How Now Brown Cow!

I remember the little phrase "How now brown cow", from a little ditty I used to say as a kid....

....but it took on a new meaning just recently when I found 2 brown cows in our garden!

I heard the cow bells and they sounded very close...and they were!

How now brown cow?...what are you doing in my garden!

After I got over the surprise and called the management of the expansive property we rent a house on, I thought I should take a photo of the one that was standing right in the middle of one of our garden beds that has some low aloe type plants in it.

And no, they are not supposed to be wandering around the property - somehow they broke through a fence somewhere.

But life isn't boring here, and if there is one thing I learnt from watching those two cows, was to not get perturbed too much with what is going on around me and just take my time, do what I need to, and calmly then move on to the next thing!  They would not be hurried by my 'shooing' efforts and acted as if I almost didn't even figure in their field of vision!  In fact the one in the photograph stood still for ages, ignoring me, and just picked through the leaves finding little bits of something to eat and chew on!

On the main road not too far from our house is a 'cows crossing' road sign, and when those cows cross (which they often do), they take their time - 'hurry' is not a word in their vocabulary!  They just amble across the road at their own speed and all the traffic has to wait for them!

I think 'hurry' is often too much of our lives in this modern world, and we don't take much time to 'slow down' and just calmly go about our tasks.

And even as Christians we can wish 'this or that' would 'hurry up', and I wonder if we stop to think about it, whether we are too easily wanting life to be faster than it needs to be.  We want 'fast', 'instant', 'quick', 'immediate', 'without delay', etc etc. I know I can all too easily succumb to this attitude. Subtly we can think 'things' should happen faster and we want to know outcomes, and we can be dissatisfied with the speed God wants us to operate at.  We can get impatient with 'slow', 'wait', 'be still'. But if we believe God is ordering our steps, then we actually run a dangerous course when we want 'things' to hurry up, because if we believe God orders our steps, we are actually saying we want God to 'hurry up'....and Scripture has something to say about that in Isaiah 5:18,19 for our caution.

Maybe I need to learn something from the visit of those cows to my garden ..... to be more like that brown cow and be ok about 'going slower' and pause often just to be still and seek out the little morsels of truth God wants to feed my soul on and take time to 'chew' them over for full benefit! 

How now brown cow?...thank you for teaching me something by visiting my garden!

Dried out!

After the last blogpost talking about getting so much hail that it looked like it snowed....

Well less than a week later....along with a 32 degree day, today's Gaborone outside humidity is registering at 4% according to the Weather Station at the Airport that registers on 'Wunderground'

From my searching of the 'www' apparently the lowest recorded humidity on earth was 2% in the middle of the desert in the USA.

I've also learnt that humidity in aircraft cabins also runs low (about 5-20%) - but that is what our daytime humidity levels are like almost all year round!

Well, here we are on the edge of the Kalahari Desert and this is normally one of the hottest months before the rainy season sets in, so I shouldn't be surprised....the reality is that low humidity is 'normal' here.

Low humidity is a foreign concept in the area of Australia where I grew up, by the sea in I suppose what might be called the sub-tropics - the problem there was super high humidity - like up to 98% even when it wasn't raining!

In those days I never had to think about preventing dehydration headaches!

So....

When you read about 'health preservation tips for flying in low humidity aircraft', it seems I should be taking note of those tips for daily life here!

......things like:

-  up your vitamin intake because dry air contributes to compromised mucous membranes and increases likelihood of disease

-  be sure to drink extra water to stay hydrated - sip little bits of water all day

-  avoid alcohol and coffee (neither of which I drink normally) as they have a dehydrating effect

-  take a bath rather than a shower and even better if you add Epsom Salts (magnesium) - well I'm limited there as our house doesn't have a bath!...but I do take extra magnesium supplements

-  Use moisturisers

here are some links if you are interested in reading about the effects of aircraft cabin low humidity to help yourself next flight you take and to learn more about the environment we live our entire lives!

