2019

Last week Ebeli’s story ended with him happily retired as far as I was concerned. It was the government’s business to care for him through their INSS program. I had paid his wages and made the INSS contributions as required. The papers had been properly submitted. It wasn’t really reasonable to expect a man too old to work to walk 45 miles to the Zone Office in Djugu to collect his retirement funds each month. It was very likely, in fact, that there would be no funds available, but then, I had done all that was required of me. I never checked on him. The last time I saw him that year was when I dropped him off at his hut.

What is your Life? It is a mist that appears for a moment and then vanishes away.

There are those who live as if life’s focus is to prepare them for retirement. There are government plans to build up retirement funds, even in Zaire where Grandpa lived and worked for many years, though he never paid into the SNSS accounts established by the government there.

Why do we work so hard for something that does not bring satisfaction, something that does not last?

What will a man give in exchange for his soul?

When one is making “good” money it must mean he is making more money, not that others are being paid counterfeit money.  The value of money is difficult to define, even though the currency note says it is legal tender for all debts, public and private.  Doesn’t it depend on the country where the money can be used, who printed the money, and what you can do with it?

Before I was six, I did get to go to boarding school. 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, I think. (She would know what I had lost when I came home after three months.) I even got to live in the dorm.

When I was little, I wanted to be a Titchie 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 to learn more about the weird diseases that exist in Africa. 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.