Before I became a missionary myself, I thought of life on the mission field in a very romanticized way: wild adventures, close encounters, mass converts, and on and on. If you’re like I was, then I am very sorry to burst your bubble, but life on the mission field is almost like life anywhere else. We establish routines, we go to work everyday, and we even have some quiet moments of near boredom (I don’t ever really get bored…I’m a bookworm, so if there’s down time, I’m perfectly content to read. Blaise doesn’t ever really get bored…he’s a nature lover, so if there’s down time, he’s out finding “cool” bugs.).
Our second Saturday in Tonj (post-malaria), Blaise and I awoke to find gorgeous weather…cooler temperatures, sunny skies, and a gentle breeze. It had rained the night before, so there was a delicious smell in the air of damp earth and fresh blooms of gardenia. We pulled our chairs out of our room and onto the front porch and decided that we would probably spend our morning just sipping tea and coffee, chatting, and soaking up South Sudan’s equivalent of a lovely spring day.
Then we spotted it: a GIANT snail!
We’re from Indiana, where snails are small and generally go unnoticed. This thing was MASSIVE! So what did we do? Naturally, we picked it up and brought it to the front porch. On the way back, we spotted another one…and another one…and another one. We finally had five giant snails collected, and we returned to our chairs.
At first, we just wanted to see how long it would take before they got brave enough to come back out of their shells and start crawling away. It wasn’t too long, maybe 15 or 20 minutes. That gave us an idea…we should race them!
So we lined our snails up and once again waited (snail races aren’t heart pounding…you have to wait for them to come out of their shells before they can even start competing). In the meantime, I decided that we had to document this.
So here you are, folks, welcome to the exciting life of a missionary on a Saturday morning!
