Camel's milk and Scrabble

Today in my German class we had a student who brought in Scrabble. Several students thought this would be a fun way to practice our German before class and during our half hour break. I'm no whiz at it in the States and playing here is even worse. Four of us sat there during our break, 1 Swahili speaker, 1 Arabic speaker, myself, and a French speaker. It was beyond painful. After 30 minutes of collaborative work we had only 5 or 6 words, 2 of which were english words adopted by the Germans. Needless to say we were not keeping score.

The Scrabble experience pretty much sums up how I feel right now: stunted. I can do my homework and then must go back through everything, spending several minutes on each sentence diagramming them out to figure out what's dative or akkusitiv, and then what gender the word is, and then which ending to write in. It's exhausting and I still get it wrong.

Often we find ourselves feeling so depleted and we keep telling each other 'camel's milk'. There is an organization, Mission Chad, that our church in Lanesville supports. Many of the nationals in Chad are accustomed to eating one meal a day in the late afternoon, some kind of baked grain mush. Some of Christians of this group have taken it upon themselves to go and work with other Chadians in the northern part of the country. They have joined the nomadic tribes that travel across the Sahara subsisting only on camel's milk. They don't even get baked mush anymore. That's sacrifice.

So whenever we are tired and weary and start complaining about how expensive things are, or how the car is making yet another weird noise, or the towels are so rough, or how we're going to be on foam mats forever.....you get the idea...one or the other of us will just interrupt and say 'CAMEL'S MILK' and that usually shuts up the other person. A little perspective is all.

I write this as the window here in the internet cafe is banging against the back of my head because of the breeze. Camel's milk. I am thankful there's a breeze.