Grandpa Still Remembers: Life Changing Stories for Kids of All Ages from a Missionary Kid in Africa

By Paul Henry Brown

Life Changing Stories from Africa

In the heart of Africa, a young missionary kid's life is changed forever. Impacted by the lessons he learned while hunting birds, leaving home, or chasing girls, Paul Brown shares some unforgettable stories that could change your life.

How do missionary kids in a boarding school relate to each other and what do they do as they spend most of their young lives away from home? Grandpa Still Remembers is Paul recalling events during his growing up years at Rethy Academy in the Belgian Congo. A little boy fascinated with birds and animals observes closely and learns about life as he tries to fit in. Seeing some boys run away or react to rejection make deep impressions on him. He eventually discovers a mysterious attraction to girls, whom he had previously ignored or avoided. In each story chapter, illustrated by his daughter and himself, there is something to learn of the basics of life and a relationship with God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torchflame Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781611531015

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Author

Dedication

To my dear wife

Ellen

without whom there would have been no grandchildren

and to Rethy

our fifteenth grandchild.

These are just some simple stories Grandpa still remembers from his life at Rethy, maybe because he learned something from them. I just wanted to share them with you. You might like to share them with your friends.

With love,

Grandpa Paul

To Help You Understand

Grandpa grew up in Africa. My dad was a doctor and my mom was a nurse. I don’t remember what happened before my dad went to the Belgian Congo to start a hospital in a remote area among the Zande people. My parents dedicated their lives to serve the Zandes who did not know God. Their only option when they became ill was to go to the medicine men who we called witch doctors.

The Zandes worshipped the spirits and the witch doctors communicated with the spirits to try to heal people. The witch doctors made little bags of spirit medicine the patients could wear under their clothes. The bag hung by a thin thong of leather around the patient’s neck to help him get well. Inside the bag there could be parts of a dead bird like feathers, claws or bones, and maybe some pebbles or other tiny, mysterious objects. The witch doctors made medicines from roots, bark, plants, and leaves, but often could do nothing to heal the sick person.

To communicate with the spirits, the witch doctors would rub the two parts of their worn communication boards together as they chanted names of the sick person’s enemies, waiting for the pieces to stick. They would figure out who cursed a person by poisoning a chicken and performing a ceremony. If the spirit communication boards stuck, or the poisoned chicken died while the witch doctor chanted the name of one of the sick person’s enemies, then that was the person who had made the patient sick. The witch doctors also cursed people if they got paid with a goat or a chicken. You see, the Zandes worshiped the spirits, and they didn’t know about Jesus. The main reason my mom and dad went to Africa was to tell the Zandes what Jesus did for them.

I started boarding school at Rethy Academy when I was just five years old. Boarding school is where you stay all the time and live in a dormitory with other kids. You do everything together, not just school work. Since my parents lived at Banda 550 miles away from Rethy, I didn’t see them very often; sometimes not until vacation time after three months at school. Lots of things happen at boarding schools that don’t happen at home to other kids. These stories share a little of what I still remember and some of the lessons I learned. The people I talk about are real people, and I want them to forgive me if they don’t remember things just the same way I do. You see, I’m not so young anymore, and I forget too.

Of course, Grandpa grew up and fell in love with Grandma. Grandpa and Grandma went back to Africa and worked for a long time at Rethy Academy, right where I went to school. You see, we wanted to love and care for the children of missionaries and teach them about Jesus. We became dorm parents for 23 boys and girls before we had any children of our own. We loved each one and did our best to teach them what God was teaching us. We now have more than 23 grandchildren for whom these stories were first written.

Now I want to share them with you too, and I pray that God will teach you more about Himself as you read my stories about growing up in a boarding school in the center of Africa.

Too Small

When I was little, I wanted to be a Titchie (an elementary student in grades one to three) at Rethy Academy, a boarding school for missionary kids in the Belgian Congo. The school was at Rethy, the same place we lived when my mom and dad first went to Africa to be missionaries. My mom and dad worked at the hospital at Rethy for the first year we were in Africa to learn more about the weird diseases that exist there. Since the school was a long way away, on top of the next hill more than a mile away, I had to stay at home.

At a boarding school you get to go away from home to live with the other kids all the time. You get to eat there too. You even get to sleep there. You don’t have to come home at night. I was pretty sure you had to go to school, but you didn’t have to ask your mom for permission to go to the dorm to play.

My mom later told me that I was so eager to go to Rethy Academy that I even packed my cardboard suitcase and told her that I was ready.

She said, I don’t think so. You are just five years old and too small to go away from home.

I wasn’t so small. I was big enough to go hunting for birds with my bow and arrow. I had a special arrow. On the four-pointed tip of the arrow there was sticky gray stuff from the sap of the big old rubber tree behind the hospital. My little African friend told me it was the very best arrow for shooting birds. The man who made it for me wrapped the split head with sisal string covered with sticky, cooked sap from the rubber tree to make it strong and four times as good at getting birds. If I could hit a bird in the tail, the sap would stick. The bird wouldn’t be able to fly with the heavy arrow hanging from its tail. It would eventually grow new tail feathers, but until then could be my very own pet. At least that’s what I thought.

