Always Learning

The boys posing for their first day of school pictures. We are starting early this year because we will need to take a month or two off in the fall for a training course and visitors.

In the “If only I had known” category

“You’ve eaten smoked rat, what can possibly be worse than that?”

Many of you have heard my answer to that particular question. The short answer is: a chunk of pig fat roughly the size and shape of two Snickers bars side by side. Eating that piece of grease was the first reminder in many a year for me that my esophagus still knows how to play yo-yo with food and, even though I got the whole thing down, my digestive system complained for days afterwards. If only I had known…

The other day in talking with a friend about the kinds of meat that they eat here, I asked the question:  “Are all meats just as good?”

The response surprised me:

Yes, all meats are the same. They all have good sweetness and the grease is very nice… except the pig fat, you know, right from here (gestures to belly). That fat is so sweet that, if you eat it plain, it kind of gets stuck right here (gestures to throat) and the sweetness sort of makes your stomach want to reverse and you feel like puking…

So what? Well, when I ate that pig fat, it was as one who steps up to take one for the team (as my partner will confirm, pig fat was something that his stomach has in the past forbidden in no uncertain terms). My eating (or so we thought at the time) would allow us to be polite together to accept (what we thought was) a very generous gift. In reality, I could have passed the fat off as well without offense because  our friends themselves know that plain pig fat it the bush equivalent of ipecac.

Anyway, Mason, if you are reading this, I hope you are laughing your head off (I know it was all I could do to hold it in when my friend was gesturing at his throat and making those faces…)

In totally unrelated news… my cholesterol is up this year. I think it has to do with too much mountain air.

Caring for younger siblings is a common chore for Pal children. It can be quite the task.

Thank you all for praying for us this week. We are making a big push in the next 8 weeks before a visit by culture and language learning consultants. We hope to have an alphabet and a grammar that is mostly complete by their arrival. The closer we get to completing language study, the more monumental the task of church planting seems (exciting… but monumental all the same.)

Thanks so much for praying.

Nate for us 5

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