Prodigal: It is a good day.
Me: I have a story about a strange day.
This is by William F Pruitt
1968. Kasai Province, Zaire, Africa. As one of the missionaries who had been allowed to return to his former station in what was once the Belgian Congo, I’d been “itinerating” for several weeks–that is, visiting among the tribal missions in a radius of about a hundred miles of my station in Moma. One evening, after preaching and showing Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 classic film, King of Kings, I found that I was only about thirty miles from our house on Lake Munkamba.
Almost on impulse I decided to spend the night there. It was late, after eleven, and I was very tired. But I was also tired of sleeping in my house-truck. Besides, I wanted to see the house again.
This was no ordinary house. I don’t mean architecturally, though that too, given the local standards. It was extraordinary because it was ours–the only home in Africa that was our very own. We had built it years before as a hideaway for little family vacations, and now, with Virginia and our two sons far away in America, I longed even more to go there. The house represented home and love and a security that often seemed elusive in those days of internal African strife. I needed to be reminded of these qualities once more.
As I drove toward the lake, I wondered in what condition I’d find our hideaway this time. During the tribal fighting of the early 1960’s, it had been looted frequently. Doors and windows and most of the furnishings–as well as the much-coveted tin roof-had been carried away. Our roof now covered the local chief’s hut, but he had explained his taking it. “When I saw those looters taking everything from you house, ” he had said, “I knew you would want me instead of them to have that tin roof!” Logic against which I could offer no rebuke.
At last I arrived. The house was still there. I fumbled my way in the darkness through the bare living room to a cot in one of the bedrooms and fell upon it. Exhausted, I was soon asleep.
I awakened early the next morning, looked about a little, and said my prayers. I thanked God for another day of life and asked Him to watch over me. Outside, through the morning mist, I saw a lone native fisherman on the shore nearby. There seemed to be on one else about. All was quiet. African quiet.
Time to get going, I told myself, and took my five-gallon jerry can to the spring and filled it with drinking water. Back at the house, I picked up my hat, and was about to leave when I caught sight of the fisherman again. It made me wish I had time to join him for a quick catch. Well, someday, I thought. I’d just better check to see if that outboard motor I left last summer is still here. With so much looting, there was no telling what might have become of a prize like an outboard motor.
I put down the jerry can and went to a small storeroom in the back of the house. It was windowless and gloomy inside, but I could see that the motor was still there. That’s a relief, I thought, reaching down and patting it as if to say, “Good boy! Stay there, because you and I have some fishing to catch up on as soon as I can get a day off!”
At just the moment I became aware of something else in a corner of the room. It was black and coiled into a circle, a though very carefully placed there. I don’t remember having a rope like that, I said to myself. I went over to have a closer look. I went too close.
Oh! Oh, dear Lord!
Zoom!
I felt a spray of liquid; it was as though a red-hot nail had been driven through my right eye!
Instantly I knew that what I had taken for a coiled rope was a spitting cobra, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world!
I screamed out loud and started running, running away, but I no sooner go to the door than I stumbled over the jerry can of water. Quickly I threw myself down on all fours and frantically splashed cold water into my face, trying to put out the fire that was spreading through my head.
A figure loomed over me. “Muambi! What is the matter?” It was the fisherman from the lake.
He looked at me, looked at the room, and ran away. He knows what has happened, I told myself. He knows there’s nothing he can do. He’s probably gone to tell the chief that I am here dying. Every native African knows that the spitting cobra first blinds and paralyzes its victim with a deadly venom before attacking again.
The pain was excruciating. Where was the snake now? I went on splashing water on my face even though I knew my flailing might cause it to strike again.
Was I beginning to feel a numbing sensation creeping over me? It seemed that way, but I wasn’t sure.
Minutes went by, maybe five, maybe ten. Three people entered the room. Strangers. A man and two women, white.
The man rushed to me. “What’s happened?” he asked, and I stuttered out the word, “Cobra.”
He ran outside and came back with a large stick. “There it is! he yelled, as he lifted the stick and again and again brought it down on the snake’s head, killing the creature–a seven-foot long female carrying seven eggs!
One of the women came to me, check my pulse, and tried to look into my blinded eye. “I’m a nurse,” she said. Then she looked up at the other two people helplessly. “I don’t know what to do, but I feel I must do something!” Then, as almost an afterthought, she opened her handbag and started searching for something. “A sample of an eye medication came to me in the mail the other day. I don’t know anything about it,” she said, addressing me, “but it’s all we have. Shall I try it on you?”
I understood what she was really saying: The poor man is going to die anyway–or go bling; why not take the gamble?
I nodded and she put a few drops of the unknown prescription in my eye.
“It’s just possible that the water you threw on your face helped,” the nurse said. Now we waited to give the medication time to do its work, if it was going to.
A half hour passed. Just as the pain seemed to be easing, we heard footsteps. Another white man appeared, a stranger to the others. I was mystified. Where were all these people coming from? In those days in that part of Africa, no unidentified white man traveled alone.
Who was he? A French doctor, he said, on his way to a diamond mine fifty miles away. He’d heard of the beautiful Lake Munkamba and he’d detoured several miles off his route, parked his car a half mile away, and walked down to the shore of the lake.
The nurse explained to him what had happened to me. “Do you know how to treat venom in the eye?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. He told us of an effective new antibiotic. In fact, he had used it successfully on a man at the diamond mine just the month before. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any with him.
“Do you know anything about this? the nurse asked, handing him the medication she had put in my eye.
He looked at it carefully. “That’s it! That’s it! That’s the very one I was telling you about!”
The French doctor stayed for a while. Then, after giving instructions for applying the drops every thirty minutes and telling me to stay in bed for the next twenty-four hours, he left us, as quickly and mysteriously as he had arrived. None of us had even learned his name!
Now, however, I learned who my other saviors were: a Scottish missionary and his wife who were vacationing nearby and a nurse visiting them from English mission. The kindly Scotsman took me to his house and put me to bed.
The next morning my eyesight was fully restored, my energy had returned, and my eye was not even red! Today I see as well from one eye as from the other.
So they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress;
he went his word to heal them
and bring them alive out of this pit of death.
Let them thank the Lord for his enduring love and for the marvellous things he has done.
Psalm 107:19-21 NEB
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