I don’t think I ever did hit a bird, but I did lots of sneaking around, half crouched, my arrow ready on the string of my little bow. Black and white birds, we called wagtails, would keep running ahead of me, then fly a little way, land, and bob their tails up and down. I don’t think my mom would be happy knowing that I was hunting wagtails. She said, They are such friendly birds. Don’t bother them. Because they were the easiest ones to sneak up on, I spent hours trying to shoot one. My arrow hit the dirt so often it lost all its stickiness, but I didn’t lose it. I also never shot a wagtail.

I do remember that I was able to find chameleons. I would look for a long time on the lantana hedge that had the fuzzy leaves, the tiny bunches of colored flowers, and the little clumps of green berries. The green berries grew as big as BBs and eventually turned black. Some of the kids ate them, but I didn’t. When the berries were black, I think the chameleons found more insects on the lantana hedges. Chameleons were hard to find since they would stay completely still and make themselves the same shade of green as the hedge. The patterns on their backs and the patterns made by the twigs and leaves looked just the same. The hedge was the best place to look for chameleons.

I would stand very still for a long time, and sometimes a chameleon would move; then I would finally see him. They have skinny legs and feet sort of like mittens with no separate toes. The tiny claws, two on one side and three on the other side, help them to clamp onto the branch they are climbing. Chameleons move the front foot on one side and the back foot on the other side at the same time, little by little, until each foot reaches the new place to hold. They feel around with their feet for the best spot and don’t even look. Then, they move the other two feet.

When chameleons sneak up on a fly, their tails stick out straight behind them, not touching anything. They advance bit by bit, maybe when they think the fly isn’t looking. Their eyes bulge way out on both sides of their head. Wrinkly skin covers the entire eye except the tiny hole in the center where they can see. Their eyes roll around and around to look in front, in back, sideways, and up and down. Each eye goes a different way until they are ready to catch a fly.

The chameleon I had been watching stopped moving. Both eyes checked all around again, but then they came together, almost cross-eyed, both focusing directly on a small fly. The layered skin under the chameleon’s chin started bulging out bigger and bigger. His mouth turned up almost like a smile, opening just a little crack.

Suddenly, so fast I would have missed it if I hadn’t been concentrating, the chameleon’s long tongue shot out and the end stuck to the fly. The tongue was even longer than the chameleon! Chameleons almost never miss. His long tongue quickly disappeared, curling up somewhere inside as he pulled the fly into his grinning mouth. Once again his eyes began searching around and around in different directions. He chewed very slowly.

I grabbed for him. He couldn’t move very quickly, though he tried to get away. He might have dropped off the branch down into the bush and then it would have been nearly impossible to find him again. I caught him around his fat middle. He tried to bite, but the rough edge of his mouth wasn’t very sharp, and his mouth was smaller than my fingertip. Some chameleons hiss too. Even though my little African friend was scared of them, I wasn’t. He told me chameleons have bad spirits in them, but I didn’t believe it. The chameleon knew he was caught, or maybe he wasn’t so scared, because after a little while he stopped squirming.

When I freed him, he started walking across my hand. He might have wanted to walk off, but I kept on putting the other hand in front so that he never got to the edge. He slowed down. He stopped. He sat there on my thumb, looking round and round with his bulging, wandering eyes. He slowly turned a dull black and his markings got blurred. He curled his tail and became very still. I think he liked my warm little thumb. I finally had a pet.

I kept him in my window on the curtain, but he didn’t turn red. He got sort of brown. I caught flies for him in some of the other windows, but he didn’t seem hungry anymore. I got tired of watching him. After dinner, I proudly showed him to my mom, but she said, I don’t want him in the house. He might go walking on the floor and someone might step on him and squash him.

If he is a mother, he could have tiny little chameleons, I told her. Lots of them. They would be just this big! Wouldn’t that be neat?

You better let him go, she said. I don’t think she thought it would be easy not to step on all those little chameleons. I took him outside and put him on a rosebush in my mother’s rose garden, but he got lost.

I thought I was big enough to go to boarding school, but I still had to get big. I guess you need to be pretty big to do lots of things, but I remembered the story my mom read that night from the Bible. She said, Little children are never too small to come to Jesus.

The people in the story were telling the children not to bother Jesus. I think my mom thought I was a bother sometimes because she would tell me to go outside to play and let her do her work.

Mom read in the Bible, But Jesus called the children to him and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’ (Luke 18:16-17).

Mom said, That means to let the little children come because He loves them. I liked that. She said, Jesus likes people to be like little children when they come to Him because they believe everything He says, and they know He can take care of anything.

I was glad I wasn’t too small to come to Jesus. I could find another chameleon tomorrow. Jesus would help me find one.

The Bible reading is in Mark 10:13-16.

Running Away

Before I was six, I did get to go to Rethy Academy as a boarding student. My mom put nametags on all my clothes for someone else to read at a place called The Laundry. There was a list inside my suitcase, too, to help me not to lose anything,