"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

- C.S. Lewis



Someone broke my 4-wheeler when I was on break in Nairobi. So I was driving a Honda 125 motorbike quite a bit this past week. I drove it 5 hours south and fell three times on that ride. Shortly after that I drove it through a muddy patch and came to a stop to high-five a kid who'd been cheering me on. When I stopped I put my right foot down, only for it to sink into the mud and I toppled over for a fourth time that day. A few days later I was driving it back North, and here is a diagram to explain that day.


1) I wiped out five minutes after getting on the bike. After that the kick-start wouldn't work so it had to be push-started.
2) My buddy Chris Wulliman picked me up and took me aways until our paths split, then he gave me a push start and off I went.
3) Here there were two roads. I took one and figured it was ok because I was headed into the sun which meant East. It was 3PM. It was going the exact wrong direction and it wasn't til I was practically back to the start that I realized my foolishness.
4) I veered off the road to avoid wiping out in a giant hole. I ended up dropping the bike anyhow trying to get back on the road. The bike decided it was done after that. My German Emergency Doctor friends happened to pass in their truck and we loaded up the bike and they took me home.
5) The last 30 minutes or so I was riding shotgun with a German nurse who is totally insane. Like Pyschiatric Hospital insane. She told me herself, along with a number of other "didn't need to know that" items.

Anyhow, during that ride (between items 4 and 5) I was sitting there cursing myself for wrecking a bike and then I realized something. I'm riding around in the back of a truck with a few Nuba people, holding up my broken bike with my legs, sitting next to a Nuba guy who's not a doctor and has performed 17 emergency C-sections in the last few months. Bouncing around and banging my head on this metal bar like 30 times. Drinking an ice-cold water from their cooler. And I thought, "Wow, my life is awesome right now."

"Everything that is done in the world, is done by hope."

- Martin Luther

After we finish building a church their is a giant party called an If De Ta. Lots of people come and pack the building and its basically a really long, high-energy church service. Lots of choirs, and singing and dancing, and thank yous, and sermons, and random diatribes by random people who don't really have much to say. This is Komo Church yesterday. The service lasted like 4.5 hours. I did get a little sleepy at one point, but overall its a lot of fun. I walk around and take photos as an excuse to move around and play with the kids outside instead of listening.




Above is Komo Church before the celebration begins. Below is Me and Pastor Santino. He's a nice guy and he's travelled with me to visit some churches before. Dude's real short. He had to stand on a cinder block to see over his new pulpit.

Correction

I was chastised a little while back for the opening of my last blog, so I think I better explain what I meant better. I'm not referring to the guys in the field at all, who are all great and thoughtful people with good hearts. It just seems that as an organization (and yes the individuals setting the tone) don't really care about why we do what we do, but if something looks good at first glance then we plow ahead and never stop to think it through. For example, someone committed us to rebuilding every church destroyed in Sudan, without having a clue what that actually meant, or thinking through the missiology of it. Anyhow, I do love and appreciate almost everyone in this organization and there is no where I would rather work than the Nuba Mountains in large part because of the awesome team we have here.