A Visit to Lui

On Monday morning Larissa and I hitched a ride with some friends to Lui, a town about 45 minutes up the main road. It just so happened that there was a man on a short-term team from Missouri who is an expert on the application of GPS and GIS tools to agricultural studies. Since I have been learning about the use of GPS and GIS for mapping water points and Larissa is our resident gardener, we decided to go to Lui and hear more about his work. There is no cell phone reception in Lui so we didn't know anything more than what he had told Karen when they flew in on the same MAF flight. In fact we didn't even know his last name, but we were off to Lui looking for "Mark the scientist".

The ride to Lui was glorious. It was a cloudy morning with a cool breeze and we were sitting in the back of a land cruiser pick-up. Since it is now the start of the dry season, the leaves are rapidly turning from green to brown. It felt like Fall to me for the first time.

We met up with Mark, and it just so happened that his group had planned to visit a teak plantation run by the Mothers' Union and the ECS church in Lui that morning, so we joined them for the trip while chatting with Mark and Sam, a gardener also from Missouri. *See pictures of the teak plantation from my last post

Later we returned to the guesthouse and sat and talked with Mark, Sam, and the rest of their short-term team. I learned a lot of helpful information for using Google Earth to map water points. A few weeks ago, Google Earth updated the images available for Mundri and the rest of Southern Sudan making them significantly more useful for our work. Michael and I had already seen the new images, but Mark had new insights about the benefits of using Google Earth for water and agricultural ministries. Much of Mark's work is too high tech to be useful in Mundri, but it was also interesting to hear about how new technologies are being used for agriculture in Japan and around the world.



In the afternoon, we got to talk with our friends, David and Heather, about some of the problems they have seen Moru farmers face and possible solutions. We also heard about what has been tried in Lui previously by other NGOs and missionaries. They have been missionaries in Africa for several decades, and we are so thankful for their knowledge and wisdom.

*David showed us what looks like a field of purple wildflowers but is actually a field of crops completely destroyed by the parasitic plant striga.

David and Heather graciously hosted Larissa and me for dinner and let us stay the night in the guestroom of their beautiful home. Their compound is truly an oasis in Lui. We had a perfect, restful night of conversation. They even gave us a ride back to Mundri the next morning.

In the end our visit to Lui was such a blessing. We learned some new things. We enjoyed the cool weather and a beautiful sunset. We had a night of deep sleep uninterrupted by Chai barking or a motorcycle revving its engine at 6 am.