Fire in the Hole...

So I promised another fire story from Zambia. Keep in mind that we had already burnt down almost all of Southern Zambia, and there was a prior incident involving the attempt to set fire under the bathtub in our old house to get rid of some mice, so Blu's track record with fire was not so great....

Our mission agency sent me to South Africa one month before Caedmon was due to be born. Blu followed 2 weeks later, so he remained out in the bush without me for a couple of weeks. Here's the story as Blu tells it:

"So my wife left to go have a baby in South Africa, and I was left out in the bush all by myself. So what is the first thing a boy would do? Go get a flashlight and look down into our bush toilet!! I wanted to see what was down there! So there were tons of maggots crawling and swimming around everywhere and it was pretty sick. So I decided to kill them all by pouring some gasoline down there. So I poured quite a bit down the hole (which was about 12 feet down)and walked out. But all of a sudden I heard some splashing around. I shone the flashlight down the hole and saw a rabbit that was stuck down there trying to get out of the gasoline! I felt sorry for him and decided the best thing I could do was put him out of his misery by starting a fire. I honestly thought that since it was such a big drop, the match would go out before it even dropped a foot. Now, keep in mind there was just a little hole to see down there, and I wanted to see what would happen to the rabbit! So I got a match, my best friend Mulenga, and we got down on our knees and put our faces as close to the hole as possible. I lit the match, and I kid you not, it dropped about 2 inches when there was a huge explosion. All of the gas fumes were rising toward the hole, and when the match was dropped, the explosion was honestly like something you would see in the movies. All we felt was heat and we ran from the outhouse. My face was covered in black (which was hopefully just ash...) and my eyebrows were all singed. I seriously almost died that day..."

Ask any Southern Baptist missionary in Southern Africa about "The Fireman" in Zambia, and they will be able to tell you the tales of the missionary who set a fire in his outhouse...