A Miserable Day in the Garden

While we were in Samban, the missionary who we were quasi-staying with needed to go to her garden and I, along with a couple other interns, were recruited for the task. Little did I know how miserable I was about to be.
Her garden was, I'll say, more than a mile away, which was fine. A long walk, a walk where you started wondering if there even was a destination, but not miserable. Miserable comes later.
When we arrived in the garden, finally, the missionary was concerned because the grass was so high.
"It'll be hard to see if there are Death Adders… It might be better if you don't help."
"I'll do what my team leader says!" I replied, confident in my team leaders ability to lead me safely.
"You can do what you like," she said unhelpfully. "You might get bitten, but then you might not. I guess it depends on what you believe." And then she walked into the grass.
Great! So now if I don't walk in the grass I'm a faithless heathen and if I do…
"Hey!" calling her back, "Hypothetically speaking, let's say I do get bitten. What happens? Do I get medi-helicoptered out?"
"There'd be nothing we could do. You would die."
Great.
So I walked into the grass. Honestly, this was probably an act of pride more than faith. So if I had gotten bitten, I would have deserved it. But after a few moments of wading through the grass, I came to realize that there was no capacity in which I could help. I didn't have a machete to remove the bananas with and the national women who were helping us didn't need us to catch nor carry the bananas because they had a fantastic system of their own. So after risking my life for naught, I returned to the path and engaged the other purposeless intern with a lively debate on Mark 16:18.


Before we left, as we were waiting for the 4 wheeler to come back to carry the bananas, one of the nationals found gongray, which is this pod and you pull back the petals, fighting past the slime congealing it together, to reveal at it's heart these little raspberry looking fruit that taste like strawberries. Even though we were warned that too many might have less than wonderful effects on the workings of our systems, we ate plenty of the delicious fruit.


By the time we were ready to return home, the sun had risen high in the sky. The mile back, some of which was in the bush, but most of which was on the airstrip, was miserable. The sun beating down from above, the long walk, and started not on a well-rested body made me wonder if I would make it back. I very much wanted to just sit down and let the others go on without me, in the most melodramatic manner possible.
Finally, just as I was about to give up, a women sitting in a garden much closer to our destination than the missionary's called out to us "white kids" and offered us a kulau, a green coconut, which are marvelous at rehydrating the body. So I sat, and drank, and rested.
In retrospect, perhaps it wasn't so miserable. Risking my life, eating too many constipating berries, and almost dying in the heat of the day might be better described as rough than miserable…