Sixteen," I knew she had made a mistake.  Maybe six years old, or even ten, but surely not sixteen!  How could the years fly by so fast?  Amelia proudly told me she had five other children, too.   

She was just a young wife with a newborn baby girl when she came to work for us.  Amelia had never held a job before.  She did everything wrong.  We struggled to teach her things, but she just wasn't willing to learn.  After months of trying and getting nowhere, we finally let her go.  Two or three years later we saw her at an event we attended.  She came running across the room to greet us.  She wanted to let us know that she was sorry for all the trouble that she caused us.  And she was so grateful for the things she learned from us.  She reported that she was working for another missionary family.  Every day she was doing her best to put into practice all the things we had tried to teach her.  She realized too late her mistakes.  But she was so glad to have that opportunity to see us and apologize.

Amelia is the only person who formerly worked for us over these last 25 years who has ever come back to apologize and to thank us for what we taught them.  She is one in a million. That's why we were both so thrilled to bump into each other after all these years.

Village uncles. We are blessed with many of them. They became our village uncles many years ago when we lived in a village for a few months. The uncles of the family we lived with became our uncles, too. We have visited them off and on over the years. It is always so sad to return to the village and discover that another one of our uncles has died.

We have always known that this group of uncles came from a large family. But we have never heard their story until yesterday. We were visiting one of our uncles when he got to talking about his father. He mentioned that his father had had twelve wives. Four of them were never able to have children, but eight bore his father children. When asked how many children his father had altogether, our uncle didn't know. He knew that his own mother had five children. In Cameroon, a polygamist father's other wives are called aunts. So our uncle could report that all his aunts who bore children, had anywhere from five to eight children apiece. Which means that his father may have had 50 children. Maybe even more. No wonder we have so many uncles! Even assuming that only half of the father's children reached adulthood, and that only half of those adults were sons, we would have a dozen uncles. We have personally known at least ten of the uncles. The uncle we visited yesterday told us he is 79 years old. We assume he must be one of his father's younger children. Very few of our uncles are still living. We miss every one of them.

And in far away America we don't even have one uncle who is still alive. So we treasure our remaining village uncles.

Mango season. It's an annual event. Begins in April, ends in July. Have you ever seen a mango tree? They are enormous. Provides marvelous shade with their spreading branches. Great climbing trees. Nobody goes hungry during mango season. When all else fails, just climb a nearby mango tree and eat to your hearts content. The fruit is big. Peel back the solid green skin to discover the wonderful deep yellow fruit. It's bright, colorful, smells delicious, juicy, sticky, and oh so yummy. Mangoes have a large seed buried inside all that juicy fruit. Cameroonians have a way of slicing a whole mango (keeping the skin on) down both sides of the pit, cutting vertical and horizontal lines in each of the two pieces, just down to the skin, and popping the pieces inside out. Now you have an exotic presentation, fit for a king. It is super easy to eat all of the sand up cubes of mango right off the skin.

This is our 25^th mango season. We've made mango pie (very similar to peach pie); mango bread, mango cake, fruit salad with lots of mangoes mixed with other tropical fruit, and we've even tried various mango drinks. But this year we have plans to make mango jelly (or will it be mango jam?)

During mango season piles of mangoes are for sell quite cheaply in every market in Yaoundé. But the price drops even lower once we leave the city. All along the highway, people put out buckets or trays full of mangoes. They try to sell their mangoes to all the cars whizzing by. Of course the absolute cheapest way to get mangoes is to pick your own. Our village house is blessed with numerous mango trees all around the house. The fruit is free for the taking.

I grew up in the (original) Mickey Mouse Club ear. (M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E...you can practically hear the music!) That is to say, our family didn't have TV, but my good friend Chickie's family did. And sometimes I was allowed to go over to her house and watch TV. Mickey Mouse was adorable. He had big black ears and he had all sorts of fun adventures. He's probably still on American TV today, entertaining generations of unsuspecting children.

