stories from the field #4: Maputo Elephant Reserve

O.K. Here is one of those "on the lighter side" type stories. Enjoy, cause the result of this story could've been disasterous!!!

Much can be said about the couple days I spent with Celia, Julie, and Matt on the Maputo Elephant Reserve in southern Mozambique. A long-term missionary got sick so Julie rushed into the short-term compound looking for someone to help take 40 kids camping for the weekend. It was between me and Marcus (from New Brunswick), and Marcus wanted to go less than I did. Long story short, I got talked into it. I threw some stuff into a bag and jumped on the back of the flatbed, and we were off on a 5 hr drive over roads that you couldn't really call "roads".

The time was good. On the second night we made popcorn over an open fire for the kids. They enjoyed very much so. Julie wanted to make juice for the kids to have with the popcorn, but Celia said, "We should save the juice for the morning, cause we only have enough to make one more serving for them." And that's what we did, we saved the juice. All was good, we all crashed.

In the morning, I slept in an hour and when I woke breakfast was well under way. I sleepily took a seat by some boys and poured myself some juice into my water bottle. I sat, ate, drank, and was merry. The juice wasn't that good, it tasted like it was extremly watered down and flavorless. But it was a pale yellow, so I figured that they musn't have had a lot of the crystals to make it really good. Julie comes over and sits beside me and we start raving. I take another drink from my water bottle [which was half empty by now (or half full, depending how you look at it)] and she says, "Josh.......what are u drinking?!"

"I'm drinking the juice you guys made this morning", I replied.

"Celia, did you guys make that juice this morning?"

"No, why?", Celia shouted back.

A look of horror came across Julie's face as she said, "Oh my God, you're drinking the water!" (They had gotten the water for doing the dishes).

Not cool. Anyways, that explained why the "juice" tasted like crap. But, I never got sick (thank God) and all was well. Whew....close one. African tap-water out of the back of a random building is not a good idea.