Today the pick up was misbehaving and the old bush Land Rover can no longer be trusted for long journeys so we went to Maasai in the Discovery...............
We arrived in the boma and immediately a conversation started in my head between Lisa from the UK and Lisa in Tanzania and it went something like this:
L-uk : Oh no look at those kids all over the car, I’d better get someone to guard it while we’re here.
L-tz : Don’t be silly, if you fuss about your lovely shiny green car, it only widens the gap between you and them.
L-uk : But look at that one, he’s investigating how the light guards are fixed and I bet he’ll pull them off next...........
L-tz : Yes but you can’t expect to show them how to trust God when you ask one of them to guard your car against the rest of them.
L-uk: But it’s my lovely car.................
L-tz – Stop being stupid, relax and go and enjoy yourself...............................which I did and off we went to drink tea, chat, sing, pray and talk about John 3 – all with the car in view I have to admit.
Time to go home and what do we find? Names, and plenty of them, meticulously carved with a rusty old nail all along my lovely car. It seems that small people, not much higher than the bonnet, so well hidden from our view, wanted to show off their writing skills and we had provided a lovely green shiny board for them to do so. One side was clearly for Primary and the other for infants – and the prize in Primary goes to whoever carved ‘malaria’ so beautifully over the front wheel arch. On the infants’ side, the prize goes to whoever did that very imaginative extended swirly pattern above the sill.
The next conversation in my head cannot be recorded – psychologists call them hot thoughts for a reason and they are the ones that are best filtered before we open our mouths. Suffice to say that L-uk took the floor in that conversation!
I forgave the parents because they were equally outraged. They had seen my face and their consequent care and concern was pure kindness. It was when one woman, desperately searching for a remedy for me, suggested that I could fill the writing in with a green crayon or a small pot of paint that I let the hot thoughts go.
L-tz took over the conversation in my head and I wondered why I would expect people to behave according to my own principles – why should they? If I was in the UK, it might have been vandals smashing the windows, stealing the music machine or simply scratching the sides as they walked past. At least, I have a car that has been carefully crafted with the names of the people I was with today.
