The Between Times

It feels like we're all a little out of sorts today, stuck between one big thing and the next. It's like this at home, too, between Christmas and New Year's Eve -- what to do now without life's usual routines? The bishop, the dean, and Christina have all gone to Mundri for a meeting of Moru "chiefs" -- all the big people in the area. We all walked to Lunjini School this morning with Gordon, and now Robert, Tammy, and Gordon have gone to see the three wells the Diocese of Missouri paid to have drilled over the past year. They'll be gone about six hours. The five team members returning to Missouri starting Monday have started to turn their faces toward airports, and Dan and Deb and I are maybe wondering how the week without them will shape up. There's quite a bit of "official" stuff to do before Robert leaves, and he has really very little time. So, now that our official task for the day is over, we are just computing, doing laundry, reading, chatting... waiting for something to occur or someone new to show up. Morris is supposed to come after lunch to teach us our first formal Moru lesson, and I'm excited about that.

We are also in kind of a "between" place with our hosts. We have done all the official introductions and greetings, and we have had some important conversations. But we are not going to live here -- in fact, we are all going to go away quite soon -- so moving on to the logical next phase of getting a sense of daily life and having the little random, inconsequential conversations that let you really know people will be difficult if not downright impossible. Emily and I were talking this morning about the problem of ever moving past the "honored guest" stage to see Moru life through a clearer glass, and especially talking about getting past our foreign-eyes' view of their worship and spirituality to have some idea what it's really like to be them. Which of course raises some philosophical questions about how any of us communicate our true selves or our feelings and beliefs, but I am not a philosopher.

Here is perhaps the most important question for today: With Christina in Mundri, what is lunch going to look like? I'm expecting beans and rice, sans flourishes. Thanks to everyone writing comments on this blog; I'm passing messages on to Tammy and Deb, as requested. We are all thirsty for news of home.