A successful Christmas

So Christmas and Boxing Day have been successfully celebrated! It was great to be able to spend time with my family and to see some old friends at church, too. I think we did a pretty good job of just enjoying each other and not getting too caught up in all the typical craziness.

I got to play quite a few games over the holidays, which was great! I got my sister and my mom hooked on Dutch Blitz, which I got for Christmas! We spent quite some time on Christmas Day blitzing each other with that. We also played dominoes at the annual extended family dinner shindig, and then the usual game of Carcasonne with my bro-in-law, which he ALWAYS wins.

Now, I'm off to visit my sister and her family in their little house in the big woods to celebrate my nephew's birthday and New Years.

Merry Christmas!

The Internet is fixed, and I didn't do anything :) It sure is good to be home! I'm also enjoying hot showers, coffee from a coffee maker, warm blankets, fuzzy hooded sweaters, bacon, paved roads, 24 hour electricity every day, fire places, and the CLEANLINESS! Why would you even have to take a shower here - I mean, other than the fact that it just feels so wonderful to have hot water cascading down your back... but it does feel odd to have a shower and really feel no cleaner than I did before I got in the shower. I also don't have to wash my hands 20 times a day, nor do my tissues turn brown when I wipe by brow or blow my nose. I also haven't had any dirt under my fingernails since I got home! Amazing.

But of course, it is incredibly good to be back with family and friends. I haven't really done anything all that exciting yet, nor have I seen oodles of friends, but it's been really good to see those that I have managed to see. It's so refreshing to be back in church, and to be gathered with a big group of people to sing with! I'm looking forward to a few more weeks here to catch up with friends and family.

Of course, I haven't gotten around to writing a Christmas letter yet... though I really enjoy reading everyone else's Christmas greetings! Maybe I'll get around to writing a New Year letter...

Have a wonderful Christmas, full of the peace and hope that Christ came to bring.

I thought the internet was fast here...

Seems there's something wrong with our Internet connection here in the house. It's slower than it is in Africa! Difference is, here, I don't have to fix it! Someone's coming tomorrow to jiggle the wires and get it all speeded up again :)

Maybe I'll do some fancy photo album or something like that, or write up some of the stories from Africa that I never had a chance to write up before. But for the past few days, I just don't have the patience to sit and blog 'cause the internet's too slow, and, um, well, er, there are too many good things to watch on that big moving screen in the corner of the room... quite mezmorizing when you haven't watched tv at all for several months!

By the way...

I DID make it home! No problems at all with any flights or travels! Thanks for praying.

But now I'm tired, so I'm off to bed.

More later... though things here in Canada just don't seem all that blog-able...

Almost Home

I'm just taking a short break from wrapping my closet in plastic bags to let you all know that I'm set to leave tomorrow afternoon at 4pm! Please pray that my flight goes well - that all the connections will be smooth, that I won't get too tired and dazed and culture shocked in all the airports and that I'll enjoy the time traveling on my own. I normally enjoy the long trips on my own, since it gives me a lot of time to think and pray and prepare myself for whatever it is that I'm traveling to! But I really don't like the tiredness, the expensive airport food and feeling grimy for hours on end... So pray that those not so pleasant feelings are minimal and that the good things about the travel transition are much more prevalent!

Thanks and I'll see you soon!

(by the way, yes, I am actually wrapping everything in my closet in plastic - dust gets EVERYWHERE, and I'm afraid of what my clothes would look when I get back next month if I left them all open to the elements!)

Traffic Jams?

Today we had our staff Christmas party, which I organized, since I'm the only extrovert and the only one who likes to have any fun on the compound :) I pre-ordered some food from a local restaurant, and bought some bread and had the guesthouse cook/cleaner make some salad and cut some pineapple. I also got some sodas, thought up some silly games, and voila... A Christmas party!

However, today I had to go and pick up the bread from the bakery and the meat from the restaurant. No easy feat in this city. I live in a capital city where there are two main roads. When I say main road, I don't mean a nice paved highway. I mean dirt roads that are passable only with a high-clearance vehicle.

However, they have chosen this month to upgrade and fix the two main roads. Which is great, since they are in serious need of some repair. But why, oh why, do they have to fix BOTH roads at once?! And keep in mind that when they do road work around here, they don't put up all the nice little "detour" signs, post flag-men at every corner and give you any warning about a potential alternate route. Nope. None of that. If you happen to drive where you're not supposed to, someone in a camo outfit will appear out of nowhere and start shouting and waving his arms. That means turn around quick before the guy with the gun comes out!

And it changes really, really quickly. I drove to the bakery today to pick up the bread for the party, and by the time I had chitchatted in Tigrinya with the baker, got my bread and turned around to head for home, they had already closed a new section of the road (of course, they didn't open any section - just closed another section).

At least we're getting nice tours every day of all the backroads of town - places that I normally wouldn't even THINK to drive down. But our high-clearance 4X4 Toyota Hilux is handling the "roads" quite nicely... and I'm not going to know what to do with myself on the weekend when I have to start driving on pavement again! I get excited here when I get up into third gear - the thought of fifth gear is a little frightening...

