Return of the Red Velvet Button Beetles

Last Thursday Maynor and I drove Fr. Joseph Ochan from Torit back to his parish in Lowoi. St. Peter Claver Parish in Lowoi is one of the places where the visiting mission team that’s coming next month will be evangelizing, so we wanted to make a quick visit for planning purposes. Fortunately the countryside west of Torit has gotten a lot of rain recently. That makes the rich, fertile soil very soft and muddy, requiring us to use four-wheel drive on the road into the village. We stopped along the way to help some people who were trudging through the mud into town, and when I happened to glance at the ground I saw the same almost fluorescent red beetles I saw on my first visit to Sudan two years ago but hadn’t seen since. It’s almost impossible to overstate how vividly red and fuzzy these beetles are; they almost glow. And there was a whole lot of them, apparently forced out of the ground by the recent rains.

On another note, Dennis Kiyimba returned to Torit from Kampala today. Both his visit home and the journey back entailed some “adventures,” including having lost his backpack on the bus along the way. He was overjoyed, though, when he found out that the bus company had called: someone found the missing bag and turned it in. When I dropped Dennis off at the mission compound where he lives, the children below lined up on the other side of the street and kept waving, saying: “Morning!” It was 4 pm. I think that children going to school in English somehow equated the teachers first greeting of “Good morning” with “hello,” and now it’s the salutation most children use at any time of day, especially toward a white person.

A few other thoughts to share with you. The great need for evangelization as South Sudan emerges as a country of its own was driven home to me in several ways this past week. Walking through the market I saw a cluster of four or five children glued to a generator powered television at a small phone charging booth watching a Puff Daddy (garbage) music video from the US. There’s a whole flock of street children in the vicinity of Mercy House who wear the same unwashed clothing for weeks at a time and sniff glue from discarded water bottles – in little Torit of primitive South Sudan! I ask your prayers, too, for several families grieving the loss of loved ones, in one case a small child, who died under tragic circumstances.

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