6/7/98: Up early for a nice breakfast. It is getting to feel rather extravagant to be so well taken care of! The H’s, W’s, and Q’s have brought an abundance of delicacies for all the meals, and we are being pampered like we were long lost family…
NOTE: The main photo above is an Impala antelope at Hwange Game Reserve, Zimbabwe.
6/7/23: We really did begin to feel self-consciously embarrassed about the luxury we were enjoying. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Arthur and Sylvia H. had a daughter who had lived in the US as a Rotary Exchange Student about a decade before our trip. They had visited her and her host family, Milt and Bev K., who happened to be the parents of Ruth’s brother’s wife. Milt and Bev asked us to visit the H’s on their behalf since they had never made it to Zimbabwe. And we were then being treated to an extravagant safari as the beneficiaries of that friendship. It reminded me of the mystery of God’s loving grace.
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” —2 Corinthians 8:9
All eight of us drove off to Jambile Pan that morning at a nice slow pace. Funnily enough, when we arrived at the picnic site, we wound up having to help pull start a vehicle operated by some high-priced tour company. The battery of the truck had died the night before, and the two paying customers had had to spend the night at the picnic site. I couldn’t tell if they were terrified or elated at the experience, but I’m sure they were thankful that nothing dangerous had happened during the night. I remember teasing Arthur that he should have gotten a cut of the money for using his Land Rover to pull their truck so they could pop the clutch and jump start the motor!
We took our time and stopped at several pans throughout the day and added to our list of game sightings. The list included: Vervet monkeys, warthog, Impala antelope, both Black-backed and Side-striped Jackals, a whole herd of Kudu antelope, and of course more elephants, giraffes and zebras! We also were very lucky to see a lion and lioness together, though they were too far off and laying very low in high grass that I did not get a decent photo. Like the Roan antelope we say the day before, lions were extremely rare sightings in Hwange at that time. We were told only 800 were still in the reserve. When we arrived back at the camp there were oodles of mongoose and squirrels running around as well. And the day concluded with another very delicious meal.
