Monday, July 22, 2013

To Cover or Not To Cover

Yesterday we attended one of our local churches.  It seems that the pastor and congregation hold to some very conservative practices.  Among those are insisting that ladies cover their heads in church, and women are not allowed to wear slacks (or trousers as they call them here).  Our missionary colleague had told me that some of the churches feel this way and will actually give a lady a head covering as they enter the building if their head is uncovered.  She said not to worry because they do not extend this same requirement to the missionary ladies.

Someone must have failed to tell our usherette that we were missionaries because she handed us each items that looked like doilies and indicated that we should put them on our heads.  I think that my friend was more surprised than I was!  I chuckled to myself and proceeded to put on my “head covering”.  They took us to the platform for service, and there were large fans oscillating in our direction.  My little friend (aka head covering aka used doily) promptly flew off my head.  I retrieved it and used the bobby pin that was attached to secure it to my hair.  My colleague informed me later that hers blew off three times before she pinned it.

You know we couldn’t let this moment pass without trying to get a photograph, so Gaylord tried to discreetly position his iPad to take a photo.  I did the same with mine, thus the following:

                       IMG_0418   IMG_0602
I genuinely love Africa.

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