Today we got a chance to drive to Ngite and hike up to the big and beautiful
waterfall. Ngite is only a short drive from Bundimalinga, where we live.
Yet there the language changes to Meconjo, not a similar dialect but a
distinct and different language. We drove for perhaps twenty minutes,
passing our team airstrip before turning off onto smaller and smaller roads
and finally parking beside a family “compound” or grouping. All of us got
out of the truck (we traveled African style, with about 15 of us packed into
a pickup truck) and walked up past houses, through a compound and its
accompanying cocoa garden. Not much later we reached the beginning of the
steep climb up the mountain side to the source of the clean water piped to
our local villagers, Ngite waterfall.

Naomi and I joined some of the other missionary parents and kids for this
half day trip. Naomi was amazing. She is growing stronger and braver all
the time. She traversed hills and ledges that made me afraid. A good deal
of our travel involved a real danger of a steep, sharp fall to rocks below,
and she is not too fond of heights.

We strapped her into a child climbing harness for the worst part of the
climb, and at one point all of us used a rope to help us scramble from one
edge of the ledge, across erosion to the other edge. We were dirty, tired
and a bit torn up from the climb, which was as steep a hike as I have ever
taken.

But, oh, the reward of the falls. When we reached Ngite falls there was no
question that the trip was very well worth it. Naomi did not go down the
difficult path to the water itself, but I did. I was able to swim in the
pool below the falls, lay backwards and feel the full w eight of 300 feet of
falls coming down on me. It was majestic, it was refreshing, it was healing
and soothing.

I am posting these pictures, which I wish did more credit to the actual
beauty there. I could not bring my camera down to the pool at the bottom of
the falls, since it was too wet, the air too full of spray. That would have
made some nice pictures. I lay in that cool pool feeling the weight of the
water on my back, the spray of the water on my face and just felt incredibly
thankful for the opportunity to be here in the African jungle swimming in a
waterfall.