It has been a long career and a satisfying one and an interesting one. During the lull for Christmas, I read old letters that I'd written to my kids. One is from 1991 when I was managing 5 houses for missionaries in Africa. They'd come home to visit about once a year and they were interesting to visit with. Here are two paragraphs from my letter.
The missionaries from Africa were back in my office today. They were telling abut their favorite true snake stories from Zambia involving them. She said she found a dead cobra under her favorite rocker that she'd been sitting in the night before. It had been cut in two by the rocking action. She was very close to having been bitten. His story was that the natives all came running to tell him there was a python in the chicken house. He found this gigantic python that had swallowed one of his chickens. The snake was then too big to get out of the hole it had come in and he was unable to kill it because the python is an endangered species there and can't be killed. But a neighbor told him that if he cut a switch and whipped it good, it would leave and never return.
So he starts whipping that long snake but the snake didn't leave. It made itself regurgitate the whole chicken first and then promptly exited. Strange story, isn't it. The snake was smart enough to know it couldn't get out with a lumpy chicken body. No, the chicken did not live.
I still find this fascinating and wonder if things are the same in Zambia after all these years. I've even lost tract of the missionaries because they sold the houses and I no longer had to manage them.
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