I fell in love with Africa when I was a child. I grew up in a mission-minded church that supported missionaries, and the missionaries would come back every four or five years and teach us where they’d been. They would bring back slides, items, but most of all stories. It meant a whole Sunday away from the monotony of our preaching cycle, and a glimpse of the exotic. We sent missionaries everywhere, even in the US, but my favorite was always Africa.
I meant to be a missionary myself, but God had other plans. In any case, I get excited about African content. I bumped into The Green Wall of Africa, where they are fighting desertification one hole in the ground at a time. I went through a lot of You Tube videos about it all, but they felt static, like encyclopedia articles. Shaun Overton sneaked into my feed with his project in west Texas. Buying a large ranch in the desert, he is deternied to raise up a desert forest. He was just this guy going out there with no real idea of what he was doing, but determined to do it. It is that grit that makes the show interesting. He hires experts. He chops up cactus. He takes a week a month to put in the hard labor his project demands. I just love it.
I wish someone would create the same long-format story-telling in Africa.
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