(I don’t have a photo of a greyhound so a cheetah will have to do.)

My adventurous travel spirit served me well during my high school days in Kenya and on into college. My best example is what I call the Greyhound story. After my sophomore year of college I was looking for a summer job to help pay for my schooling. I passed through Chicago where I stopped in to see a distant cousin. I asked her about jobs and she told me that the Greyhound bus company was hiring. They were looking for tour guides for their summer excursions around America. Having been raised in Africa, I did not know that much about America, but the job sounded interesting so I thought I would make an application. The following morning I took the train downtown to Chicago and approached the massive Greyhound depot. The building was a beehive of...

Hunting is the avocation of most little boys that grow up in East Africa and I was no exception. At the age of ten I was given a .22 rifle by my father and taught how to use it. I started by shooting at paper targets mounted on termite hills and then moved on to shooting birds for the pot. But my big goal was to shoot a bushbuck. These beautiful antelope were secretive and although I frequently saw their splayed footprints in the damp soil, I never got a shot at one.

After several years of camping in tents overlooking Lake Victoria, my father built a primitive road into our area. Then with the road built it was decided to have a church conference.  Sukuma men walked in from the surrounding areas and temporary shelters were erected to house them.  The Dilworth family drove in from Butundwe so that Dick could...

In the early 70s my wife and I were teachers at the Rift Valley Academy – a school located in the highlands of Kenya. Our students came from all over East Africa so during one of the vacations periods we decided to visit some of the parents who were located in eastern Congo.

Barb and I drove our old VW bug through Uganda, then ruled by the despot Idi Amin, stopping at various Game Parks on the way. Upon arriving in the Congo we drove to various mission stations where we stayed with the parents of our students. One of our final trips took us through the famous Ituri Forest. The road was a thin ribbon of red mud – permanently in the shade from the great canopy of trees. Occasionally we spotted short reddish people – pygmies who were the original inhabitants of the great jungle. Rounding a curve we met a group of pygmy hunters...

In 1952 I lived in Tanganyika with my missionary parents. We lived rough, setting up tents in a forested peninsula on the shores of lake Victoria. The area had recently been opened to homesteaders and hundreds of Sukuma people were in the process of clearing trees and planting garden. But the area also teemed with wildlife and gardening with animals in the nearby forest was problematic. The biggest problem for the farmers was – BABOONS!

These terrestrial monkeys were clever and quickly learned there was tasty food to be found in the fields. A large troop of baboons could ruin a field of corn or sweet potatoes in a few minutes.  They did not just eat a little, but pulled up whole sweet potato vines and left them to die.  They would also pick a number of ears of corn and take one bite out of each.  When the baboons left...