The Copeland Ramblings/

The Hernia

During our time in Jungle Camp we had the privilege of meeting Kirk & Yolanda Rogers. Kirk, Yolanda and their family are missionaries to Guinea West Africa with NTM and were back this summer on home assignment. Kirk shared with our class about Guinea and at the end of the presentation gave Debra and I a book entitled ‘The Hernia’ written by Rolf Engelbrecht. We began reading and soon discovered that we couldn’t put it down! ‘The Hernia’ is self described as a book of “amusing anecdotes and cultural insights from missionary life in Guinea, West Africa”. It really is a funny book but also gave us a very realistic look into life in the country of Guinea which we are headed towards! One of our goals before we leave for Guinea is to help our friends and family get to know Guinea. I wrote Rolf and asked permission to share some of his stories on our blog, he quickly wrote back giving us the go ahead. Rolf is a very encouraging person to correspond with which from a worldly perspective is strange considering all that he has gone through. In 2004 he was diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live and as he writes in his book he is “confident that everything is in the hands of a loving God” and is “at peace with the situation”. Please pray for Rolf as he and his wife Danae continue to deal with the cancer. If you are interested in a copy of the Hernia they can be purchased here

No doubt about it, women are the “beats of burden” in the Guinea culture. It is not uncommon to see them walking along carrying loads exceeding 100 pounds balanced on their heads – without using their hands to balance the cargo, and with a baby strapped to the backs.

Even Guinean men acknowledge their propensity to pass any cargo carrying chores on to their women. Here is an indigenous joke on the subject, which appears to be quite popular in West Africa.
————————-
When Musa could stand the pain no longer, he finally dragged himself into to see the village ‘doctor’.

Musa: It’s my groin, doctor – it’s really sore.

Doctor: Let me see, Musa. Oh yeah… I see… Looks like a pretty bad hernia.

Musa: It really hurts, doctor. I don’t know where it came from. It just sort of happened.

Doctor: Well, do you remember overly exerting yourself recently? Any unusually hard work?

Musa: No, I don’t think so… Wait a minute, now I remember… Yeah, that must be it… A few days ago me and two of my buddies had to lift a huge load of firewood. It was so heavy we could hardly get it up onto my wife’s head.

Doctor: Oh yea, that would do it. You really need to be a bit more careful, Musa.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.