Australia - The Land Down Under

www.abc.net.au

As a doctor, he never saw a case of scurvy. As a prisoner of Al Qaeda, that changed

Kidnapped from his Burkina Faso home at gunpoint in 2016, Ken Elliott survived seven years in the desert as a prisoner of Al Qaeda.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

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His captors showed no interest in using Ken's medical skills. Some of them were profoundly sceptical about Western medicine anyway.

"Muslims don't get sick," one of them pronounced – which after decades of treating sick Muslims in Djibo, came as news to Ken Elliott.

Of course, they tried to convert him. But Ken was adamant: "The Lord has been good to me. There's no way I was going to dishonour Him by converting to Islam. Or even pretending to convert."

"Well, some might say that the Lord hadn't been doing you any favours for this period of your life," I put to him. "Didn't you ever feel that God had abandoned you?"

Quiet conviction: "Never. No. He was always there."

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Hmm...

Religion is strictly forbidden. I'll leave the post above this as it makes no attempt to convert anyone and isn't discussing specifics. However, discussing that post may be problematic.
 
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We have good rain today, the slow soaking kind. Got a few drops yesterday.....maybe enough to wet the back of your hand.

I think that will be about all. I was hoping for downpours !!!

They are forecasting a wetter than average summer, but also a hotter than average summer to go with it.

 
I love a sunburnt country....

My Country
The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

-- Dorothea Mackellar

.....and in Australia, today, October 9, 2024....

Spring in full swing across Australia​


A quintessentially spring-like week is upon Australia, with a contrasting mix of thunderstorms in Queensland and Western Australia, cold and snow in Tasmania, heat in the Northern Territory and rain possibly developing in the southeast.

Variety?...Yes. We have that in spades.....
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

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Credit and Thanks are due to weatherzone.com.au for the pic/map above
 
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