Update Summer - Snakes

Snakes are an unavoidable reality of life in Africa. And where there are snakes, it is the inevitable reality that you will one day encounter them. Thus I recount to you the unavoidable and inevitable realities of life here.

On a particularly unassuming day, we went about the business of camp life: Collecting jerry cans of water from the borehole, making pocho and beans over a charcoal fire and attending classes under the grass roofed meeting house. The sun shone as it always shone. The wind blew as it always blew. The benches we sat on were as hard as they always were. And the classes captured my interest, stimulated my faith and equipped me as they always did. As the adults sat in the meeting room, the children were nearby in a small school hut (the school hut was built with half walls that gave view to the African plains below- beautiful). Miss Shelly and Mama Lane were entertaining the children and teaching them lessons as they always did. Mama Lane sat upon the mat with the younger children reading a story aloud to them, ignoring dust, bugs and ants that ran across their toes. It was a normal day at school… until that fateful moment when Mama Lane looked up. There, crawling through the grass thatched roof was a slimy beast of Eden!

Mama Lane acted calmly, as every mother, grandmother, teacher extraordinaire should. She whispered to Miss Shelly that she should get the children out of the school house and then she came to interrupt our classes. “Excuse me” she said politely, “I need Simon Gruber’s help.” Class stopped as we considered this request. Simon, having no children of his own was not usually the one called to the school house. Sensing that we were not grasping the urgency of the situation, she looked directly at him and implored, “Simon, there’s a snake in the school house, could you please come kill it.” Simon was on his feet in two seconds flat and ran to the school house drawing his knife from its sheath as he ran.


As Miss Shelly ushered the last of the confused, but oddly calm children out of the school house, Simon rushed in. With one swoop he flung the snake from the roof and chopped off his head. The rest of us watched in a dumb stupor as he proudly lifted the snake up and declared “meat for dinner!”

An ordinary day of teaching in Karamoja!

So happy that Simon Gruber is on my team to face the unavoidable, inevitable encounters with the lowest of God’s creation!

We ate snake for dinner.

Please read and pray through Psalm 91 for us.

PS- The locals killed four very large puff adders (third most dangerous snake in Uganda) in the field below our hill. This is the same field that I walked through every week on the way to the village… They are the ugliest snakes I’ve ever seen! Praise God I’ve never seen them alive!