Elephants and Tourists

 

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Romans 11:33 Good News Translation

³³ How great are God's riches! How deep are his wisdom and knowledge! Who can explain his decisions? Who can understand his ways?

 

In 1956, on our furlough from mission service in Africa, Dad bought a VW Microbus in Germany to use back in Africa.  We toured a bit of western Europe and spent a few hours touring the Amsterdam Zoo.  As we walked with a great throng of tourists down a main sidewalk in the zoo, we were asked to step aside and let an elephant come by.  The elephant had a frame on its back and several tourists perched up there.  Our family stood behind a number of other tourists.  When the elephant plodded right in front of us, it suddenly stopped, turned, and looked directly at Mom.  Then it threw its trunk up over its head and trumpeted loudly, right in her face.  Mom just about fainted.  Then the elephant turned and plodded on down the trail.  One of the zookeepers came up to Mom right away and asked if she was okay.  “I have been working here for twenty years,” he apologized, “and I’ve never seen that happen before!  I’m terribly sorry!”

I couldn’t help laughing.  I knew immediately what had happened.  Some two years previously we had been touring Wankie National Park (now Hwange in Zimbabwe). We had seen very little in the way of animals and were driving down a narrow track through the rather dense savannah bush when some 50 feet ahead of us a great African cow elephant stepped into the trail and slowly and majestically walked off into the bush on the opposite side of the track. Then, one-by-one, the rest of the matriarch’s herd filed across the track.  Elephants always have the right of way, so we waited in awe of these great animals.  I was sitting in the back seat and saw the matriarch come around to left side of our car and stand there watching us and her herd coming across in front of us.  The other passengers all had their eyes glued on those crossing our track ahead of us.  When all had finally crossed and disappeared, we sat and waited quietly.  Suddenly the Matriarch threw her trunk into the air and trumpeted violently.  She then started to charge straight at us.  Mom about had a heart attack right there and then.  That was enough to strike an eternal fear of elephants into her heart.  Everyone in the car started yelling: “Roll up the windows!”  “Roll down the windows!”  “Start the car!”  “Backup!”  “Go forward!”  Dad was driving.  He didn’t know what to do so just remained quiet.

Fortunately, after a few determined steps, the matriarch decided against charging us, turning our car upside down, and trampling it flat, as elephants do.  After that episode, Mom would stay in camp while we went elephant watching at Wankie and pray for our safety.  When God created elephants, He put many typically human emotions into their great hearts including love, sadness, and a sense of humor.  Apparently that elephant in Amsterdam sensed the terror that clutched Mom’s heart and responded to it as an elephant’s practical joke, in its own natural way. It was saying to her, “See, I mean you no harm!  This is only noise and bluster!”

 

Thank You, Lord, for Your infinite knowledge and wisdom in creating both us and elephants. We rest in Your loving care for us.

 

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[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/32/0d/c8320d52ca67d6e95dbc55cdac40b8a9.jpg

Serengeti National Park

 

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Psalm 104:24-25

King James Version

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

²⁵ So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

 

We were poor. All of the other missionaries at Ikizu Secondary owned a car. We could not have afforded to put gas in it, even had we owned one. So, we had to hitch a ride anytime we wanted to go anywhere. From my meagre earnings I had managed to buy an SLR camera and a 200 to 400 mm zoom lens.

We lived on the northern edge of the great Serengeti National Park. Often on a Sabbath (Saturday) afternoon or a Sunday, I would talk with one of the other missionaries—never the Kings who had no sense of adventure—about what we might do. The only real entertainment within driving distance—the Serengeti.

I would almost always ride shotgun while Gary or Fritz or George or Dave or Bob drove. I seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the trackless steppe county of Africa. Even though the grass was four feet high, and the bush and trees grew with no pattern, I always knew the most direct route to the only ford across the Grumeti River and the way home. There was no GPS in those days.

Upstream or downstream, the Grumeti housed the great crocodiles and even greater hippos. We would often risk life and limb by stealing on foot through the dense brush along the river to snap pictures of the crocs or hippos. Of course, this same thorn brush often hid the lions and leopards awaiting their prey. Hunters claimed you could always smell a lion from 20 feet away by the foul smell of rotting flesh caught between its teeth. I was fortunate not to have ever gotten that close on foot. Every year we got reports of someone’s having been carried off by a lion or disemboweled by a leopard.

