A Lesson in Camels

Wow... has it really been another week of work? Time is flying by so quickly. Real quick... last night Stephen and I went to Charro's apartment for dinner with some teachers! Her apartment was huge and has rooftop access which we sooooo desire. She had a ridiculous amount of food for us. To start, we had more meat than I could ever imagine in one meal. We had jamón, lomo, pato (DUCK!) and chorizo that was made by Yolanda's grandmother! On Tuesday I got the lowdown on the pig and how Spaniards are particularly prideful in their love and use of said pig. I was told that homemade chorizo involves making sausage and then cleaning the linings of the intestine (cleaning very, very well) and then using the lining as the casing for the sausage. However it is made, it is delicious!
So we had those meats with cheese, bread, some weird tuna fish thing I did not try and ensalada rusa (some cheesy potato salad looking thing with pineapples, shrimp and crab - yum!). Then she brought out a seafood tortilla (potato cake with shrimp). Then she had the best porkchops this side of the Atlantic and a chicken dish with mushrooms. I'm not a huge funghi fan but these mushrooms were la bomba. Then we had some wine from Asun's village and it was just a fantastic way to break my fast :) Really fun. We were over there for 3.5 hours and when we left at midnight, two other teachers stayed until FOUR IN THE MORNING. They couldn't believe I try and get 8 hours of sleep a night... they average about 4. How Estrella works with 3 year-olds on 4 hours of sleep is beyond me. Power to her!
Okay, now on to the camels! Some of you may know this little fella who hails from North Carolina:

But he is not the camel we will be talking about. This camel looks more like this:

He lives in the Middle East as is called a dromedary camel. The Bactrian camel is typically found in Asia and has 2 humps. Dromedary has 1.

Now for the camel lesson! (These facts are straight out of "Walking the Bible" p 252-253)
1) the camel is the only mammal capable of surviving without water for as much as two weeks in the summer and TWO MONTHS in the winter
2) unlike most people think, the hump of the camel does not store water. the camel stores water in its tissues and cells and conserves water by constantly increading its body temperature to match the climate (as much as 12 degrees farenheit) AKA it does not need to use water to cool itself down like humans (who must maintain a steady body temperature)
3) the hump of the camel is filled with fat - as much as 80 pounds of fat - and allows the camel to live without food for long periods of time
4) camels have broad feet so that they do not sink in the sand and they have tight nostrils to block out sand during sandstorms
5) the camel's forehead has thick bone visors that block the sunlight from the camel's eyes
6) by far the coolest... the camel has extra eyelids that move from side to side like a windshield wiper to remove sand from its eyeballs. the camel can actually close its third eyelid and see through it during a sandstorm - ridiculous.

Other interesting quotes from this book (there are LOTS so if you don't care, scroll down to the bottom for a funny video!):

• Agatha Christie (who was married to an archaeologist): "The great thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more he loves you."

• A proverb in Giza: "Things dread time. Time dreads the pyramids."

• I learned the terms "Egpytmania" and "Pyramidiots"

• "Earth collapses with the engineering of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can find the muscle to descend the hill. The desert may be empty, but it's the least quiet place I've ever been."

• When your god is self-reliance, and you let yourself down, there is nowhere else to turn.

• And whatever route they may have taken, this terrain would have been ideal as a place of revelation. Come face-to-face with the high mountains of southern Sinai, and whatever one's orientation, one pauses with anticipation. The Bible says that when the Israelites beheld Mount Sinai, they "trembled." At the moment, I could understand why.

• Water becomes wisdom. Food becomes salvation. And sandstorms become poetry...

• Bedouin philosophy of hospitality: host first, ask questions later (like Abraham when he invites 3 unknown visitors into his tent)

• "So what feature of this house are you most proud of?" "If you have such a house, your wife is pleased, so you are pleased. I think it's the same everywhere you go."

• the origin of the term "stiff-necked" - reference to an ox that refuses to lower its neck, which it must do to be properly fitted into a yoke

• "For as long as we were in the Sinai, we talked about food. We talked about the food we were eating. We talked about the food we wanted to eat. And mostly we talked about how we couldn't complain about the food we were eating because that would make us too much like the Israelites. Misspeak and we'd be eating manna for forty years."

• Science is never going to prove the divine, but it's never going to disprove it either. We can explain many things, but we can't explain what's inside the human soul. That's God.

• Most Muslims don't know why the Jews care about the Holy Land. They don't know that the Jews believe it was promised to them (in reference to the fact that Moses in the Koran has no sense of purpose for leading the Jews to the Promised Land - in fact, there is no Promised Land at all)

• Just like the Israelites had to go around Gaza to enter Israel from the Sinai, the British in World War I could not capture Gaza either and had to go around as well. - this is a pretty cool story, you'll have to read the book to get the whole picture!

• Ben-Gurion "My whole philosophy is strongly influenced by the Bible. What is clear to me is that there is a physical world and a spiritual world, and I am saddened that our perception of the spiritual world is very primitive. It hasn't evolved at the same rate as our perception of the physical world."

• King Abdullah II of Jordan was a 43rd generation direct descendant of Mohammed, the founder of Islam

• The Bible lives today, not because it's untouchable, but precisely because it has been touched - it has been challenged - and it remains undefeated.

• The Israelites begin their trek to the Promised Land, but at each step along the way, they resist putting their faith in God. Finally, after the spies, God gets so fed up that He lashes out. And what punishment does He levy? He doesn't kill them. He doesn't send them back to Egypt. He doesn't even rescind His oath of land. Instead, He banishes them to four decades in the desert. Only by spending that additional time in the wilderness will they fully purge themselves of their past and become a nation of God.

• A leadership lesson from the life of Moses: Moses could easily have gone to the Promised Land with God, but without the people. He could easily have gone with the people, but without God. Instead, he chose to go with both, and the only way to do that was to stay in the desert until both sides learned to get along. That's why they stuck around for forty years.

• When you live in the city, you can control everything. You control the temperature, you control the food, you control the water. In the desert, you have to take things as they are. So why stay? Because we don't control everything. When you live in the bubble, you see just what human beings make. When you live here you see things other people don't. It's difficult. Sometimes you get frustrated. You want to press a button and make things better. But you can't. I invite you in the winter, to see a flood, and you will see that we are not masters of the world. It's the most destructive thing I've ever seen, and the most beautiful. It comes out of nowhere. No signal. No warning. Just suddenly the skies open and the water starts to fall... when I saw it for the first time, I almost cried. I know all the things it was washing away. But I also knew what it would bring in the spring.

• In the end, I believe the essential spirit that animates those places also animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God in the course of my journey. If that spirit is life, then I found life. If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three, and that none can exist without the other.

• All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.

And that's a wrap.

And in closing, I offer this blessing found in Numbers:

"May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord shine His face upon you and favor you. May the Lord lift up His face toward you and grant you peace."