I'm plagerizing!

Gack! So I went to check African Banter this evening before the lights go out, and I realized that I completely unconsciously STOLE the title of my blog from his. Since African Banter hasn't updated his blog in, oh, well, quite some time now, I guess I've seen the title "Bits and Bobs" enough times for it have seeped into my sub-conscious and I used it without even me realizing where it had come from. I guess that's what you get for not updating your blog more regularly.

Bits and Bobs

Once again, I spent most of the day running around with various bits and bobs. One of the main things on the agenda today was renewing our travel permits so we can come back "home" after spending Christmas outside the country. It was a relatively painless affair, considering what it COULD have been.

Basically, there are two guys sitting in a little pre-fab office across the empty vacant lot from the Legislative Assembly building (which has now been renovated three times in the last two years - that's a whole 'nother story!). They each have a desk. On the desk, they have a little stack of yellow cards, two stamps, a pen, and a glue stick. The stamps are the important part of the equation, 'cause without a stamp, you're nothing around these parts.

Anyways, Jackie went first and explained the situation - our current cards are still valid, but we want to get new ones because they will expire on December 30, while we are both out of the country. And we need these cards so that we will be allowed back INTO the country in January.

No problem. The guy starts writing out Jackie's card. Then the second guy is finished with the Kenyan that he's dealing with, and I pull my plastic lawn chair up to the desk and ask for the same thing. Here is where it gets complicated. Both of these guys suddenly decide that it's not really possible, and that they have to take away the current cards that we have (which are all nicely stamped, proving that we have paid all of our money for the registration fee etc.), and that they will give us these new ones, which will be valid for 6 months from today.

But we don't want them valid 6 months from today, and besides we need our old cards to get out of the country. I tried to explain. The Kenyan chap who was sitting in his plastic chair tried to explain. The other guy (of unknown origin) tried to explain. The two guys with the stamps started trying to explain to each other...

At one point, I was a little worried that I wouldn't get my pass at all!

But in the end, they figured it out, took our $120 USD and filled out the yellow cards for us. I even got the guy to leave the section where it asks for the passport number and date of issue blank for me, since I have to get a new passport when I get home, and I would like to write in my new passport number, rather than my old one.

It was really quite comical to sit there in the ubiquitous plastic chair, watching these guys fill in the cards, then getting out their glue sticks, cutting and pasting our photos on the cards, and the stamping it all with great flourish! It was like arts and crafts day at immigration!

Anyways, the whole ordeal took less than an hour, which is really, truly amazing for this place. It also goes to show how few "systems" are really in place. We have these travel permits now, but no one took any copies of it, no one has any record that they were issued to us. I don't even have a passport number written on mine! And they all had to have quite a lengthy discussion to figure out if they could even give us new passes or not. Imagine an entire country being run like this... no wonder we have to have great flexibility when it comes to living here :)

On a better note - tomorrow we are having a Christmas party for all the translation teams and staff based here. I'm in charge of it all - seems I'm the only one who likes to plan parties no matter where I go! I've got some ideas for some games to play, and I've arranged to get some fried chicken, meat and fish from the restaurant that we always go to. The fridge is stocked with pop, and I'll arrange to get some bread, salad and pineapple tomorrow. So hopefully everyone will have a good time. I think some of the translation teams are thinking that I'm actually going to slaughter a goat or a cow tomorrow and roast it all up. That's THEIR idea of a good party. But I'm more into the take-away fried food, myself.

I also checked the mail box today, and lo and behold there was a little package from a friend of mine from where I used to live. He sent a little bag full of shiro powder (that's ground up chick peas, mixed with spices). You mix it with water and some finely chopped veggies and cook up a nice paste to eat with injera. So this evening, on the way home from the post office, I stopped off at the Ethiopian restaurant, got some injera for take-away, and came home to cook up a pot of shiro! Man, was it ever good! I took a photo of it on my plate to send to my friend, but since I haven't posted many photos for the last few weeks, I'll put a picture here...
Mmmm... shiro and cabbage salad. It doesn't get much better than this!

So long, farewell, auf wiedesien, adiou...

Yeah, I know I'm supposed to be a linguist, but that doesn't mean I can spell in all the languages of the world...

Anyways, today was a day of farewelling. It started off saying good bye to John, Julia and little Isabella. I already miss them, since I spent quite a lot of time with Julia and the baby. It was SO refreshing to have a little one around to hold and play with every day. And John and Julia were really incredibly interesting people to talk to. Good conversationalists and very deep thinkers with some very different perspectives than most people in my world! I know that God's going to use them whereever he brings them next, but I am sorry to see them leave our compound.

I also tried to say goodbye to someone else today. We were driving around for several hours trying to get her a plane ticket out of here today. But alas, we were not successful. She might be on the flight tomorrow morning, but she's not even sure about that!

