FDA & the lion's den

Dear Friends,
Greetings! After three days being locked up in the apartment working on my syllabus for the New Testament Background class I'll be teaching, today I left home to go and forage for food for a few minutes. I needed a break!

I found my ful again. It is probably easier if I just try and go to the same person when I can to get the ful as we are learning to communicate. I dredged in my memory and thought I'd heard the word "laban" used for milk so I said that and indicated a crumbly motion with my hand. He got it and produced the cheese that goes with the ful! As soon as I can I've got to continue on my Arabic vocabulary work.

A friend recently asked me if buying the ful is a way to connect with the culture here. Yes, it is. It is also a way to begin building relationships. At least that was what I found in China. I'm not talking like come over for coffee relationships but simply I see you, acknowledge and recognize you, and she seems to like our food and wants to make the effort to buy it from us kind of relationship. I also happen to really like the ful. It does need olive oil, salt and the cheese to enhance it, but it is good and I assume it is healthy.

Now, on the other hand....I inwardly cringe when I see it being ladled into a container that looks like a plastic pitcher and put into a bag -- that is the standard take-out, a plastic bag. And when I realized the man today had falafel, I asked for some of that and he used his bare hands to put it into another plastic bag. Be still my heart. I never got sick on street corner food in China because I didn't like it and therefore didn't eat it. Here I like it. I just pray for protection for my stomach every time, let me tell you! Because I know there is no FDA, there are no standardized rules for cooking and serving here. In Rome, do as the Romans do....

Speaking of Rome, or whatever empire it was that Daniel lived in, at the moment it escapes me having had my head in Rome for the day today....I passed my own version of the Lion's Den on the way home this morning. One night recently something got the neighborhood wild dogs barking and barking and barking. I did not appreciate it one little bit. And I thought to myself that this is why I am reluctant to walk home from the bus stop on Sunday nights in the dark -- these wild dogs really scare me. So today on my way home from the ful and yogurt and date bars run after I had crossed the secondary main street onto my side street I saw a whole lot of dogs sunning and sleeping! Truly one of them looked like a lion and that was the first thought that passed in my mind -- Daniel and the Lion's Den!

I finished the rough of the syllabus today. I need to make a copy of it so that I can see the whole thing at once, fix the errors and then take the book listings and numbers and the books to the college and get started on making copies for reading that goes with each day's topic. There is no place to buy theological books in Sudan. I was shown one Christian book store that had both English and Arabic books. It was definitely not a college or seminary type bookstore. So we do what we have to do to teach the students.

I am reasonably sure that a Kindle from Amazon.com would not work for me because I have discovered that even as big as the screen is on my 15 inch Apple Computer it drives me crazy not being able to see a whole document at once. I think I will probably always be a paper kind of person. Who knows?
Blessings,
Debbie