The Curse

When I was in high school in Cameroon, we all went to the beach for a spiritual retreat.  The program included lots of long presentations.  Some of them were pretty interesting.  The basketball coach drew a big heart on the overhead projector with a chair in the middle of it.  First he put ME on the chair, then scribbled over that and drew another one with a cross on the chair.  He drew a check mark next to that one.  Then they separated the girls from the boys and talked about sex.  This talk also involved Ven diagrams and such.  

It was a pretty good time.  There were games and good food.

So one day we all went out to the beach, by the old cannon, during our free time.  There was an island about a mile off shore.  Nothing better to do so we all swam out to the island, all us kids.  It took longer than I thought to get out there.  And way longer to walk around the periphery than I expected.  Pretty soon it was just me in the jungle, picking my way across cliffs and inlets.  Up ahead I could see Lawrence coming in and out of view.  I saw a huge orange iguana leap from a boulder and splash in the surf.  

"Did you see that, Lawrence?" I yelled.  I'm not sure he saw it.  I'm not sure I saw it either, really.  It's one of those things.

Anyway, the next day we were about to leave.  We were all sitting in the pavilion and the owner of the camp showed us old colonial slave-trading trinkets they had found on the property.   I guess he was the owner.  Maybe he was the manager or something.  He passed them around, like old pieces of metal and stuff.  He told us stories about missionaries who came all the way over there from Europe and then died of malaria.  Then he turned real serious and said that until we walked around the island, nobody had done that for two hundred years because of the curse.  He thanked us for breaking the curse.  That made me feel pretty good.