I also drove another group of people to the airport, in their truck, and then drove it back to park on the compound while they're away. It's always fun to cruise around town in a different truck! This one is an old landcruiser, with power windows and automatic transmission! I almost forgot how to start it, since there was no clutch to hold down!

So in actual fact, I got very little "real" work done today, but spent a lot of time just cruising around town trying to get rid of people!

We did have a great Arabic lesson this evening, though! I love our picture that we're working with - the one with the blue goats and pink birds! Today we added a short woman, a tall woman, a happy man and a sad man. So Jackie and I took turns telling stories with the little paper cut out figures. Somehow, in my stories, the cat always ends up eating the birds... I think I need to think of a new storyline for our next lesson! I'll have one more lesson before I come home for Christmas and forget every word that I've learned!

Workshop

Ok, so, as I sit here in my verandah, listening to a program on BBC about people who use the Internet to worship and sipping my tea, it seems like as good a time as any to type down some highlights of my time away... So, let's see, some of the highlights...

1. It was refreshing to be away in a town that has banned plastic bags! And the children still like to collect the empty plastic water and pop bottles from the streets. And, everyone and their dog has a pit latrine! So it was clean. Dusty, but at least the dust was "clean" dust. It was much less "fragrant" than my usual city. Of course, I was still dirty all the time. Just walking out of the bathroom where you have just bathed makes you dirty. Dirt under my fingernails, dirt under my toenails, and a sheen of red dust covering every inch of exposed skin. Oh well. The guest house that we stayed in didn't have any running water, either. So bucket baths were in order. Jackie and I also got really good at pouring water on each other's hands so we could wash two hands at once :)

2. I ate my entire year's quota of meat in the last few weeks. Because the town is a lot more Muslim, we had to adopt a more Arab sort of eating schedule. We had tea in the morning (but I had to supplement with a piece of bread and jam!), then "breakfast" at 10:30am. That was normally a sandwich filled with fried meat. Unfortunately, the last few days, it was a sandwich filled with liver :( Eeeewwww... I will never understand why people eat liver. Then we had lunch at 2:30 or 3. Again, it was meat, meat and more meat. Only slimy okra for veggies! Then we had our dinner around 8 pm. Again, meat or fish or chicken. And slimy okra.

3. We made friends with the tea lady on the corner near the guesthouse where we stayed. She set up her little charcoal stove and jars full of tea and sugar and spices and milk and coffee on the corner, just as the sun was setting every night. So me and Jackie went every night to sit with her and drink some milky tea or sweet coffee, which was thick enough to be almost a mocha pudding! She didn't speak English, and we hardly speak any Arabic, but we had a great time together :) She was a funny woman, and had quite a personality! It was great practice for us to try out the little Arabic that we know, and she was really very patient in repeating phrases for us over and over again until we figured out what she was saying. It was just so relaxing to sit on the street corner, under the brilliant stars, sipping tea and playing around with Arabic.

4. Oh yeah, the workshop... that actually went quite well, as well! We had 32 participants, and many of them were really quite high up in the state ministries of education. So they were in a position to make some decisions about how to start implementing the language policy here in this country. Of course, there were also some folks there who somehow came along and didn't actually speak any English at all! But they were all very kind and very eager to work. There was a lot of group work and time for people from each state and each language group to work together and do some planning, so even if they didn't catch all the things that Jackie and I were leading from the front, at least the could have some time to help each other out in their groups.

It was also really encouraging to see that some of the people in the States ARE actually using the mother tongue of the people in their states for the first few years of primary school... even though no one is making any textbooks or resources available to them. Some of the teachers took photocopies of some of the textbook samples that we had brought with us, so at least they can be used by a teacher in one school! We pray that the government will get things together enough to actually start printing some of these books and distributing them to the schools, so these children can actually start to learn in a language that they understand.

It was so much fun to be teaching and facilitating a workshop again! Maybe I am more of a performer than I thought I was, but I think it's so much fun to be helping people understand a concept, even if that takes a little song and dance routine up in front of a big group once in a while. I'm convinced that even adults like a little action when they're learning, so I try to do a lot of active sorts of things. It also helps a lot to be a bit dramatic when people are trying to understand some difficult concepts in a second (or third or fourth!) language. I think the participants understood some of the big issues enough to actually go and make some good, informed decisions about the implementation of mother tongue education. So in that respect, I think the workshop was a huge success! Thanks for praying for us.

5. The workshop was closed by our guest of honour - the Bishop of the Catholic Church! Most of the participants who were there are Catholics, so it was a real honour for them to receive their certificates from his Lordship the Bishop. He also made an amazing speech about the role of the mother tongue in finding one's identity in Christ. He was very eloquent and very supportive of the use of local languages, both in education and in people's relationship with Christ.

It was wonderful to be able to mix the work that we're doing with the Ministry of Education with our own Christian faith. Because it was a government sponsored workshop, we weren't planning to do any prayer or devotions or anything like that, but the participants themselves asked us to do some Bible reading and prayer at the start of each day! So I also pray that as these guys go back to their "normal" jobs of teaching and administration in the Ministries of Education, that they will also become advocates for the use of the Scriptures in their own languages, as well. Many of them spoke of the fact that they want children in their communities to learn to read and write in their own language because then they will be able to read the Scriptures and take part in the life of the church!