Here and here and here

But keeping fluids up is something that is constantly on our minds as it is just so easy to get dehydrated in our part of the world.  

We carry a water bottle everywhere we go and we make sure we remind visitors to keep their water up! Part of the problem is that the air is so dry and hot that any perspiration is evaporated almost instantly and you don't realise how much body water you are losing....or how much 'salt' (body minerals)....including magnesium salts.  We have to supplement with a lot of magnesium (especially my husband) or else we get muscle twitching, spasms, headaches and migraines.

(another interesting fact....did you know that annual evaporation here in Botswana is 2 metres!)

But our bodies aren't the only things that DRY OUT!

• - glued furniture joins dry out and furniture comes apart
• - wooden furniture dries out and joins pull apart
• - clothes 'dry out' too much and the fibres (especially natural cotton) just break down over time and get holes and rips more easily
• - fruit left on the counter dries out - we have watched passion-fruit, lemons and mandarins just shrivel up to half their normal size.
• - plastics dry out, and crack, and split and so household items can become useless very quickly when one small plastic part cracks or splits - even outdoor plastic chairs after a while become brittle and can 'snap'!
• - rubber seals dry out and shrink - and if they are seals of importance - like in a car engine!!!!.....all kinds of trouble can result!!! (in fact with dry air and dust - it is quite normal here for car repairs to have to happen far more frequently than what the manual says.
• - even plants dry out - it's quite something to watch a cactus aloe actually partially dry out!

But its not all bad.....we have a thatch roof and the biggest enemy of thatch is moisture!....so dry air is a good thing in that sphere....

and

I don't have to worry about cleaning of mould issues in the shower!

And I can be thankful that even though its only 4% humidity at the airport, here in my thatch-roofed house in the bush, its about 25% (that's still considered low but its better than 4%!)

And on this very, very dry Sunday, I'm reminded again to pray for rain for this land, where severe water rations are in place, and the dam that supplies our water supply is dangerously low. Please join with us in praying for rain.

Snow in Botswana?

No not really, but it sure looked like it!

We have just had what I would call the first 'proper' downpour of rain for this season.

And it was a really good storm - thunder, lightning, rain and hail!  (and then the normal subsequent power outage!)

One of our 'sons' wanted his photo taken with the 'snow'...

The hillside had a pretty thin covering of small hailstones and our deck was quite deep in hail stones and patches of the gardens still had some significantly thick patches of hailstones even an hour later!

And the coolness in the air is a welcome relief as is the sense of feeling the 'cleanness' of the air.

It has settled the dust at least for a few days, I think.

Thank you Lord for this rain!

Spring Snippets

I've named this post "Spring Snippets", but I'm actually not quite sure what season we are in here in Botswana!

In the past 3 weeks we have gone from 35 degree maximum 18 minimum days to suddenly 19 degree maximum 0 degree minimum and back to days in the high 30s and then last weekend we were back to a maximum of below 20 and minimum of 9 degrees, and now we have returned to daytime temps over the 30 degree mark again!!!

So one minute we think the force of summer has hit and the next it feels like the winter is returning, but before we can figure it out, summer is back!

I think the plants must be a bit confused....but none the less I am seeing a few tiny fresh green leaves coming on the thorn tree and even flowers on some of the tree around our deck area.  

Flowers on trees here are subtle, but have their own beauty against a backdrop of mostly leafless branches.

By the end of winter the bush looks so 'grey' and dry and you wonder if everything is dead....A great proportion of native trees here are deciduous, unlike my Aussie home setting of South East Queensland where the opposite is true.

But Spring here is certainly a reminder of the beauty that can come out of barrenness.

Here are some snaps I took yesterday afternoon of what I saw on the trees when I took time to look more closely.

High on the tips of a tree

Pretty little pompom like flowers starting to appear on otherwise barren branches.