In the Lands of Guns, Spills and Providence

Only on a lunchtime stroll in Moshi do I have to worry about my wife being used as a human shield when she wanders into a line of prisoners being escorted down the road by 4 guards with AK-47s. I think she’s learnt another lesson.

Lesson 1-don’t squawk when a lioness is near
Lesson 2-if you see a machine gun guarded procession, stop walking

Distracted by work I think. Just the usual story of us trying to implement ‘skills exchange’ when everyone is flat out on reactive tasks. We are feeling a bit mentally/spiritually tired at the mo.

I’ve been following news of the current Palestinian/Israeli peace talks. Yesterday, I was surprised to see a map of the Old City of Jerusalem on the wall of a random Tanzanian money changer’s office. Israel is another place where you can expect to see machine guns everywhere. More M16s than Ak-47s though. I traced on the map with my finger some of the routes I took in January 2005.

That trip was a whole different kind of crazy to Africa. I can chortle now about being interrogated in a basement by Israeli Security and other such-like mishaps. You can forget in your day by day life where you’ve actually come from...then a quiet moment sneaks up on you and you go ‘Oh yeah, I did travel to Israel alone, didn’t I’

Did you know?

I just realised I have had a car incident in each of my 3 extra-Australasian international trips:

2005 Capernaum, Israel-our VW van ploughed into a ute at Capernaum. Their fault. However, we were an Israeli driven vehicle smashing up some tired Palestinian fishermen. If the incident had occurred in the Palestinian territory we had passed through the day before, things could have gone bad...like angry mob bad.

2008 Carolina, South Africa-the wheel guard falls off our rented Fiat Uno and slices our left front wheel apart. We were a group of volunteers stranded in a signposted ‘High Crime Area’ in the dark.

2010 on the way to Lake Natron,Tanzania-landrover rolls into a culvert. My watermelon got smashed up.

My life has not been boring that’s for certain.

While gulping down some wine relaxing after the aforementioned land-rover incident, a companion asked me why I went to Israel. I burbled something about antiquity and history. Truth be told, I’m just a searcher. Certain places on Earth just resonate within the depths of Doug. Plus they give me the chance to see cool guns.