Antelope in the Hart Mountain Refuge, Oregon
My head is spinning Africa. I've
yearned to know more. Because I can? Because I should? Read Africa Trek
1 by Alexandre and Sonia
Poussin. It will change everything you know and think
about Africa. An amazing journey. An amazing story.
Favorite excerpts...
Everything is simpler with all hands
in the soil.
We are
thinking of the thirst of an entire people.
We are all walking towards the light. When you reach the summit, keep
climbing.
Sorcery, jealousies, acts of
sabotage: the success of an individual is forbidden. He has no right
to succeed. It's everyone or no one.
To be a missionary is not to
disembark with a brand new catechism in your suitcase and hit people
over the head to try and hammer it in forcibly. To be a missionary is
to find the work of God in every man, in every culture, and to
inhabit, inculturate that spirituality with the evangelical message
of the Good News.
How many of these admirable women
will we come across, these heavy lifters who bear loads, households,
offspring, and Africa in their arms?
You are always in the middle of a
landscape you are crossing! You think you see it? All you are doing
is moving the center, and the landscape never ceases to change...
They aren't a thousand young people
singing together, but a single body expressing itself with a thousand
hearty vocal chords. A lesson in harmony and unity. No complexes, no
individualism, no self-aggrandizement or self-obsession among the
Basothos. The length of the mass depends on the enthusiasm of the
young people; sometimes it last three hours and we can't manage to
stop them singing....Then there are long discussions about life,
faith, travel, the world, Christians around the world. And what
surprises me most is that these girls have a shameless faith, free,
without complexes, pure and simple, natural. And it becomes obvious
to me how hard people are on the believers of Europe. Systematically
derided. Constantly humiliated. To what extent they hide their faith
and elicit sarcastic remarks. Who has not felt queasy getting into a
conversation on this taboo subject, revealing one's candid thoughts?
Who has not been ashamed to say there was maybe something rather than
nothing? What fine man has not been sacrificed at least once,
swearing to himself he will not be caught again on the altar of
ambient cynicism and skepticism and that anti-clericalism and atheism
fashionable ideas. Well, the glacial wind of the kingdom of sorrow
and emptiness is swept away by the shining faces of these eager
girls. Let them believe! And let me doubt! Who ever said that faith
was certainty? And happiness, those who are born into it, well
nourished, spoiled, they find that bourgeois, so they worry about
their appearance and think themselves romantic when they are
brooding, wise when they are sinister, happy when they are blasé.
Read this book. You
may not be able to trek Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Mount
Kilimanjaro, but you can follow the footsteps of man, learn their
story. Our story. Go with them on their trek. Above a
certain altitude, man cannot conceive bad thoughts.
As for me, Africa Trek ll, the journey from Kilimanjaro to the
Sea of Galilee is next up on my list.
