Wednesday, September 26 -- "What, don't you eat ______?"

We got up and left none too soon. I don't think that any of us wanted to hang around Anavabe much longer. We hiked 2 miles to Andrafiabe. The weather was a bit cooler since it had rained the night before. (I think that it was God crying for the people of Anavabe!) Andrafiabe wasn't too big either, but it felt a bit "warmer" than the previous village. We surveyed and ate lunch. They were very happy to have visitors and pulled out the woven mats for us to sit on and swept the nearby dirt for us. This village did not have a taboo against praying, but they certainly weren't evangelized.

You should have seen the stock piles of rice in some of these houses here! I asked one young man if he liked living in the bush or if he thought the city would be better. He said he preferred the bush because you don't have to buy anything, you grow what you need. I told him that he wouldn't like America then, because here we pretty much have to buy everything. I really enjoyed the part of the surveys where we exchanged information and I got to share a bit about life here. I tried to find common ground between their lives and ours, I told them that in America I spent my days doing the same types of things that they do: cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking care of my family, etc. Kyle didn't seem to think that my version of those chores was very similar to their versions! The men also liked to hear about our cows "without humps on their backs".

Before we ventured on to the next village, we decided to filter some water. It certainly was a lot more of a task to filter water than I thought it would be, but we only used 2 filters between the 5 of us. We filtered at least 22 liters each time we needed water. After filtering, we had to add tablets to the water to kill off certain viruses that the filters were not effective against. The tablets that Kyle had took 4 hours to become active. The additives that we brought took only 30 minutes, so each time we filtered we put some of the 30 minute treatment into a few of the bottles that we thought we would need right away, and the rest of the bottles we put the 4 hour tablets in.

We hiked on another 4 1/2 miles that afternoon to our final village, Ambovenomby, and set up camp. The chief wasn't there so as we waited we got to have an interesting conversation about the bush diet with one of the guides. It seems as though they eat cats. I had really been suspicious of this since we saw dogs everywhere in the villages and we only saw a couple of cats here and there. Now in the states, stray cats repopulate like crazy and I know that these people aren't spaying and neutering them... so where were all the cats??? ****If you're squeamish don't read this!*** I asked how they ate them and he gave me a very detailed description. They chop off their heads and singe the fur off in the fire, then cook them much like they do chicken. They wait until the cat is 3 years old. I guess he thought that we were strange asking all of these questions about cats, so he asked us: "What.... don't you eat cat?" This would be a great example of differing world views!

It was very sad knowing that this was our last night out in the bush! Thanks to all of our prayer support we slept well, ate well, did not get sick and we just thoroughly enjoyed our time "roughing" it! We were so blessed with beautiful evenings and a nearly full moon each night. The stars were amazing too! This picture was meant to capture the moon over our tent site, but the it did not even come close to showing the beauty of the evening.