Nancy J. Myers, the practical mystic, lives in southwest Michigan, USA. She is drawn to spiritual experience but always keeps at least one foot in the material world. This blog covers the gamut of her daily experience as a retired writer and editor for great causes; grandmother; world traveler; Midwestern Mennonite; and lover of books, other cultures and languages, nature, and God.
This blog moved to WordPress in October 2012. Archives for February 2011–September 2012 are located here.
the practical mystic 
I love your blog! The organization is really cool.
Love the topics you bring up on your blog!! Really enjoy the different perspective!
Yes I hate to repeat myself. Thank you for following!
Hi, Nancy–
I stumbled across your blog because every now and then I type some term from my past into google, just to see how much the world is aware of the lesser known things. Tonight I typed in “Ndjoko Punda” and found, to my surprise, that Google Earth is fully aware of a small town on the Kasai River just where it becomes unnavigable. Hilariously, my next hit offered to find me a hotel there (I was just hoping for a photo of a particular house). I found a sad, sad picture of the beautiful Mennonite church built almost a hundred years ago and now falling to ruins. They used to run goats in that field to keep the grass down. Another sad picture of the village school, the walls collapsed. The African World War has not treated this little town well. I hated to think what the airstrip might look like, but another blog, from AIMM assured me that planes can still land. I lived from 1968 until 1972 in the mission house closest to the road that ran down to the water holes and then to the river itself. My father was in charge of the mission hospital. My mother worked in the dispensary, and later, Aganetha Fast ran the maternity ward. The path behind the house went up to the generator station and from there to the hospital. When dark fell my father would come down that path, start the generator for the three hours of electricity and then my dog Taffy and I would meet him on the path and escort him the rest of the way home. On our way in we would tie up Taffy for the night, make sure the chickens were cooped and safe, check on the rabbit houses, and then go in to dinner. We left when I was ten, leaving Taffy in charge of guarding the Mennonite kids’ boarding house in Kinshasa. Like all missionaries we left nearly everything behind except a few cherished toys, and I smuggled into my Pan Am flight bag a match box full of Ndjoko Punda earth. I didn’t know the term Third Culture Kid until I was an adult, but the red dirt of Ndjoko is still in my heart, although the actual box is long gone, discarded with the detritus of my childhood by my mother when she was cleaning house. I can still smell it.