Mary had a good long laugh session in the car today. This isn’t normal for her, so everyone else in the car stopped what they were doing and looked at each other, wondering what on earth could be so funny! Well, here’s the story:
Dr Mary wrote this amazing book called The Village Medical Manual. The director of my mission organization said that he believes that nobody has done more in the world of missions than Mary has with that book. It’s absolutely brilliant, and is used in millions of villages around the world. Anyway, she’s now working on revisions for the 6th edition, and they asked her for some fun pictures of people doing medical work in villages for the cover of the 2 volumes. She’s seriously afraid of cameras pointed at her, so she asked me if I would be willing to be on the cover. I said sure, as long as it’s not a full face shot of just me. So, the past few weeks, we’ve been trying to get some good pictures of typical medical work in villages. One picture has been accepted, but we need one more for the 2nd volume. So, today was going to be the day. We went to 2 villages, and Mary had the perfect patient in mind for this picture. She’s an elderly woman with shingles on her abdomen and up her side. We brought some pain patches for her, and wanted to get a picture of me applying them to the area. No problem. Well, we arrived and found the patient. I had the patches, Mary had the camera, and the patient was holding her shirt up for the application and photo op. As I was applying the patch, I wondered if it would be a problem to have some…ummm….female anatomy…in the picture. I dismissed the thought because we’re in Ethiopia, and showing that particular area of the body is absolutely no big deal. Plus, she’s 70 years old! Nobody will care!
On the way home, Mary was very excited about the pictures she got. She thought for sure that the editor would love one of them, and she couldn’t wait to send it. I said offhandedly, “Yeah, as long as they don’t mind having [female anatomy] in the pictures!” That’s when the laugh came…and continued for a solid 2 minutes. Mary had not even noticed the extra body parts in the picture! That’s how Ethiopian she has become.
So now we have to come up with another picture. In the meantime, though, Mary is going to send that one to the editor and see what she thinks. I can’t wait to read the email in response.
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