Who would have thought. But the smile turns quickly into a wretched grin.There's reason enough for the smile not to last. First, the predicament I'm f...acing. Then, the welt on my ass. It still stings terribly. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't survive 200 of those lashes. At least I didn't reach behind my back to rub it when she whacked me, I'm sure Mistress wouldn't have approved.I'm pretty sure I can get the count down on the bike and the rowing machine, after all I went to the gym at least twice a. .’ Ora wasn’t paying attention to the words. She was stuck on ‘giving thanks with all her heart’ for the young man she’d married and the new life in her womb. Dreams for young women in this community were simple, and she and Jim had started their life together with more than many of their neighbors. She had a lot to be thankful about. Jim closed the Bible and looked at the top of Ora’s head. ‘Tell me again what you’ll do when it starts,’ he ordered gently. ‘I tell Matty to run to the Jacksons’,. He was skeletal. As I took out my wallet my friend told me in my language (In India, we have many official languages, which are as different as Dutch and Portuguese and we can’t understand each other’s language) not to give money as he would spend it on drugs but to give him food instead.We took him to the same Parsi restaurant and paid for his food. He could not enter the hotel. Waiter gave him food and he sat on the foot path and ate his meal. I felt very sad, I could still picture the. The skipper spoke only broken English so there was little to do but avoid getting seasick. It wasn’t so bad this time. Four hours later he could see the dot on the horizon get larger and larger, finally approaching a sandy beach with people waiting.The boat couldn’t go up on the beach so Joshua took off his shoes and rolled up his pant legs to wade the rest of the way in. The boat crew, clad in loincloths, had no such issues as they unloaded his things and the supplies the islanders needed..