But before Mickey entered my life, I learned about the Three Blind Mice. They seemed pretty innocent. All in all, I grew up thinking mice were these cute little harmless things with noses that wiggled. Some of them could even sing and dance.

This is a true story. It really, truly happened. The very first time I ever saw a little gray mouse in our home out here in Cameroon, I thought he was way too cute for words. I actually  stooped down and tried talking to him. He just wiggled his nose at me and scampered off. Way, way too cute for words! But alas, a couple days later I was getting something out from the back of our closet when I discovered, to my shock and horror, just how destructive these adorable little critters actually were. How dare he (or maybe it was a she?) chew through my valuables! In a moment of time mice became my sworn enemy. “The only good mouse is a dead mouse” became my motto. The battle lines were drawn.

All down through these last 25 years, any mouse (adorable or not) who has the audacity to squeeze under the kitchen door to begin setting up housekeeping, is living on borrowed time. We've tried all sorts of ingenious mouse traps. Recently Jim walked into the kitchen early in the morning to find two, not one but two, mice caught in the same trap! They were too young to spring the trap alone. It took the weight of the second one joining his brother at the peanut banquet, to bring about their quick demise. And then we discovered “Mouse Trap Glue”. It's made of cardboard folded in half. When opened, with the sticky glue side up, it becomes a serious trap. The more they wiggle and try to get away, the more firmly they are glued down. The only problem is the trap does not kill them. But it's not a serious problem for this Old Grandmother. I am surrounded by plenty of big, strong men, who willingly empty mouse traps for me.

The Blog that went away has returned! For nearly three weeks we have had unending internet problems. While not holding our breath, we think the internet might finally be functioning OK.

The highway that runs between the capitol city of Yaoundé, and Daoula, the seaport city of commerce, has historically been a dangerous road. There are straight patches of road, but there are also lots of curves as the highway winds its way down to sea-level. Missionaries, their children, Peace Corps workers, Cameroonian business men, government workers, and ordinary citizens have lost their lives or been seriously injured on that highway. In more recent times the government has made a concerted effort to correct the problem. But it still persists as one of the more dangerous highways in all of Cameroon.

To better understand the story I am about to relate, you need to know that the Uncle in the story is the last living sibling of her late mother. Our cook's assistant, Doris is rapidly running out of that generation of relatives.

Her Uncle and his closest friend were recently traveling from Yaoundé to Daoula. An enjoyable ride in the friend's car turned tragic in a moment of time. It's easy to get stuck behind one or more of the big semi-trucks that travel back and forth between these two major cities, transporting goods. It's all too easy to get frustrated with having to drive so slow for such a long stretch of time, waiting for the next straight patch. And thus it was that the friend took a decision that many, many, many others have taken before him. He had to pass that big semi on a blind curve. He had no other choice. Time was wasting. They needed to get down to Daoula. Unfortunately, before he could pull around the semi-truck he met another truck heading towards Yaoundé, in whose lane he was now in. Needless to say, the driver did not survive the head on collision. In addition the driver of the semi-truck and his two passengers were all killed outright. Only the Uncle, the last living sibling in his family, survived the accident. While the car he was in was flattened, they were able to pull him out alive. He was taken to Daoula to a hospital. His wife was notified and quickly made her way down to the hospital. One by one family members were informed. Doris received the call while working at Shiloh. She phoned her Aunt daily for updates. Bit by bit the story unfolded. The Uncle has a broken arm and a broken leg. He'll be laid up in the hospital for awhile, but he will live. His face and body suffered many lacerations, but they will all heal in time.

Doris took time off work to go down to Daoula to be with her Uncle in his time of need. This Aunt and Uncle who formerly didn't believe in the God of Doris, now declare that He exists. The Aunt says they can clearly see God's hand sparing her husband's life, when everyone else died in the crash. We trust that some day soon they will take the next step and accept Him as their Lord and Savior.