Phew, this is a lot of text for one night. I think these are the main highlights... there were SO many funny "blog-able" moments throughout the workshop. I mean, nothing is ever really straightforward or "normal" in this country, so some days of the workshop were just a complete comedy in errors, at least, from me and Jackie's point of view! But somehow, through God's grace, we made it through!

Photos

I haven't really felt very "wordy" today, so I didn't actually get around to writing anything about the past couple of weeks in a town that's pronounced like "Wow!". But I have put some photos up on facebook, so if you want to see them... here they are.

Enjoy! We've got city electricity at the moment, but it will probably go off again tomorrow and probably not come back on until Tuesday or Wednesday, but I'm sure I'll have some time during "generator hours" to write down a few of the highlights of the past few weeks!

For now, though, I have a few of my friends' blogs to go and catch up on.

I'm Home!

Ok, well, I'm not home home, but I'm home. We were told to be at the airport this morning at 10:30am. We actually ended up leaving ourselves a lot of time, since logistically, it could have been a nightmare to get all of our stuff and all of our people to the right place at the right time. But as it turned out, things moved very smoothly and we ended up at the airport EARLY. Amazing. Of course, the flight was delayed. And delayed. And delayed some more. Finally, at about 1 pm, Jackie went in search of a snack to put in my poor rumbling tummy (all I'd had all morning was 1/3 of a grapefruit, a very small piece of bread with jam and a cup of tea). But, because so many people were leaving on the UN flights that had been organized for the education meetings we were at, the airport canteen had run out of food! Not even a packet of biscuits to be had. At least they had a warm Coke.

At about 2-ish (I think), we were finally able to board the little plane and make our way back home. It was probably a good thing we didn't have more for lunch, since it was a pretty turbulent flight, and poor Jackie woke me up from my nap, urgently in need of a plastic bag. I will now add an empty plastic bag to my list of "be-prepared-for-everything" travel kit!

Turns out, I did pretty good being prepared for most eventualities on this trip. My Swiss Army knife was in great demand a couple times a day for various tasks, my headlamp served its purpose very well, and my extra mini-light was also used by Moses every night (which reminds me that I forgot to get that back from him!). I also had my amazing "equatorial" sleeping bag from MEC which kept me clean and cool each night. It's a great little sleeping bag, and doubles as a good pillow, as well. I even managed to bring my flip flops with me to use in the bathroom! So I lacked nothing on this trip.

But man, it sure was good to get home this evening. Lynne came and picked us up from the airport, and on the way home, I was amazed to see all the construction and new things that have sprung up, even in less than three weeks of being away. On the airport road, there's a brand new gas station that looks like a "proper" gas station - the pumps aren't housed in a metal shipping container and there's a little shop where, presumably, you could buy sodas and car snacks!

My little cat seemed pretty happy to see me. He's got a pretty nasty infection on his tail - I think he got into one too many scraps with the neighbor cat. But he's already back to his usual self of whining for food every 10 minutes!

I hope that tomorrow I'll be able to condense some of the "journal" that I've been keeping for the past few weeks and post some of the highlights of our trip here. But for now, I'm just so happy to be in my own house, even though we've come back to broken water pipes! No running water for us until Richard comes next week... at least our kind neighbors have put a water barrel in the house and filled it up for us! So we're no worse off than we were at the guesthouse that we've been staying in. And there are plenty of other showers on this compound for us to use when we get stinky!

I'm really tired out now, so I'm going to go have a nice long drink of bore hole water (mmm... salty!) and then go to sleep... in my own little bed.

Still Coping Up!

So we're nearly done the workshop. Phew, it has been a LOT of work. But some very good things have come out of it, I think.

It's Saturday afternoon, and we worked until about 4:30 today. Now we're back in the Internet cafe by the River. Tomorrow we're going to church in the cathedral, then for lunch at the home of the former governor of the state! Should be interesting, anyways...

Monday is our closing ceremony, which should be a good time. Then on Tuesday, some big meetings for planning of the education sector will begin and run until Thursday. There should be almost 200 people there to try to plan education stuff for the next few years. Yikes. I'm not sure what my contribution to that will be... but I'm supposed to go and "network" and advocate for the use of mother tongue in school, as per the official policy here :) Should be fun.

I'm back "home" on Friday, enshallah (God willing!), then Wednesday, I get on a plane to go HOME HOME! I'll be seeing a bunch of you in less than two weeks! Whooo Hooo!

Coping up

So here I am, still in the midst of a crazy workshop! Things are going well, after a few rocky bumps in the logistics. But the participants are keen and are really having good time. This morning, we arrived and found them all there, already working together in their groups on a homework assignment that I had given them! Amazing group of keeners.

