While sheltering in place, Husband and I have found a fun activity to do at home that has given us chuckles and lightened our mood- looking at old family photos.  Our family photos are a bit novel because we lived overseas for ten years when our children were young.  The first five years we lived on the other side of the world in a tiny, very remote jungle community without roads.  Our only connections with the outside world were small planes that brought us food and mail, and a single sideband HF radio for necessary communication like medical help. Isolation was a way of life for us.  

I have to admit that when looking at photos of our children during those years we look at each other and say, “Where was their mother?!”  One of our kids answered cheekily, “Taking these pictures.”  Yikes, some things didn’t look at all safe!  Apparently raising children in the jungle isn’t for the safety conscious.   Our toddlers swimming/riding in a canoe in a river five football fields wide?  (Photo below is our three younger girls aged approximately 2, 7, and 4 years old in a sinking canoe in the river.  In my defense, they were close to the shore and I was apparently watching them, altho distracted by taking this photo!  Notice the tender care the older one is taking of the smallest one.).   At least our kids didn’t have to paddle clear across that huge river every day to go back and forth to school from the age of six like their national friends.  The river was 1500 feet wide in front of our house and had a swift current.  I could swim in place if I slacked even a little trying to swim upstream.

 During dry season the river level could drop 54 feet vertically. This was dangerous because disease spread easily in the shallow water since the river was also the local people’s latrine and the place where they bathed and washed their clothing and dishes.  Some years it flooded and this also caused serious health problems because the polluted waters surrounded homes.  We lived in a house on stilts to guard us from snakes and flood waters from the river in our front yard.  We lived on the higher bank of the river, but even so, sometimes we could step off our front porch steps into the water.      (Top photo is some of our kids standing in our front yard at the beginning of dry season as the waters recede.  Lower photo is our front yard during rainy season as the river rose.)                                              Our front yard during dry season as the waters were receding.                                                                             Our front yard during rainy season as the waters rose.                                                                             House across the river during rainy season floods.

  “if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.”  David talking to God in Psalm 139:9-10

During our first months living in the jungle a severe drought occurred.  We depended on rainwater from our roof to provide our drinking and bathing water.  But no rain fell to fill our water holding tanks.  That season my visiting friend and I carried buckets of water to the house from the receding and especially muddy river 54 verticle feet below our bank. I never did get back up to the top of the bank with a full bucket!  Possibly it had something to do with walking on narrow boards laid down on the muddy, oozing banks populated by billions of worms the stench of which was sickening.  The people had started their usual cycle of burning the jungle in order to clear land to plant their crops.  But the normal rains hadn’t come to clear the smoke from the air and water the ground for planting. The smoke from slash and burn farming that hung over our province was so thick we hadn’t seen the sun for two weeks. This smoke had grounded all the small planes that normally connected our jungle base to the outside world. 

That was when dear Husband got cholera.  In seven hours, he lost 15 pounds from vomiting and diarrhea and became delirious.  The family next door were Americans.  She was a nurse and he was the pilot of the small plane based there but now grounded. Upon examining Husband, she dispatched her husband, the pilot, to go upriver by small boat to a government clinic to get IV bags.  He was unable to fly and going by boat wasn’t a cakewalk, either.  Our pilot had to get out and pull the small boat upstream in the shallow places.  Undeterred, he eventually returned with the life saving IVs.  We owe Husband’s life to our caring neighbors.

“Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God.
They cannot be numbered!
I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand

And when I wake up, you are still with me!”  Psalm 139:16-18

Our oldest son, about eleven years old at the time, made a homemade bomb to kill the flesh eating fish that had taken up residence under our dock where we swam on the river.   The fish had two plates instead of teeth and literally chopped pieces of flesh off the toes or other appendiges of the unwary.  It’s saliva contained anti-coagulant and the victim bled profusely.  Needless to say, we were all delighted when the fish met it’s violent end.  The river was our recreation in our isolated location.   We swam, canoed, and later even purchased a tiny motorboat that we used on weekends to ski behind to the amusement and horror of our local friends.  Two of our children were born while we were living in the jungle, but pregnancy didn’t prevent me from waterskiing.  (Until my expanding belly prevented dear Husband from pulling me out of the water and clearing the side of the boat!)  My friends chided me by proclaiming that the crocodiles  would eat me and my baby. In reality, the crocodiles were already extinct from over hunting.  They are good meat and when your family is hungry, you don’t think about the extinction possibility.

“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed. 
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God.”  Psalm 139:13-17

Somewhere there is a photo of some of our kids and their national friends holding an impressive 13 foot long dead snake which they proceeded to cut up and cook on a fire in our front yard.  Our oldest son, about ten years old at the time, had shot it out of a tree near our house.  He was very proud that he killed it with his first shot right in the throat.  I was thankful there was one less snake.  I tasted it.  It was greasy and very bony.  But the kids ate it up.

Lately, I’ve been taking phone photos of our old photos and texting a couple to the appropriate kids regularly during this unsettling period.  Maybe looking back at God’s protection then will bolster our faith in him now.  Have you looked back lately to notice all the ways God has taken care of your family in the past?

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