Witchity Grubs

So you know that scene in The Lion King where Timone, Pumba, and Simba eat those creepy crawler thingies? Well that was me today. We ate "Witchity Grubs" today. It was so cool you guys. But let me give you some lead up.

We are now in Alice Springs. This is in the center of Australia. It is a very interesting place. There is a joint American-Aussie military base here so we saw some American things we hadn't seen yet. Namely, Baskin Robins. We tried to find some Cherry Coke and/or Dr. Pepper with no success. We also checked out a bunch of Aboriginal art galleries in town. It is one of the cheapest places, save from the artist themselves, to get aboriginal art, didgeridoos, and the like. I'm still fricking poor though. A good didgeridoo is like $100 at least; a decent piece of artwork a little bigger than a sheet of paper is about $40-60. So we'll see if I come back with anything at all the way things are going.

We met with an awesome fella in Alice Springs names Paul Eckert. He has worked with the aboriginees for over 30 years and he speaks a language called Pitjatjantjerra. There once were over 200 aboriginal languages in Australia, now there are only 20 odd. He has done a large amount of translating of the New Testament into this language. It was so fascinating to question him about complications with that process. One of the questions I asked him was, "Have you ever thought you knew what a phrase or word meant and then found out like years later than you had the word slightly confused the whole time." He said, "Yes, that's happened." And he gave me a good example from the work they do with the Bible. The language he works with has no word for forgiveness. So for a long time the translators were using the phrase "let go" to mean forgiveness. For instance, "God let go of your sins" instead of "God forgives your sins." This has been the translation since before he arrived on the scene. In recent years he was talking to an aboriginee about one of these verses and they asked the question, "why was God holding onto the sins in the first place?" This person was speaking literally too. So they had to ask themselves what forgiveness meant and how to translate that meaning into the aboriginal culture. They figured it out (at least for now :)). Aboriginees have a strong sense of pay back. If someone does something to you, you may break the windows of their car or something like that (they don't value posessions all that much and in the way he said it, this didn't seem to be as terrible an action as it would in our culture). So they changed phrases like, "God forgives your sins" to "God, with the desire to make peace, will not repay you for the wrong things you have done." The desire to make peace phrase was necessary because with out that phrase the sentence carried more of a "God will let you get away with it so keep doing it all you want" kind of attitude. It was just awesome to talk with him about it. It renewed in me the desire to hit up seminary someday so I can do the same kind of thinking in comparing the Hebrew and Greek culture to our modern Western culture.

So the next day, after all that stuff I just mentioned, we headed over to Hermansburg. We travelled on a totally outback type road. It was still sealed, so it wasn't totally outback I suppose, but it was the width of a single car. So as you came upon another car you had to quickly slow down and vear of the road. Hermansburg was the original missionary settlement in central Australia. The missionaries that formed it have a fascinating story of faith and conviction that I won't completely recount here because you could probably find it online if you really wanted to. But, we met some really cool people. We played a couple songs at the aboriginal school and hung out with those kids for a while.

They are an extraordinarily reticent and suspicious people. They do not quickly trust or open themselves up to outsiders and they opperate on an entirely different set of principles. From their view point, it is rude to ask a lot of questions. Where as in our culture it shows a desire to get to know someone if you are curious about their life. Instead it goes over much better to share about yourself and then they will often share something about themselves. It is entirely backward to the way we are used to functioning. They loved seeing and american bill, listening to themself on my hand-held recording device (that's right jen), watching themselves on sarah's video camera, etc. Those are the things that really got them feeling comfortable and talking with us actually. Us sharing things that we thought were interesting with them. I'm gonna bring some pictures from home next time. Sarah shared hers and then went over really well. There's a lot more I can say about the people and their history that I learned the last couple of days. But I'll save it for a later post.

Now, to the witchity grubs. So we were getting ready to leave Hermansburg when one of the blokes showing us around, named David, asked us if we wanted to go and try these grubs. I had heard about them and I've been preparing myself since we got here. I knew it was a distinct possibility that we would get to do this activity, but it wasn't for sure and I was so excited. So we set out back toward Alice Springs. Somewhere in the middle of that "outback" road I was telling you about we just went off the road. It was unmarked, we just headed into the outback. We didn't have to go far in but it was still fun. We were accompanied by David's wife, Lily, who is an aboriginee, and a boy named Matthew who I think may have been there son but I didn't catch it completely, and another aboriginee named Vivian. Lily and Vivian were hard-core and started finding these special trees and digging around their roots with crow-bars and shovels. I got into it too, and by the end, my teammate Sarah and I had found 2 grubs ourselves. Between all of us we had filled a bowl full of these big, marshmellowy caterpillar-like grubs. It wasn't easy neither. You have to find the big roots that are around these trees buried deep in the sand. Then you have to snap them off somehow...usually by using the shovel at one of the two ends of the root to crack it. Then very carefully you have to split the root down the middle. You will find the grubs in the big roots! They burrow into them somehow. They are puffy and juicy looking. Now some people just bite the head off, spit it out and throw the body straight in their mouth raw. But, Lily and Viv said that most people cook them and I was happy to do that. So we set up a little fire there and warmed up some sand. They don't cook them over the coals or the burning wood. They use the warm ash to heat up the sand and then bury the grubs in that sand for a short time. Yeah, I ate one and half grubs. They tasted kinda like cashews. It was hard to get past the idea of eating a squirmy grub, but I'm glad I did it. I have video and pics.

So it's getting late and I'm working from an school computer lab, so here comes the rap up.

Jennie, is the movie 16 candles. That's just a guess though really.
Viv, thanks for the Aussie term correction stuff. Basically people are "crook" not "crooked" when they are sick (I can't believe I wrote crooked), and the rest were mostly spelling mistakes.
Danny, it's awesome to read a comment from you. Didn't expect it at all. I hope Japan is treating you well. And don't tell any Aussies you like kiwis better dood, they'll kill ya.
Sam, your comment section cracked me up.
Dan, I had no idea about Joe. Thx for letting me know. And I'm with you on the VB thing. I feel your pain of late night programming. But it's so great too isn't it? I've never had to do VB though...just other Visual stuff.
Lauri, good to hear from yas!

Now take note everyone. I have uploaded some Aussie pics. Go check them out. Some are from Henley Beach where the team got to stay sans host families for a couple of days, and the others are from that almond farm that I told you all about.

I love yas,
in Christ,
jason

ps I didn't get a chance to check over this post at all make sure I didn't leave any thread of thought unfollowed, or botch any sentences up. So if there's badness contained within...bite me.