So things are going well, and I think that something good will end up coming out of this whole workshop. It's been very interesting to get to know some of the participants and to hear about their situations. We've got some key decision makers here, as well, which could have some very good influence on the entire system of this country. Phew, a little scary, but really good, anyways.

There have been SO many blog-able moments. I wish I could blog them all! But there's just not time - I'm in an internet cafe, just waiting for all my emails to download, and I only have a few minutes left.

Please pray that we continue to have good relationships on the team here, and that we are able to work together as a team.

Also pray that I don't turn into a cow - we are being served meat to eat three times a day! I have gone from eating beef once or twice a week for the last several months to eating it three times a day! Yikes. Problem is, that's ALL they serve. Meat and bread. Meat and rice. Meat and aseeda (like a porridge). But I'm "coping up" with it ok. (that's my latest new phrase that I hear all the time here... "Coping up with a situation"...)

Will blog more later, with photos of course! I have a ton already. We're even going to be on local TV in a few days... hope my special tie-dyed mumu is clean for that day :)

Safe and Sound

So Jackie and I are busy spending some of the money! We're doing the workshop here, and there are, well a few frustrations... but hopefully things well get ironed out.

Anyways, we have food, we have water, we have beds to sleep in and we have participants for our workshop! What more could we need?!

I'm at an internet cafe and happy to be connected to the rest of the world for a few minutes. I have SO much to write, but no time... so I just wanted to post a quite note to let ya'll know that things are ok. Please continue to pray for us - especially as we work through all the logistics of holding a workshop in a place like this!

Going away!

So yesterday morning, some folks from the Ministry of Education came and plunked a suitcase full of cash down on our verandah floor. The equivalent to almost $40,000 USD in cash. Yikes. So now we have to spend it! So I've been madly trying to get things together for us to go... stationary, handouts, pens, books, library resources, mosquito nets, clothes... whatever we need to hold a workshop for 35 people for two weeks in a town that may not even have electricity. I can hardly believe that it's actually happening, but it's coming right down to the wire to really get things packed and ready to go.

Please pray for me and Jackie over the next few weeks. We got some big issues to get the participants to deal with. Pray that we communicate and listen well, and that there will be unity among the participants as they work together to figure out how they're going to start implementing the language in education policy in this country. It's a bit frightening when I think about it - the outcome of these workshops are to determine the education system for the entire country! I still shake my head at how I ever got myself into these things. But somehow, God has brought me here and has given us the opportunity to do this sort of work, in this country, at this time...

I gotta go rescue some of my handouts from the printer.

By the way, I have NO idea what the internet situation is going to be there, so I probably won't be able to blog much. But don't worry, you'll probably hear by other means if I'm dead or something :D

An Interesting Article

I found this article on the Los Angeles Times website. I thought it painted a rather good picture of the situation at the moment. That's all for tonight.

I may or may not be travelling on Monday. Still haven't gotten the money released for our workshops! Maybe because of some of the issues discussed in the article?! That's all I have to say about that.

A Garden in the Bathroom

Don't have much of interest to write about today, but I feel like I should take advantage of the city electricity that we have tonight! I still haven't been able to figure out if there's some sort of system to when the city electricity is going to come or go. All I've been able to ascertain so far is that if it comes, it will come at around 5:30 pm. And if it goes, it will go around 5:30 pm. But sometimes it will be on for two or three days at a time, then it will be off for a day or two. Other times, it's one for a day, and then off for two or three. I just can't figure it out - but it sure would be nice to know if there was a method to the madness, you know.

Anyways, I just thought I would share about the quote of the day today. As Jackie and I were drinking our morning tea on the verandah (I've become SO British in drinking a couple of cups a tea every day - even when it's 35C outside!), we were watching Sunday wash our nieghbor's shower curtain. And I thought outloud, as I often do these days, that we should wash our curtain sometime soon, since, as Jackie so aptly put it, "We have a garden growing in the bathroom".

Now, that line is only funny if you can repeat it in a posh English accent whilst sipping a cup of hot tea on the 35C verandah.

Other than that, the big excitement of the day was the emergence of a kiddy pool for the baby on the compound. The baby and her mom got to sit in it and splash around during the heat of the afternoon. Sunday thought they were nuts, but I just about jumped in fully clothed. Except, of course, there wouldn't have been enough room in there for all of us :(

I also took the visiting Americans on a tour of the city, culminating, of course, in a Coke by the River. Except, of course, they were out of Coke. So I had mango juice instead, whist sitting under the mango trees. That's about all the excitement for the day. The rest of the day was spent putting some finishing touches on my teaching notes for the workshop next week!

On the subject of teaching activities...

Jackie and I had some good fun in our Arabic class today. Since it's just the two of us, we can do whatever we want for our classes. So today, we continued to talk about a picture that we quickly threw together two minutes before we started:
I am especially proud of the blue goat that I so artistically drew. We even made cut outs of some of the animals! One of the cats, the blue goat, as well as all three birds can actually move! So today we practiced the colours that we learned last week, as well as learned some new vocabulary for "bird" and the plural for "cats" and "goats".

