Turtle, Greens and Sago

Noel has been helping me with translation and lesson comprehension checking for months.  He’s the most faithful of all my helpers, helping me twice a week consistently.  He would help me more if I didn’t need to work with other guys as well.  Anyway, he came on Wed after the teaching time, although he slept through the teaching time and was ready to work on a couple Bible lesson checks.  On Monday, he’d helped me and as he was leaving, he and some other guys were going fishing.  We talked about turtle meat and how good it is but I don’t ever get any of it.  So he said that if he got one, he’d give it to me.  Well, he didn’t come by that night with one but someone else did – the whole turtle, shell and all!  I was barely eating real food again from the stomach bug so I wasn’t sure what to do with it.  I didn’t know how to get the meat out of the shell or anything – wasn’t sure I felt like tackling it that night either.  Then Akusta suggested that they cook it on the fire first and then she would bring me the meat.  Great – sounds like a good idea to me!  So she brought it back partially cooked and as much as I wanted to finish cooking it and eat it, I threw it into a Ziploc and put it in the fridge.  Then it was time for my lone egg and biscuit dinner- the first real food in days.  

 

Anyway, so now we’re back to Wednesday.  Noel came and somewhere in the middle of lesson checking, he started talking about how they caught turtles and fish bare-handed in the really low river the day before.  They caught something like 244 fish and turtles and a couple of small crocodiles too.  I was excited for them – it’s always good to know they’re getting meat to eat!  So I thought we were just going to chat about their great catch and fun but then he invited me to eat with them that afternoon!  His wife, Wekot was going to cook turtle meat and greens and make the sago paste for us to share together.  This is not a normal thing – they don’t actively invite us to meals very often so that made this a pretty special invitation.  So I cooked some rice and went over for dinner.  My stomach was barely used to food again so I wondered how it would go.  The turtle meat was good – hard to eat the meat without the skin and such.   The little claws were still attached but it was pretty good meat.  The first bite of greens hit my stomach and just kind of sat there like a lead balloon.  I wasn’t sure I could finish what was on my plate although it wasn’t an outlandish amount of food.  But I kept pushing myself and insisted that they eat more of the rice than what they put on my plate.  Once we finished off our food, we sat around and talked about things they’re learning in the teaching or have questions about.  Noel asked again about where their spirits would go after death.  If a man doesn’t believe in God, does he go to hell?  Yes, and one who believes God’s talk – that he’s a sinner before God but that God has provided for that in Christ goes to heaven.  We didn’t go as far as naming Christ since we haven’t taught that yet but kept pointing towards that as we talked.  Then he asked, well, if our ancestors didn’t have God’s talk, then where did they go?  That’s always a much harder question to answer, eh?  I tried to get them to come up with the answer themselves by asking questions based on the things they’ve been learning. They recognized that they must have gone to hell and said that we’d talk further about it once they’d heard the rest of the lessons.  It was a neat time with them – felt like I was visiting friends in the States in a lot of ways, talking about the Lord after dinner.  Never mind that we ate with our fingers in the darkness and hardly talked as we ate, it was a neat time of fellowship with them!