kar0ling

I'm not afraid of bringing rain. Even if I did believe in the superstition, what do I care about a bit of precipitation? No, that old reticence from Cameroon has stayed with me. When I saw a spider in Cameroon, I weighed the relative harm the arachnid caused me versus the relative harm it could cause to other insects (like mosquitoes) which could cause relative harm to me. The scales definitely tipped toward letting the spiders live. Now, it just seems rude to dispatch them without another moment's thought.

Two rather abstruse names are used for two different kinds of heavy-duty reusable bags in Cameroon. I was able to get the history behind “fertilizer,” a general word for an all-purpose shopping bag, but despite Johannes’ explanation, I never quite got a handle on why the extra-large plaid suitcase-style bags were called “Ghana-must-go.” Fertilizer. Fertilizer came/comes in a sort of gunny sack, which of course, would be reused as a carrying bag, small mat, or however it could be pressed into service. Over time, the content word was lost, leaving the adjective, and the word came to be used for bags in general. A common phenomenon in word formation. Ghana-must-go. I’m sure there’s a nugget of etymological fact in this explanation, but I’m not quite sure where it is. Johannes, Scotts’ cook, says the bags have this name because during some football (soccer) tournament they were used by the team from Ghana. Everybody wanted Cameroon to win, so they said “Ghana must go,” and ever since tho...

"Of the 2,400 language groups with portions of the Bible, roughly 1,115 have the New Testament. Only 426 have a full Bible including the Old Testament."— Christianity Today quoted these figures from Wycliffe in September 2006.   One of the neat things about the Oroko translation project is that from the beginning, the translators planned to give the Oroko the whole message of the Bible, not merely the New Testament with portions from the Old. The team is presently working simultaneously on the gospel of Luke and the book of Genesis. The book of Ruth has already been published, and the book of Jonah is in the final stages of approval for publication.

"Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered," Leviticus 24:19-20 (NRSV). I always understood that in the context of "if someone takes your eye, you're entitled to take one of his; what's fair is fair," and thought it vaguely unfair. I didn't quite understand what about the law in Exodus was particularly just or righteous. If you've lost an eye, causing someone else to lose theirs hardly seems the way to make reparation. It may satisfy the bloodlust for a while, but even that, I suspect would end up leaving you cold. How is this an improvement was beyond me. But if the previous way of doing things -- which is likely -- was to take two eyes for one, a life for two eyes, a family for one soul, and so on, in an ever-escalating chain of violent retribution, suddenly an eye for an eye seems sufficiently fair after all. Having functio...