Today were able to discuss jumping and climbing up and eating grass and eating birds and sleeping in the grass... the possibilities for telling simple stories are endless when you have a couple of cats, goats, birds, trees, grass and flowers. And it makes me and Jackie feel pretty good about ourselves when we can move a little paper cat around a piece of paper, telling each other, "The black cat is hungry. He sees a pink bird in the tree. He is going to climb the tree. He climbs the tree. The bird sees the black cat. The bird is scared of the cat. The bird jumps from the little tree to the big tree. The cat climbs down the tree and goes to sleep in the grass."

But considering that we're still in our first month of lessons, and we only have two hours of lessons a week, the fact that we can tell a story like this makes me feel pretty good about our progress! We also have a very patient teacher who puts up with, and almost enjoys, all of our funny methods of learning Arabic - including my magic blue goat who can fly from tree to tree!

I sure didn't do THAT in school...

As I was reading an article about bilingual education programs in Mozambique today, I came across this interesting little tidbit:

“Teacher talk makes up as much as 90% of classroom time while students wait, listen or engage in reproductive activities…”


I'm not really sure what those activities are, but it could explain why there are so many people in Mozambique?

Stinky Internet

Well, my feet are no longer stinky, since I spent some time scrubbing my Chacos sandals this evening, after scrubbing the rest of myself in the shower, which was almost warm. Gotta love the sun-heated water thing. Only problem is that the water tank is ginormous, so the water never gets really warm.

Anyways, I digress.

The internet is stinky here tonight. Just as I was trying to have a little online conversation with a friend in an undisclosed country, the internet started acting up and we couldn't get anything through to each other. Stinky, 'cause we were both there for like, 15 minutes saying, "hello?" "are you there?". Anyways, please pray for the folks in that country (and you all know what I mean). Things continue to heat up and are getting more tense, again. Now, there is a new law that says absolutely no one, for any reason, under the age of 40, regardless of whether they have completed their national service or not, is allowed to leave the country!

So I'm not too pleased with the internet tonight. And besides that, there's a lot of discussion flying around in cyberspace by the "powers that be" in our section of the organization about what to do for internet access once the NGO that shares our internet connection vacates the compound in December. Please also pray for wisdom for all the decision makers and that there will be good communication and good understanding of all the details of the issue. I'm really fearing, dreading, in fact, being on this compound without any internet connection at all, which is almost looking like the direction these discussions are going! Not having an internet connection could be serious grounds for me just packing up and finding a new country where the internet flows ...

On that note, I have a "date" with Jackie to eat some chocolate! Dear little Grace in Uganda responded to my pleas and actually sent us some real Cadbury's chocolate, as well as a couple of Bounty bars with a visitor who arrived today. Yum yum! Tea, chocolate and a new tv series on DVD tonight. What could be any better?

Oh yeah, the ability to chat online using the internet with my buddies whilst drinking my tea, eating my chocolate and watching a dvd. Now that, my friends, is a good way to spend an evening :) (just remember where I live... we don't exactly have a whole lot of relaxation options around here!)

Random Happenings today

So today started out fairly typically - I actually don't really like Monday mornings much because it's when everyone comes to ask questions. I'm not really a morning person to begin with, but when people start asking all sorts of questions like, "Where's the toilet paper? The truck doesn't start, how do I fix it? What tone do we need to write on the long vowel?"... It just gets a little too much for me on Monday mornings. Seems all the questions pile up on the weekend and come to me before 8:30 on Mondays. I don't really like it much, so I tend to give Jackie a bigger head start to the office on Monday mornings than I usually do. Normally, since I sit by the door to the office, I'm the one fielding the questions and acting as Jackie's Personal Assistant (in that I can filter some of the questions before they get to her.). But on Monday mornings, she's on her own!

Then we were off to the Ministry of Ed, to see where we were at with our plans for this workshop that's coming up. In theory, we're leading a workshop for 30 participants in a different city, starting in 10 days. Jackie and I are responsible for the material and the teaching, and the folks at the ministry are responsible for the logistics. Seems we'll just show up in that other town and see if anyone else happens to show up at the same time. Well, um, we'll show up, that is, if we actually get any plane tickets! I'm not really a planner, and I'm really quite flexible and spontaneous... but even I found our meeting this morning a little on the exhausting side!

By the time we got back, me and Jacks had to share a Coke as we got on with the rest of our day.

There is a workshop going on here now (for which none of the participants have shown up yet - only 3 American facilitators!), so we have a full time cook for the next few weeks. Unfortunately for me, she cooked liver for lunch today. Ew. Thankfully, I live on the same compound, so I trotted down to my house and made some lovely fried potatoes and had a tomato salad on the side. You really can't go wrong with potatoes.

