Sunday, January 6, 2008

Bibles for Chickens

Michele (see my previous post's blog comments) has inspired me to continue my stories from Zambia. For some reason, the first one that came to mind was our chickens!!

In Zambia, our mission agency had the policy that we do not give away Bibles. This is very controversial to some. The reasoning is that if you just give away free Bibles they become something not very precious, that someone will just sell and most likely use the money to get drunk. However, if you "charge" something for the Bible, it becomes something precious that they will treasure. So we would give out a list of Bible verses that they could memorize in exchange for their Bible, or they would most often bring a chicken for a Bible. Soon, our hut was surrounded by tons of chickens!! We got roosters that crowed at 2am, laying chickens, and all sorts of ugly things!! We cooked a couple of them, gave some to friends in neighboring villages, but I'm sure all the other people in our village called us the Chicken Bazungu! (chicken white people!)

Our hut with a few of our many Bible Chickens!
Photobucket

4 comments:

Brandi said...

Oh my dear. . .I can just picture you surrounded by chickens thinking, "Just take the Bible. PLEASE don't leave another chicken"!!!! ha haa!!!

Love ya,
Brandi

Anonymous said...

Some of those "Chickens" look a LOT like turkeys:)
CeCe

Stefanie said...

Ok so you said that you cooked a few....does that mean that you had to kill it too?? Ewww! I have really enjoyed reading all of your posts from Zambia!

Brandi said...

Alright, we need a new blog post!! Come on!!!!

Bran