#1 The Adventure Begins

My friend asked me to join him on a 10-day trip to visit different villages and spend some time teaching and encouraging our brothers and sisters in those villages. His sales pitch was lacking appeal: he told me there would be long days of travel, long hours of walking, nights sleeping on the floor, and meal after meal of the exact same food. Despite all those luxuries it was still a very difficult decision. I would have to leave my wife and beautiful baby girl for 10 days. In the end, we decided as a family it was right for me to go for a multitude of reasons.

So last Monday my friend and I loaded up at 6:00am for a long road trip. 11 hours and one flat tire later, we arrived at our destination where we met our local companions that would be traveling with us. Day two was eventful but not very newsworthy. We visited a young congregation, and I spoke to them in the morning. In the afternoon we had a small leadership retreat. Day three we were on the road again, heading into the mountains, and luckily we had no flat tires or any other problems. We arrived at our destination around dusk. We could go no further by vehicle since there was a river with no bridge separating us from the village we planned to reach. In the dry season they build a floating pontoon bridge, but we are in the tail end of monsoon season so no hope there. We had a short 30 min walk to the place we would sleep for the night, which was situated on a little peninsula jutting into the river that was connected to the mainland by two suspended walking bridges.

The “hotel” consisted of a ground floor eating area with kitchen and an upstairs open room with five single beds. We put our packs down and headed down for dinner. All the kids were excited to see two giant white people in their little town and were asking us to tell them a story. We were excited to tell them a story from the Truth, but before we finished our food, the electricity came on and all thoughts of a story went out the window with the switching on of the television. The television, oddly enough, was located in our room. So after dinner we joined the entire village already seated in our room for a little entertainment. Not long after we sat down a little boy put a new DVD in which turned out to be the absolute strangest movie I have ever seen in my life.

The plot started out simple enough. A rich family in the capital city has their only son kidnapped on his way to school by a group of jungle hooligans who all seem to operate on an I.Q. in the single digits. The kidnapper demands a steep ransom, but before they can make the exchange, the little boy escapes into the jungle. The scene ends with the little boy running into the jungle, and the very next scene opens up with the little boy sitting in a jungle tree-house with a beautiful woman from the city and a fawn. By fawn, I don’t mean a young deer, that wouldn’t be that odd, but rather there was a half man half goat just like in Narnia sitting in the tree house with the little boy. Where this fawn comes from, or for that matter the woman from the city, we never know. How did they meet up with the boy? That’s never explained either. Those are only minor details in the story I guess.

The movie proceeds without a plot of any kind for the next 30 minutes as the fawn, gets himself into funny situations after the woman from the city takes both the fawn and the little boy home to her mansion in the capital. The fawn tries to eat plastic fruit, shoots the T.V. with an arrow after a lion came on screen, eats an entire tube of toothpaste, and inadvertently sees the girl naked in the bathroom. All the typical things fawns do when faced with civilization. Then they take a trip to the zoo, and while at the zoo, they are spotted by the jungle hooligans who recapture the little boy and the woman with the fawn in hot pursuit. Ah, back on plot.

The movie ends with the boy’s family showing up to pay the ransom, but they never have to pay it because it turns out the woman from the city and the fawn seem to have black belts in Taekwando so they defeat the 10 kidnappers with ease. The father gives his heartfelt thanks to the fawn, and then the beautiful woman, who seems to have fallen in love with the fawn, says a tearful goodbye as he swings up into the vines and off into the jungle. Maybe she realized the city was no place for a fawn. It was a really touching moment. The T.V. was switched off, the village left us to sleep, and moments later I was laying in my bed thinking, “What in the world did I just watch?”