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Crocodiles Lurking
A missionary who served in Africa tells of the region in Malawi (just Northwest of Zimbabwe) where the women go to the river for water. Every once and a while one of them will get swept into the water by a big crocodile never to be seen again.
River crocodiles can be enormous creatures, 1,000 lbs. and up to 20 feet long. They can run faster than a man, and if they go for someone standing next to the river there is no defense short of a person with a big gun who can shoot well. They clamp onto a leg or arm and drag the person off to drown and be consumed at leisure. They are especially aggressive in Malawi and prey on large animals also. A walk along the river there is not a good idea.
I happened to fall into conversation with a young veterans’ organization member, who turned out to also be eligible for the veteran’s organization to which I belong, due to service in Korea. My outfit needs more fresh blood, so I had an ulterior motive to sit and listen, just prompting him for more of his thoughts. It was a treat to hear a well-spoken young man’s perspective on his own life, work, and service. The trick, really the pleasant surprise, was to then find an amazing breadth and depth to this fellow veteran, who I took from the conversation to be in his mid-20s.
From the mid-1980s to early 1990s, I worked in Chad, Africa, for Esso Exploration. There was a lot of oil there and Esso had a group of ten geologists — me being one of them — who rotated to Chad on a 21-21 tour. We worked on the drilling rigs looking for oil and describing the reservoir. In September 1989, two of my best friends — who were also members of the ten — had just finished up a well and one of them was at the end of his tour. Mark was one of those men, and his best friend, Charlie, was the other. Going home after a 21-day rotation after working long hours on a rig was something we all looked forward to. Mark was pestering Charlie to fly back with him (Charlie still had a week to go on his rotation) because the rig was moving and it would be a week or two before we would be ready to drill another well, but Charlie decided to stay to finish up the office paper work.
“Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God.” —
She was an immigrant to the United States, an independent woman who began her modeling career at five years old, and was a successful model who spoke five languages: Slovene, English, French, Serbian and German. She moved to the US in 1996, and became a permanent resident in 2001 and a US citizen in 2006.
Robert Mugabe is under house arrest by the Zimbabwe military, 