This afternoon we also had our Arabic lesson, which was good fun! We have such a good teacher, and man, I really hope he doesn't run to find a new job somewhere else. He's a great asset to have around this compound! But of course, we can't pay him all that much, and he's actually quite highly qualified to find a better job somewhere else. So I would be quite happy for him if he could find a place that would pay him more, but we sure would miss him around here. It's tough keeping staff around here - everyone just wants to make a quick buck and go back to wherever they came from :(

During our Arabic lesson, I had to put on my community health nurse hat, and clean and bandage a wound from one of the old guys that's been working on the compound for almost 30 years. These two old men have been working as "carpenters" for so long, and I really have no clue what they do most of the time! They just sort of wander around the compound and pick up a few tools now and again. But they're very friendly and very willing to help fix our door when it falls apart, or strengthen a bookshelf etc. They're due to retire any day now, but I think they see this place as home, so they don't want to leave. Anyways, one of them had a nice infected cut on his finger, so I dabbed it with some antibiotic cream, wrapped a band-aid around it and sent him on his way. Another happy victim... er patient... for my nursing skills.

As soon as we were done our lesson, I was called up to the guesthouse to meet someone that had just arrived in Juba. I had met him at a meeting that I went to last month. Of course, he told me all about his plans to open a vocational college somewhere in this country. He didn't know where yet. But basically, he wanted help to open it. I was glad to have the excuse that I only work with primary schools ... so I could gracefully bow out of helping him set up a college! I hate saying no to people, even when it's a relatively random person off the street who wants me to help him set up a college!

As I was talking with him, Wes and Henry pulled up in the truck... which was riding precariously low to the front wheels. Seems they broke a spring or a coil or something. I know very little about suspension and front ends of trucks. But I do know that these roads are rough, and they can't be easy on the trucks. And I think our one little white truck finally had it. Now without Richard here... could be difficult to get it fixed. Jackie's little car has an irreparable flat battery (seems the heat is really hard on batteries, too!), so we're down to one car for all of us! This could be an interesting week...

So that's a rather boring play by play of my day. I'm going to go scrub my fingernails with a nail brush now. I already scrubbed once today, but since we're now into the dusty season, I seem to get filthy by simply sitting at the computer! Mabruk to those of you who actually kept reading this far!

Kindred Spirits

I spent the evening tonight with some real kindred spirits - watching the "Sound of Music"! But this wasn't any old version ... we had the Singalong version! Yup, it was like the Sound of Music karaoke, with all the words to the songs turning yellow as the von Trapps sang them.

I have never been in a room of 7 people who would not only heartily sing every word of every song in the movie, but also get up and spontaneously choreograph the "So long farewell..." song TWICE. It was great fun, I felt like I was truly among kindred spirits tonight. It's just wonderful to be with a group of people that you can just belt out completely cheesy songs with, and quote all the best lines and spin along with Julie Andrews as she whirls in the Alps and in the gazebos... Ah, it was the most fun I've had in quite a few weeks!

Most of the people there were folks who had previously lived on the same compound with us... and we're all die-hard Sound of Music fans, for some odd reason. Unfortunately for me, they built their own houses and are living across town now, so I don't see them nearly as much as I would like to. But when we spend quality time together like this, we don't need to see each other all that often... it's all about the quality, not the quantity, after all :)

And now I'm sure I'm going to have the "Lonely Goatherd" in my head for the entire week...

Time Away

This morning we set aside the entire morning to pray, along with all the other branches and entities in our organization around the world. I actually do feel like I had a few hours away - even though I was the one facilitating and organizing everything today!

Our organization had provided a bit of a powerpoint show, along with a couple of movies clips to aid in our prayer time, so it didn't take that many hours of work to prepare for the day, which was good, since I've got several other projects on the go at the moment! One of our translators here is also a very good choir master and he helped us out by choosing and leading a few songs for us today.

I think the day actually went exceedingly well! My hope was that we wouldn't spend most of the time talking about our prayer requests, but that we would actually spend most of the time praying together. My hope was also that we wouldn't spend the whole time praying for our own needs here in this country, but that we would pray for the people and projects that we don't normally think about, in other parts of the world.

And I think we achieved that, actually. No one fell asleep we were praying, everyone participated, everyone had opportunity to pray in which ever language they felt most comfortable praying in... and then we all enjoyed good fellowship over lunch, which the girls in the kitchen prepared so well for us!

It was truly a refreshing time, and I felt so privileged to be together in a room full of people from so many different cultures, who have so many stories to tell, who have such mature faiths, and to be united with them as we prayed for people all around the world.

I used this old globe that we dug out of one of the storage containers and was able to show the different parts of the world that we were praying for. And I also gave everyone a good laugh when I couldn't find Argentina. At least I knew which continent it was on...

And I still do marvel at how God has given me the ability to stand up in front of a room full of people and lead them in a half day of prayer, without even being nervous about it!

So I encourage you to spend a few minutes today to pray for a country or a project or some people that you might know in some far off corner of the world that you don't normally think about. Maybe you read something in the newspaper about something that's happening in a country you've never heard of, or you read an article online about someone in a far corner of the globe. Don't just walk away and think, "Hmmm, that's interesting". Let's spend a minute and pray for the people of that place. In fact, I'm going to go and read some BBC news right now and see who needs some prayer today...

