When you’re building relationships, you never know what might happen. This truth came home to me on a recent village trip that started out as a simple visit but ended up involving a well and several reptiles, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I met a young man named Ibrahim about a month ago when he was hitchhiking outside of Kangaba and I picked him up on my motorcycle. This good deed started a very rewarding relationship. Ibrahim and several of his friends have a love for learning English. Ibrahim visits my home often, and I visit his as well. I have gotten to know his parents and siblings.

Ibrahim knows that I am a missionary, and this fact doesn’t seem to bother him, although I have a feeling it bothers his father who is a Mori, an Islamic teacher who uses the words from the Quran to make protection charms, and also charms to influence people. Despite their reservations, Ibrahim’s parents are unfailingly polite to me when I visit.

Several weeks ago, I visited Ibrahim’s home when his father happened to be in Bamako and his mother was off on an errand. Sitting in the courtyard with Ibrahim and his friend, Isaac, we had some rare privacy, and the young men took the opportunity to ask me some questions that seemed to have been on their minds for some time. “How can someone know which religion is the right one to follow?” they asked. My heart skipped a beat at such a wonderful opportunity, and I told them my testimony of how God spoke to me personally at a very difficult time in my life. I assured them that God wants to speak to them personally as well.

Just yesterday, Ibrahim called me. He wanted me to come out to his village, pick him up and take him to a festival near Kangaba. The town of Kangaba was engaged in the ritual changing of the roof of the sacred hut, a huge event that happens once every seven years and is accompanied by the inauguration of a new kaari, a large group of young men that do most of the work of the changing of the roof. I had no idea how big each kaari was until I saw the line of young men running up the road by our house. There must have been almost a thousand of them. It was an impressive sight.

When I arrived at Ibrahim’s home, he told me he had just discovered that the festival would start the next day. So, instead of driving us to Kangaba, I sat in his courtyard and enjoyed talking with him and his family. Then we visited in the courtyard of Isaac’s family. While there, we heard a family member talking about a kanar (monitor lizard) that had fallen into a well. Kanar are common here in Mali and some grow to immense proportions. I saw one that was more than five feet long.

Isaac volunteered to remove the kanar from the well. Of course, this wasn’t going to be an individual effort, so Ibrahim, Isaac, the well’s owner and I trooped over together. There is not much I like more than a good creature hunt, so I peered down into the well with great interest. The surface of the water was about 15 feet down. Isaac’s weapon of choice looked like long skewer—a pointed piece of metal about five feet long attached to a two-foot handle. Isaac planned to inch down the well by pressing his back against one side of the well and walking his feet down the opposite wall. He would stop just above the surface of the water and stab the kanar from a safe distance. Kanar are not poisonous, but they can inflict nasty bites.

Isaac squirmed his way down the well and, after several well aimed stabs, managed to harpoon the kanar. Excitedly, he called up to us for a rope, which we threw down to him. He tied the rope around the skewer and then made his way slowly up the well and out. Then we hauled up the kanar, over three feet long, and Isaac quickly slit its throat. I knew what was going to be on the menu for Isaac’s family that evening.

The owner of the well walked over and slowly surveyed the dead kanar. Shaking his head, he said the kanar he had seen in the well was much bigger. It must still be down there.

Isaac was game for another try and quickly squirmed back down the well, skewer in hand. While he was down there, I was telling Ibrahim a story from when we were in Guinea and I had gone hunting for two snakes we had seen that lived in the wall of Fred and Isatta Coker’s annex where the student missionary had been sleeping. The snakes kept popping their heads up above the wall one after the other, and by the time I was done shooting, we found that I had killed three snakes instead of two.

I was in the middle of the story when a young woman who had been watching the proceedings with interest suddenly looked at the ground and yelled, “Sa!” (“Snake!”) I looked, and sure enough, a long, thin snake was wiggling toward us. I leapt for a stick to dispatch it (here it is prudent to assume all snakes are poisonous because so many are). My blow missed, and to my great dismay, and Isaac’s greater dismay, the snake slithered quickly into the only hiding place it could see—the open mouth of the well! Yelling loudly, we ran to the well only to see the snake land on poor Isaac’s head and slither down his back before splashing into the water below. Isaac wasted no time ascending out of the well and quickly checked himself over. He didn’t find any bites, for which we were all very thankful. After we determined Isaac was fine, the hilarity of the situation struck us, and we all laughed long and hard.

Perhaps wanting more kanar for supper, Isaac wanted to go back down the well, but we talked him out of it and walked back to Ibrahim’s courtyard. It was almost dark, and I needed to head home. I had quite a story to tell Holly and the kids!
We never know what is going to happen here from day to day, but we know our Heavenly Father does. Please keep our family as well as Ibrahim, his family and his friends in your prayers. I look forward to exploring more of their questions with them and perhaps having more adventures.

• Twitter