
Mom's dad's face used to just hang in a frown. It wasn't that he was always upset (contrary to my childhood opinion), it just hung that way. Well my face seems to do the same- I have to work harder than most people to convince them that I'm having a good time. And my dad's dad was Swedish, so nothing to smile about there.
I met an old Lani man about half my height and the brightest eyes this side of the night sky. He worked for the Dutch missionaries ages ago and he continues to take care of the buildings they left. When he met me his smile stretched from one ear to the next and his two teeth popped right between his lips. It was at that point that I think my smile doubled in size.
The old man ran off, hunched over, and returned running with a wheel barrow bouncing behind him. This was an old friend of Kellian, who was showing me around the village. The man showed us the pride of his work, taking us through each of the mission houses. I wasn't nearly as interested in this subject as his speech- he only spoke Lani, one of the oldest and most complex languages on the planet. Though we never exchanged a word, the man put a fire in me.

I think I already said this somewhere...your grandfather Mallory would have loved this... sounds like some of his Africa stories. The happiest (and probably some of the hardest) years of his life.
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