The Poisonwood Bible

od notices they are the Tribes of Ham. And the dirt-color houses all just the same as the dirt they're sitting on. Mama says not
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a thing in the whole village that won't melt in a good hard rain. And I could see Mommy Mommy, the top of her. I could see everything she was thinking, like Jesus does. She was thinking about
animals.
Sometimes when you wake up you can't tell if it was dreaming
or real.
Adah
GOD WORKS, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won't do, now and then. Oh, He will send down so much rain that all his little people are drinking from one another's sewers and dying of the kakakaka.Then he will organize a drought to scorch out the yam and manioc fields, so whoever did not die of fever will double over from hunger. What next, you might ask? Why, a mystery, that's what!
After the Independence cut off our stipend and all contacts with the larger world, it seems God's plan called for Mother and Ruth May to fall sick nigh unto death. They grew flushed and spotted and thick-tongued and tired and slow-moving near unto the lower limit of-what is generally thought to constitute a living human body.
The Reverend seemed unconcerned about this. He forged ahead with his mission work, leaving his three older girls in charge of hearth and home for days on end -while he sallied out to visit the unsaved, or to meet with Anatole about imposing Bible classes upon boys of tender years. Oh, that Bible, where every ass with a jawbone gets his day! (Anatole evidently was not keen on the plan.) Often the Reverend simply went out and walked along the river for hours, alone, trying out his sermons on the lilies of the field