Of spiders in soda pop bottles

We rounded a corner and exited the forest and, from our spot high on the east edge of the Andes Mountains, Dave and I gasped at the view.

A vast low expanse of steaming plains spread out before us, stretching east, north, and south—the llanos. An azure sky stretched to eternity, clean and searing and clear. Somewhere out there, way out in that immense humid unknown, we’d find our new home, Lomalinda.

For the next half hour, we dropped to an elevation of a thousand feet. Numb toes and fingers warmed, and we peeled off layers of clothes. We didn’t know it at the time, but we wouldn’t feel cold again for seven months.

We skirted the town of Villavicencio, crossed a river and, three hours after leaving Bogotá, turned in at the airport, a short row of low buildings. At times we had wondered if we would arrive safely, but we did, with barf bags still in pockets, unused.

We piled out of the taxi—Dave, Matt, Karen, and I along with our traveling companions and new co-workers, Loren, Laura, and Doug Rush.

The cabby opened the trunk and he, Dave, and Doug started unloading our bags, but Loren took me aside. “We need you to stay here and watch the rest of the luggage. Don’t let anybody steal it.”

I was shocked—I’d never heard of such things happening. The guys carried our bags inside and Laura guarded them at that end while the men returned to the taxi for more.

We had arrived at 9:30, the scheduled time for our flight to Lomalinda. Laura and Loren scanned the small airstrip. “I don’t see the Evangel,” Laura said, referring to our mission’s little white and blue plane.

Our family had already experienced a small dose of cross-cultural living during our one brief day in Bogotá, but upon arriving at the Villavicencio airport, we stepped deeply into our introduction to cross-cultural living. (Within a day it would become cross-culture stress, if not full-blown culture shock.)

It started when Laura, Karen, and I needed to use the restroom. After asking the guys to watch the luggage, we pushed our way through a filthy door decorated with purple polka dots.

The toilets had neither seats nor lids. That made me kinda grumpy.

But on a pleasanter note, Betty Welch, that dear lady we’d met at our Dallas orientation, the one who cautioned us to hire only taxis with meters, had given us another priceless bit of advice. “Always travel with your own toilet paper,” she’d said. Thanks to Betty, we were prepared.

 When we rejoined the men, we continued searching the skies for our plane. In the open-air terminal, hot and muggy, flies landed on everyone and everything. We Seattle people struggled with the heat and humidity—and especially with those flies.

SeaTac International this was not. Scrawny dogs wandered in and out, nibbling at trash on the floor. A rooster crowed somewhere. A man sat at a table eating, a parrot perched on one hand.

Laura strolled over to the control tower and hollered up to the man, asking, in Spanish, if the Evangel was on its way. (Now, tell me: How many of you have walked over to a control tower and yelled up to the guys on duty?)

She came back with disappointing news. “The tower hasn’t had any communication with Lomalinda.” Laura waited a while, asked again, and returned bearing the same story.

By then we’d grown hungry, but the thought of eating in those surroundings made me gag.

We couldn’t drink the water—it would make us sick—but Laura said we could drink bottled soda pop, so we ordered one for each of us. They were warm—no refrigerators.  (One more cross-cultural surprise. But an even bigger surprise awaited me.)

Loren said, “Before you take a drink, you need to do this.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped the bottleneck, inside and out. I couldn’t believe the filth that came out on it. (Yet another cross-cultural jolt. But the biggest one came next.)

“Oh, by the way,” he said, “check inside. Sometimes spiders or cockroaches float around in there.” (from Chapter 5, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: AFoot-Dragger’s Memoir)

What an introduction to cross-cultural living!

But here’s the sobering thing: That couple of hours at the airport was only the beginning.

Standing there on that foreign soil, I wondered, 

“What’s next? What other icky stuff will we live with? 

What other surprises will smack us between the eyes?”

Entering the unknown can be painful. Distressing. Sometimes even calamitous.

In Luke 9:34, Peter, John, and James were standing on a mountain with Jesus when a cloud enveloped them, and the three feared as they entered that cloud—that unknown.

“How often we fear as we enter into some cloud of the unknown,” 

Amy Carmichael wrote many years ago, 

and then she asked this blistering, haunting question: 

“Shall we be led through it, always caused to triumph? 

or shall we fail?” 

(Edges of His Ways)

That day at the Villavicencio airport, 

if I could have looked ahead into the next few days, 

I’d see my 29-year-old self 

teetering on the edge of failure.