The Stars, Like Dust

Seventh Post:
'The Stars, Like Dust'

So let me tell you a little bit about the beauty of Mzenga- this place is wonderful. It's technically classified as semi-arid, but all around us the landscape is lush with cashew trees, coconut palms, orange trees, mango trees, papaya trees, lemon trees (very pretty! and the flowers are sweet, but the fruit...), and all kinds of smaller vegetation. If you climb up a tree that's high enough, you can see our two villages surrounded by a blanket of green, with two other tiny villages in the distance in opposite directions down the road, and smoke rising from various points in the forest where people are burning wood to make charcoal. It's so... idyllic.
The sunsets are gorgeous. I didn't think of taking any pictures but I'll try to sometime later. Every shade of colour from blue to yellow to orange to purple to pink to red to grey to indigo, and everything in between, is visible at one time or another. The thing that really gets me though are the stars. I've grown up my whole life in big cities, never stayed for long in the country; and when we first got here, between jetlag, lack of familiarity with the place, early mornings, etc, we never really got out after dusk. The first time I went out at night though, I looked up and what I saw took my breath away- the stars like dust stretching away from horizon to horizon- a shimmering blanket covering our village- reminding me that the God who created each one of those suns and galaxies and knows the infinity of them by name, is certainly watching over us. What a powerful testimony to His glory, I wish you could see the stars as I see them... (and you can! just come visit me)

So the other day I got back in from my stargazing, and was in bed reading with my head-lamp at around 8:30, when I heard a car drive up (our team has a 4-wheel-drive van, Tim has his personal SUV, and maybe literally one or two other people in the village have cars, but the latter mostly don't run very well. There are vans that go back and forth to Dar everyday). It was Tim, who came to ask me if I wanted to drive with him to the hospital, some two and a half hours away (that's how long it takes to drive the 60ish kms, roads are bad, and Dar is around 80-100 kms away). One of the guys in Tim's village, who coincidentally is the man who owns the cow-butchering business, had developed a hernia around a month earlier. As he tells the story, he was on his way home to lunch, when a witch-doctor hired by one of his enemies put a curse on him. As he started eating lunch, he suddenly developed a hernia. He showed it to Tim a few days later (this was just a few days after we, the team, had first arrived), and Tim told him he had a hernia and needed to see a doctor to get it operated on. The man insisted that since the portrusion was a result of a curse, what he needed was a witchdoctor to cure it, so for a month or so, he spent a fortune going from witch-doctor to witch-doctor, getting counter-curses to cure his hernia, all to no avail. Until earlier that night, when at around 7ish, he'd gotten to Tim's with a hernia around the size of my head (this is an approximation, I didn't actually get anywhere near the hernia to compare sizes. It certainly looked bigger than a coconut though), crying, throwing up, and almost passing out in severe pain, asking Tim for a ride to go to the hospital.
Apparently, things of a similar nature have happened several times- people would come to Tim with a problem, he'd tell them what they needed to do, but they sought the help of the spirits instead, and ended up coming back when the problem had aggravated to an emergency. Except this time Tim had someone to ride with him on the long ride there and back.
Anyways, we took the guy (and several of his friends and relatives) over on the team van and got him admitted at the hospital. On the way we saw a ring-tailed lemur, several owls including one that swooped right in front of our van, a large nocturnal animal that I thought was the African Honey-Badger (cousin of the Wolverine's), but from the family members' description of its habits, am thinking it is not, and in fact have no idea as to what it may be. Also saw several full grown deer the size of hares (they're called dyk-dyks), and several hares the size of full-grown, hare-sized deer. Had some great conversations with Tim on the way there and back, and finally got home around 3 am.
All this just to illustrate the great relliance that our friends and neighbours here have on the occult and spirits, despite their allegiance to islam. There's so much need in Mzenga for your prayers.