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.