The logo for Fat J Records isn’t exactly an accurate representation…

Actually, that title is too dramatic. By far. But a lot of you have asked me where I got the name for Fat J Records. Some of you have even thought that it was a half-veiled drug reference (it’s not).

The name comes from my cat. My friend Denise, who I used to work with, always used to refer to Jay as “Phat J.” It was a good name for him because back in the day he was a little chubby as well as cool. The name stuck. But when I using his name for the record label, somehow using the name Phat didn’t fit (because I didn’t want anyone to think that Cara Austin sang 90’s era rap music).

Photo by tolngacre

Cara’s Cameroon trip is coming up soon and my mind has been on missions so today I’m going to be posting about the trip yet again . I will get back to exciting and thrilling posts about Cara Austin’s musical adventure – I really will. But Cara’s music is so tied to missions that sometimes it’s hard to separate the two, especially when a trip is coming…

As part of the trip, the team is going to be able to spend a night at Waza National Park. Not only does it have an awesome name (Waza! I love it!) but from all the pictures of the park here it appears that there are all kinds of crazy animals that I never want to meet face-to-face (lions, for example).

— Don Richardson

“You can hardly call it sacrificing when you are having the time of your life. There was hard work, there was sweat, there was malaria and hepititis, but those are just bumps in the road.”

— Quote by Don Richardson (the first sentence was Cara’s favorite, the second was my favorite).

Last night, Cara and I went to hear Don Richardson speak. Cara told me a little bit about his amazing background and story as a missionary before we went, but I wasn’t expecting the talk to be as unbelievable as it was.

Don Richardson is a missionary that went to the Sawi tribe - a totally unreached people back in 1955. He, his wife and his under-1-year-old son traveled by canoe for 10 hours to get to the village. The tribe hadn’t ever really been around Europeans before, but were eager for Don and his family to come and live among them because they wanted their own “tuon” – what they called a tall, pale, sickly looking person. They had heard of other tribes in the area that had tuon living among them, and wanted the medicine and other benefits that came with the tuon people.

When Don and his family arrived, the Sawi villagers were dressed in full tribal paint and had their weapons brandished. Since the Sawi people are cannibalistic headhunters, this was fairly troubling, but apparently it was a way of welcoming the visitors to their tribe.

During the 15 years that the Richardsons lived with the Sawi, they were able to learn and record their language and figured out all kinds of really cool and interesting ways to communicate with the tribe. The stories were unbelievable, seriously. The most famous story is about the Peace Child, which you can read about here, but he told tons of stories and they were all great.

The way that he described learning the language was fascinating. The first thing that he did to begin trying to learn was to hang out with a group of Sawi and start pointing at things. First he pointed at a man, and they said a word. Then he pointed at a woman and they said the same word. Then he pointed at a dog and they said the same word. Then a stream, tree, rock – all the same word. He finally figured out that the word that they were saying meant “finger.” He also found out (later) that pointing at someone with your finger is the same thing as placing a curse on that thing. When the Sawi point at something, they use their lips.

It was a very cool thing to be in the room with Mr. Richardson and to know that he had experienced all these things. Cara was a bit star struck. Afterward, she went up to him and said: “Would it be ok if I had my picture taken with you? You’re my missionary hero. You’re kind of like a rock star to me.”

After both of them got done blushing, I took their picture.

Woman in Rwanda installs moquito netting over her son’s bed in an effort to prevent the spread of malaria.

This link goes to a slideshow about one of the efforts that Compassion has in Rwanda to try to get mosquito nets distributed to as many people as possible in the country.