 |
| Relatively quiet, taxi-less street |
Now we don’t have a car, so we depend on taxis too. This meant that we were indisposed by the
taxi strike too. Examples:
·
Our teammates who live in the next town over
wouldn’t be able to get to our team meeting so instead they spent the night at
our house, and then since the taxis still weren’t running they stayed a second
night. (This was actually a blessing in disguise since we got to hang out and
play board games with them.)
·
We are co-teaching some English classes with
some island teachers. When the strike
hit, they were not able to come into town, so we had extra English classes to
teach.
·
There’s a couple of men who come by to sell us
vegetables to our door (a very nice situation) but with no taxis available, there
was no fresh vegetables.
·
Our doctor teammate had to wait an hour and a
half to find someone willing to take him to his village clinic.
·
When we found out that they had changed our
visitor’s flight and that we had to get him to the airport right away, we had
some anxious moments while we called our few friends who own cars and asked our
neighbors to help us get our visitor to the airport. (He made it just in time.)
So a common question we get here is, “Why don’t you have a
car?” I usually explain how we don’t
need one to get around, and that cars are expensive, and there’s unforeseen expenses
like insurance and repairs…just a bunch of trouble that we’d rather not have to
deal with. But there’s another part that
you might find strange. By not having a
car, we feel closer to our neighbors.
The fact of the matter is most islanders don’t have cars. And so a taxi strike inconveniences
them. They suffer. And when we are inconvenienced, to some
extent we suffer too. We relate to what
our friends and neighbors are going through.
We even ask for their help to work around these problems.
 |
| She keeps losing teeth! |
Now I’m extremely thankful for my friends here who have cars—our
visitor would probably not have made his flight otherwise—but I wonder, if we
had a car, would we have noticed the strike at all? Would it have had much of an effect on
us? Would we have really cared?
So what did we gain (besides the chance to complain along
with our neighbors)? I think it’s about
walking a mile in another man’s shoes. We come from thousands of miles away and
try to cross over the distance of culture, language and history in order to
understand and be understood. We do a lot of things to try to reach over this
gap and this time around, not having a car helped us get just a little closer.
PRAYERS ANSWERED
Our visitor made it to his flight! Our teammate has had a
good time in Kenya (she’ll be back tomorrow). Tom had a chance to tell the
final story to one of the guys he has been meeting with and they had a good
discussion. After a couple of weeks of feeling discouraged, we are starting to
feel encouraged again- thanks for your kind thoughts and prayers. Our team finished and printed the 1st edition
of a little grammar book for the local language! We pray that it will help more
people learn and appreciate this language. A young woman in our neighborhood
wants Megan to come and study with her and her family (siblings and
mother)—this is just the kinds of opportunities that we pray for!
PRAYERS REQUESTED
We’ve had two rounds of the taxi strikes and there may be
more. Pray for a resolution and that we’d be patient in the meantime. Pray that
the second man will get to hear the final story (ideally through his friend). It
is starting to get hot. Megan was supposed to meet with the family yesterday
but a neighborhood funeral meant a week delay. Pray that she would have wisdom
as she interacts with this family.
