When I was little, I wanted to be a Titchie at Rethy Academy, a boarding school for missionary kids in the Belgian Congo. The school was at Rethy, the same place we lived when my mom and dad first went to Africa to be missionaries. My mom and dad worked at the hospital to learn more about the weird diseases that exist in Africa. Since the school was a long way away, on top of the next hill more than a mile away, I had to stay at home.

At a boarding school you get to go away from home to live with the other kids all the time. You get to eat there too. You even get to sleep there. You don’t have to come home at night. I think you have to go to school, but you don’t have to ask your mom for permission to go to the dorm to play.

 My mom later told me that I was so eager to go that I even packed my cardboard suitcase and told her that I was ready.

She said, “I don’t think so. You are just five years old and too small to go away from home.”

I wasn’t so small. I was big enough to go hunting for birds with my bow and arrow. I had a special arrow. On the four-pointed tip of the arrow there was sticky gray stuff from the sap of the big old rubber tree behind the hospital. My little friend told me it was the very best arrow for shooting birds. The man who made it for me wrapped the split head with sisal string covered with sticky, cooked sap from that tree to make it strong and four times as good at getting birds. It would stick to the bird, and I might even get a pet bird. I might hit a bird in the tail making it unable to fly away carrying that heavy arrow. It would grow new tail feathers and be my very own pet.

I don’t think I ever did hit a bird, but I did lots of sneaking around, half crouched, my arrow ready on the string of my little bow. Black and white birds, called wagtails, would keep running ahead of me then fly a little way, land, and bob their tails up and down. I don’t think my mom would be happy to know that I was hunting wagtails. She had said, “They are such friendly birds. Don’t bother them.” Because they were the easiest ones to sneak up on, I spent hours trying to shoot one. My arrow lost all its stickiness since it hit the dirt so often, but I didn’t lose it for a long time. I never did get a Wagtail that I can remember.

I do remember that I was able to find chameleons. I would look for a long time on the hedge that had the fuzzy leaves, the tiny bunches of colored flowers, and the little clumps of green berries. The green berries would grow as big as bbs and eventually turn black. Some of the kids ate them, but I didn’t. When the berries were black, I think the chameleons found more insects on those lantana hedges. Chameleons were hard to find since they would stay completely still and make themselves the same shade of green as the hedge. The patterns on their backs and the patterns made by the twigs and leaves looked just the same. The hedge was the best place to look for chameleons.

I would stand very still for a long time, and sometimes a chameleon would move; then I would finally see him. They have skinny legs and feet sort of like mittens with no separate toes. The tiny claws, two on one side and three on the other side, help them to clamp onto the branch they are climbing. Chameleons move the front foot on one side and the back foot on the other side at the same time, little by little, until each foot reaches the new place on which to hold. They feel around with their feet for the best spot and don’t even look. Then, they move the other two feet.

When chameleons sneak up on a fly, their tails stick out straight behind them, not touching anything. They advance bit by bit, maybe when they think the fly isn’t looking. Their eyes bulge way out on both sides of their head. Wrinkly skin covers the entire eye except the tiny hole in the center where they can see. Their eyes roll around and around to look in front, in back, sideways, and up and down. Each eye goes a different way until they are ready to catch a fly.

The chameleon I had been watching stopped. Both eyes checked all around again, but then they came together, almost cross-eyed, both focusing directly on a small fly. The layered skin under the chameleon’s chin started bulging out bigger and bigger. His mouth turned up almost like a smile, opening just a little crack.

Suddenly, so fast I would have missed it if I hadn’t been concentrating, the chameleon’s long tongue shot out and the end stuck to the fly. The tongue was even longer than the chameleon! Chameleons almost never miss. His long tongue quickly disappeared, curling up somewhere inside as he pulled the fly into his grinning mouth. Once again his eyes began searching around and around in different directions. He chewed very slowly.

I grabbed for him. He couldn’t move very quickly, though he tried to get away. He might have dropped off the branch down into the bush and then it would have been nearly impossible to find him again. I caught him around his fat middle. He tried to bite, but the rough edge of his mouth wasn’t very sharp, and his mouth was smaller than my fingertip. Some chameleons hiss too. Even though my little African friend was scared of them, I wasn’t. Chameleons have bad spirits in them he told me, but I didn’t believe it. The chameleon knew he was caught, or maybe he wasn’t so scared because after a little while he stopped squirming.

When I freed him, he started walking across my hand. He might have wanted to walk off, but I kept on putting the other hand in front so that he never got to the edge. He slowed down. He stopped. He sat there on my thumb, looking round and round with his bulging, wandering eyes. He slowly turned a dull black and his markings got blurred. He curled his tail and became very still. I think he liked my warm little thumb. I finally had a pet.

I kept him in my window on the curtain, but he didn’t turn red. He got sort of brown. I caught flies for him in some of the other windows, but he didn’t seem hungry any more. I got tired of watching him. After dinner, I proudly showed him to my mom, but she said, “I don’t want him in the house. He might go walking on the floor and someone might step on him and squash him.”

“If he is a mother he could have tiny little chameleons,” I told her, “lots of them. They would be just this big! Wouldn’t that be neat?”

“You better let him go,” she said. I don’t think she thought it would be easy not to step on all those little chameleons. I took him outside and put him on a rosebush in my mother’s rose garden, but he got lost.

I thought I was big enough to go to boarding school, but I still had to get big. I guess you need to be pretty big to do lots of things, but I remembered the story my mom read that night from the Bible. She said, “Little children are never too small to come to Jesus.”

The people in the story were telling the children not to bother Jesus. I think my mom thought I was a bother sometimes because she would tell me to go outside to play and let her do her work.

Mom read in the story where Jesus said, “Let the little children to come to Me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child, he shall not enter into it.”

Mom said, “That means to let the little children come because He loves them.” I liked that. She said, “Jesus likes people to be like little children when they come to Him because they believe everything He says, and they know He can take care of anything.”

I was glad I wasn’t too small to come to Jesus. I could find another chameleon tomorrow. Jesus would help me find one.

The Bible story is in Mark 10:13-16