In which I engage in an unlikely activity while abroad.

Acts 17:26-29

He made from one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, determining beforehand their appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwelling, that they might seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, even though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and are, as even some poets among you have said, For we are also His own race.

This time, as I read through Acts, I’m impressed again and again by the way the gospel is presented to people of all different backgrounds. To the Jews, He is presented as the fulfillment of their prophecies and a better covenant than that of the law; to the Gentiles, He is the meaning behind all of creation’s beauty and the inner sense that convicts every man. To those seeking a God they did not know at the Parthenon, He is the ungrasped, unknown, yet close and yearning God not made by hands, not served by hands, the very essence and sphere of our existence.

There is a good news, a gospel, for every person. After being trained, I feel like I’ve learned how to serve a few dishes of the gospel. Maybe the tomatoes and eggs gospel, or the garlic aubergine gospel, or the beef noodle soup gospel. But I want the gospel to be so much a part of my being that I can open anyone’s refrigerator and whip up something irresistible. Peter, Stephen, and Paul all do this in the Acts time after time. I think everyone who loves God ought to open themselves to experiences of the Lord until they can do the same.

Speaking of opening up other people’s refrigerators, I have a fun story for you.

I started off this week thinking I’d go on an expedition to An—, a village outside of the rainforest. The morning of departure, however, the expedition was cancelled for me and another teammate, so I suddenly had a whole week at the lab base free as free can be. I started thinking about what ventures could possibly fill up my time, and inspiration struck at the breakfast table as I ate stale bread (Malagasy: mofo, pronounced moofoo)—I could make some bread.

Yes, bread. I had no yeast, salt, flour, oven, or even a warm place to let things rise. Challenge accepted. Here’s my process for making a passable sourdough boule in minimal resources/time in ten easy steps.

Step 1, Monday: Get a friend to ask the Malagasy-speaking kitchen for a bag of flour. Try to ask how to pay. Give up because of language barrier.

Step 2: Sterilize containers with boiling water; mix warm water with flour. Cover with a coffee filter, because it’s the only thing around.

Step 3: Set up makeshift incubator by pouring boiling water into 6 glasses surrounding the sourdough starter jar, and covering with a towel. Refill with boiling water every 3–4 hours.

Step 4, Tuesday, Wednesday: Feed with flour/water and mix every 24 hours.

Step 4.5: Anxiously read and reread online tutorials on sourdough. Anxiously calculate how many days you have left in the lab base for the sourdough starter to start culturing bacteria from the air. Borrow the use of a friend’s oven while he’s on vacation.

Step 5, Wednesday night: Decide that the bubbly sourdough is ripe enough (recipe said sourdough starter should be a week or two old at the earliest), because it floats and also because you have no time left to bake your bread before going on a cross-country road trip.

Step 5.5: Search entire lab for suitable bowl. Settle on a decorative coffee table bowl. Sterilize it with boiling water. Find a three inch, twitching cockroach in the sink. Kill cockroach with boiling water.

Step 6: Warily eyeball measurements to approximate the recipe for the levain and initial rise. Give up and throw all measurements out the window in favor of hand-feel.

Step 7: Knead, turn, let sit overnight with incubator.

Step 8, Thursday: Tote the little dough baby downhill a few kilometers in the rain to friend’s house. Break in, sort-of. Knead some more, periodically. Discover that oven doesn’t have any temperature markings: just big flame and little flame. By palm-feel, the max temperature was about 300 degrees (recipe called for 450 degrees). Use a pot as a makeshift Dutch oven.

Step 9: Decide that 2 hours of rise time (recipe called for 4 hours) is enough, because the taxi-brousses returning to the lab will not be running soon. Bake until bread sounds hollow when knocked on, 90 minutes (recipe called for 30 minutes).

Step 9.5: “Okay, first we gotta find the best lighting in this house.” Crowd into the bathroom to take pictures of the bread.

Step 10: “The recipe says to let the bread cool.” Stare at the bread. Abandon the recipe altogether and just cut into it. The crust crisps and sings with the knife. The sourdough starter hasn’t matured enough to form any characteristic taste from Ranomafana’s air microenvironment, but in a few weeks the bread can be really called Ranomafana sourdough. I can’t wait for bread that tastes like Madagascar microbiota.

Baking recipes are slightly OCD about what makes a perfect bread: temperatures, gram weights, even air pressure and humidity, etc etc etc., but I figured that people have been making bread by feel for centuries, baking in stone and fire ovens, just eyeballing and 大概-ing. So I’m proud to make my little loaf and join the inheritance of millennia.

When we walked out of the house with our hot prize, the rain had just cleared and the twilight sky and mist were too good not to share.

I’ll be bringing the sourdough starter with me across the country to possibly bake some bread in Ifaty, so once again, the adventures of the traveling bread will resume! Stay tuned for more bread hijinks.