TRAVEL and COMMUNICATION...............................................

My head whirls with the va et vient of the international workers in our world today.  I hear So and So from "East Overshoes"  is in Seattle speaking in some big church - and I am thinking I have been praying for those people as they just arrived back in Papua - or wherever!   And then I go to church and see people from other parts of the globe whom we just farewelled last year, and here they are back again like a " bad penny" returning!   But things have changed...... travel is easier and sometimes cheaper than it used to be.  People are allowed to be more connected to their families and can get permission to go to weddings and funerals and graduations and so on and on.  These changes are certainly not all bad.  I had to learn to know my folks all over again after not seeing them for four of my changing teenage years.  We were able to make it for some of your weddings, and that was a treat.  But the down side is that it is hard enough for new people to learn a new culture and language, and if there are too many interruptions in that process, it is telling on the ministry on the field.  But the present system is sure not going to change and we are glad for any visits we have with our kids, even as other parents are.  And we are certainly looking forward to being with most of you overseas in a few months. 

We were talking about travel and communication the other day together, and I decided to go back through the years and ruminate on the way things were, how they developed and the way they are today.  I was reminded of this today when the SKYPE rang, I waited for the phone to pick it up (Dad was out visiting an ex-prisoner) and the voice I heard was a young man whom we had befriended and mentored years ago, who now lives in Ouaga.  We had a nice long chat!  And inside I mourned the fact that you kids all grew up not having that kind of privilege - to talk with us regularly and we with you. 

Occasionally we would receive a phone call - but it was always because someone was engaged or getting married or had had surgery or some other momentous debate - because phone calls were so expensive. 

To go way back in antiquity, I remember when I was a little kid and we had friends who had a "rumble seat"  in their car.  You probably never saw one. But for me that was a treat when those friends would take me for a ride in their rumble seat!  As I grew up in Africa, most of our missionaries had pickup trucks.  We kids used to ride in the back, surrounded by stacks of luggage and gas bottles and all covered with red dust at the end of the journey.  At night my Dad would occasionally take some of us kids out hunting for deer with a searchlight, and we would stand up in the back of the pickup bracing ourselves against the cab, looking for animals.  And that was fun!

Phone calls during your childhood and teen age years in Africa were reserved for sickness or death or some big event that was going to happen.  When you had an emergency appendectomy, Cheryl, we got a phone call from the hospital and Aunt Evelyn and You talked to us briefly.  The year you and Jennie got married, John, I had been teaching down in the Republic of Guinea, and when Dad met me at the airport, he gave me the news and said you were calling back so you could tell me your plans also. That was when you had a job in Puerto Rico and had to advance the date of your wedding which we had planned to attend.

Air letters were only supposed to take ten days to two weeks to arrive from America, but sometimes they were longer than that, and that is how we got your news.  It was always a BIG DAY for us when one of those blue airmail letters was in our mailbag!  There were not even air letters when I was in college, and my parents always wrote one page typed each week, typed on the thinnest paper they could find and sent by air to me in college.  Postage was very expensive in those days also. But every week I received one of those air letters, regular as clockwork - for four years!  No phone calls that I ever remember....

Today we have the blessing of faster mail, FB and emails, cheap phone calls and even seeing each other on SKYPE as we talk!  What a communication revolution!  Those old telegrams we used to get were sometimes really funny as the spelling would get mixed up with the transfer of language!  But a letter from the U.S. took three weeks to arrive, so in case of an urgent message, a telegram was sent. 

The only paved roads in our part of West Africa during those early years were the ones in large cities.  Everything else was dirt in the dry season and mud in the rainy season.  Do you remember the rain barriers??  You could never plan your hours of travel during rainy season.  If there was the least suspicion of rain in the sky, the rain barrier would go up and no car or truck could travel on that dirt road until a little while after the rain ceased.  So in making a long trip, this had to be taken account of - to have extra food and water to drink in case of rain stops. 

In France we travelled by metro, and our metro stop in Paris was two long flights of stairs down into the ground! So when we went anywhere with you two heavy girls, we had to each carry one child and a stroller down into the metro stop and then at the destination  climb up two long flights of steps to see daylight again.  Needless to say, we only made those family trips that way when we had to.  However, we did buy a VW Kombi in France and then we were all set.  Arnolds, Bowers and we could all get into our bus on a Saturday and travel around the area seeing the sights.  It sure made language study more interesting! 

We took that Kombi on to Africa and used it our first term.  For a time we also had a Jeep as the Kombi could not pull the heavy house trailer we used for teaching out in the villages, and so we used the Jeep for that. 

Motor bikes or Yamaha dames made running around town easy.  Dad and you kids all road those. I had never ridden a motorbike and was kind of afraid of them for fear I would slip in the sandy roads.  But toward the end of our time in Burkina, I had been asked by a group in Sarafalao neighborhood in Bobo to help them start a church there. I attended and taught and helped in every way I could. But I had no car for a while as Dad would be in the bush on Sundays.  So I finally learned to ride a motorbike so I could help out with that church plant!  And I kind of enjoyed it.  But really I liked my little Toyota the best of all our cars and I drove that to work at the translation office every day the last couple of years. 

From childhoof I remember the washboard roads and the ferrys we had to cross in RCI and Guinea.  But those were mostly a thing of the past as you kids were growing up.

We were not allowed to go to the States for anything in those days - even death of a family member.  But later on we did get permission to go for weddings, using the month we had for vacation allowed us each year to make the trip.  So things began to loosen up.  And now I am not sure you have to get permission to go anywhere.  We've come a long ways, Baby!!