Out on the plains we saw the great animals, 5-ton elephants flapping their ears to drive off the tsetse fly, tall giraffes delicately picking off the leaves from between the vicious thorns of flat-topped acacia trees. When we were lucky, we would arrive to experience the hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra during their annual migration towards Lake Victoria. They left the plains totally denuded of grass and blotched with pungent manure. Then we could see the smaller animals: warthogs running with their tails pointing straight up, maybe the sneaky jackal. Always we saw various stately antelope that varied from the eland, as great as a bull moose, to the terrier-size tommy (Thompson’s gazelle) with its perpetual-motion tail. 

As the sun sank towards the lake in the west, we would drive back home, enriched by the vista of God’s varied handiwork. Back at Ikizu, missionaries gathered as Sylvia or Charlotte played hymns on the piano and we hand cranked vanilla ice-cream and popped corn, renewed for a new week of endless work.

Thanks, Lord, that we have never gone wanting and for the enjoyment we have received in spite of periods of poverty.

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[1] https://www.exploring-africa.com/en/tanzania/western-corridor-and-grumeti-reserve-western-serengeti/south-grumeti-river

Africa by Starlight

 

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John 1:5

Good News Translation

⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

 In 1967 in the heart of Africa, my bus pulled into the tiny hamlet of Nyamuswa. I grabbed my weighty suitcase and a heavy box of books and stepped off onto the dirt road. It was two o’clock a.m. The bus roared off into the night

I stood there. No one was awake at night, and no electricity existed within 25 miles at that hour. No vehicles of any kind were on the road. Nyamuswa was pitch black. There were no phones, not even at home. Cell phones had not been invented. No one knew when I was coming. There was no way I could lug my heavy luggage the three miles to my home at Ikizu on foot. I knew no one in the hamlet. There was no gas station, no café.

Puzzled, I stood there in the night. I hadn’t planned what I would do at this point. Stars were bright in the moonless sky. They made the white-washed walls of the buildings visible, ghostly visible. About four or five low thatched roof buildings down on the right was the maternity clinic that always had several women with complications awaiting their babies. There would be a caretaker there in case an emergency happened at night.

My mind clutched at a faint hope. Maybe I could awaken her and leave my bags there. Of course, men were not welcome there, day or night. Every idiot knew that! I was a foreigner, mzungu. Maybe, just maybe, I could persuade her to let me store my bags there.

I trudged up to the dark, heavy wooden door. “Hodi!” I called loudly. I knocked on the door—no one knocks on a door; they always call “Hodi!”

After repeated calling, a highly suspicious voice replied “Ni nani?” (“Who’s there?”)

“Ni Wilton Clarke kutoka Ikizu!” (“I’m Wilton Clarke from Ikizu.”) With that I had practically exhausted my Swahili. Fortunately, she spoke more English than I did Swahili. After some protracted talking, she understood that I just wanted to leave my bags in her clinic until the next morning. She showed me where to put them, and I left her with a heartfelt “Asante sana!” I would be lying if I said there was not a hint of a worry as to whether I would see them the next morning.

Elsewhere I tell about how the military had been called to Nyamuswa, and they had shot 9 elephants in the Nyamuswa gardens, so wild animals did come into this area every so often. I hadn’t heard any actual reports about animals recently, but I did know that leopards would roam where ever they pleased and that they often killed just for the thrill of killing. Of course, you’ve heard about poisonous snakes and other undesirables. All of these things were in my mind as I started to walk, by starlight, the three miles home.

It was bright enough so I could see where the road surface was. The stars were brilliant. Orion was high in the sky along with its accompanying constellations. The Milky Way was spectacular. So, I really did enjoy the walk. I let myself into the house shortly after three o’clock. Sylvia expressed surprise and joy at seeing me. Later that morning I went back and picked up my bags. They had been moved but were totally unmolested.

Thank You, Lord, for the beauty of a still, dark night with a bit of tension yet filled with Your care.

 

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[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/light-pollution-star-night-sky-england-rural-census-orion-campaign-a8873096.html