The Life of Lou Ruppert

Today I got a chance to meet up with my friend Kristina, who I’ve known for quite a while. She’s about to leave for Sénégal in a week or so, so we took a road trip out to Rochester to have an Ethiopian dinner. No, that doesn’t mean sacks of wheat airdropped into a barren field. Ethiopian food is a lot like Indian food. You get a selection of different curried dishes, all dumped out onto a kind of giant sour pancake called injera. It’s shared communally, and you eat with your hands, so make sure the people you are eating with are clean. And make sure they’re open-minded too, because after you’ve eaten your fill, you’ll still want to enjoy the uniquely delicious curry, and the only way to do that is to smell your hands. Most people would think that’s just weird.

When I first met Tina, she was the tree-hugging little sister of one of my other friends. She had just signed up for the same ministry training program I had, and spent a year preparing to live her dream of becoming an African missionary. She left for Ghana the next year, and spent five years building a church at the main university in its capital, Accra. Fast forward a few more years, and now her latest endeavor is running a training center for missionaries, in the remote Cassamance region of southern Sénégal. She keeps an interesting blog of what life is like there, which I’ve added to my blogroll. I’d highly recommend it. She includes the occasional picture and video, along with stories about the culture and some of the people who live there.

So, while I try not to make prior commitments on Saturdays, I made the exception today. It was good to do more with my time than just laying around on the couch in my pajamas watching Donnie Darko. The long drive was a small price to pay to have access to all of the cool anecdotes from a life thousands of years removed from our daily norm. And at the end of the day, my stomach is full of African food, my mind is full of African stories, and my hands are spiced with edible African perfume. You can’t buy that at the video store!

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