Trivia

Well, here I was giving my dear friend Grace a hard time about never updating her blog... and she came back and told me to take the plank out of my own eye, since I haven't updated mine since Monday! Sorry, Grace, and here's your update for the day.

I've been working all day. Yup, all day long. Imagine. Started out by organizing some lunch for those of us who eat in the guesthouse. Problem is, there's no gas. The warehouse is empty. Maybe two weeks and the barge with the gas for cooking will arrive in town. So we're using the charcoal "jiko" stove, and I taught the girls who work in the house how to boil water for tea in the microwave today! Jackie and I still have some gas at our house, but once that's gone... that's it. And we have a big workshop (which means a full guesthouse!) starting on Saturday. Oh well. I think everyone should just fast. After all, they're all Bible translators and it's a very Biblical thing to fast, isn't it?

Once I figured out lunch (ended up being quite a feast - lentils cooked over charcoal, chapatis made at the little stand on the corner, pinapple and papaya), I had to figure out a problem on one of the team's computer. They had a corrupted file, which is WAY beyond my ability to recover. So I came back to my office and started reading and researching and figuring out my session plans for the workshop that's coming up. In my reading today, I found some particularily interesting tidbits:

• the average middle class child in the United States reads approximately 1 million words a year, or about 80,000 to 100,000 words per month.

This really makes me wonder just how many words the typical child here reads every year. I'm guesstimating maybe... oh, somewhere between 75 and 100. Per year. We are certainly not living in what you would call a "print rich" environment! A pretty grim situation in terms of trying to help raise up a literate generation! I wonder how many of the languages here even have 1 million words in printed form yet?!

Another tidbit I read today:

• Estimates of the number of repetitions needed to learn a word vary anywhere from eight to fifteen times.
  

I'm going to bring this little tidbit to my Arabic teacher tomorrow and prove to him that I'm really not all that stupid - I just need some more repetition as I try to learn more vocabulary :)

A more typical day

Well, we had a lovely interlude on the weekend - city electricty and cool weather. But today, it's right back to normal. Generator's humming, Tanya's sweating, stuff is breaking. It was nice to have a holiday from it all on Sunday. I was even inspired by the electricity and cool weather yesterday to make a big pot of tomatoe-pumpkin soup. Once again, using the pumpkin from the garden. It tasted so lovely and fresh... and the best part about it was that there were leftovers for tonight... when I was tired, it was dark, and I was hot!

I was also feeling really bad for our Arabic teacher today. Both Jackie and I were so tired - we had just come from a meeting with the Ministry of Education and have, well, let's just say an impossible amount of work ahead of us in the next few weeks! And then we went straight into our lesson and neither one of us could think straight. Poor Justin must have thought we were either really stupid or that he was a horrible teacher. He's actually a really good teacher, and I am enjoying our lessons with him. But today we just couldn't think straight.

After our lesson, me and Jackie both just sat in the chairs on the verandah, in the dark, too tired to even go and turn on the generator! Once the generator roared to life (thanks to some kind soul on the compound), and my belly was filled with soup, I felt much better. It's definitely early to bed tonight, though.

I already miss Zane, too. He's been rented out to the neighbors again to catch their remaining rats. Funny little Zane story, though. I've been training him to not use a litter box, but instead, to just go outside when he needs to, well, go outside. And it's been working really well, so far. However, when he went for a sleep over at the neighbor's house, I decided to give them his litter box, lest he have any accidents in the house. It just so happens that they haven't moved his litter box yet. And it also just so happens that they have a rip in their screen door.

So while this couple was sitting and having a very serious chat with their organization's director today, dear little Zane walked into their house through the rip in their screen door, proceeded directly to his litter box, did his business, and walked straight out again. I guess the little guy thinks he's entitled to an indoor bathroom, as well!

Brrr...

Yup. That's what I said. Brrr. It started raining last night at about 4 am. And it got downright cold. I even turned off my fan. And all day today, I've been feeling slightly on the chilly side. 25C at the moment (9:40pm) and I'm feeling positively chilly. It's very unusual, since we were all suffering last week with mid-upper 30s. Even poor little Zane snuggled on my lap for a good hour and half in the middle of the afternoon, since we both needed each other to stay warm.

This cold weather has be thinking about another little problem that I've encountered. As I have a plane ticket now to come home, via Addis Ababa and London, I've realized that I have left all my "winter" clothes in Nairobi. I don't have a single pair of long pants, and not one long sleeve shirt here! So that means all I have to wear home on the plane are capri pants and t-shirts or short sleeve blouses. That's going to look rather odd while I'm hanging out in the London airport on my layover. Plus, I'm going to freeze in-flight. I didn't think this far ahead when I packed my stuff in Nairobi to come here. I just assumed that I would pass through Nairobi on my way home. And yet, with the money that I saved on the plane ticket by traveling through Addis rather than going to Nairobi first could buy me a few new outfits in Heathrow!

So, if you come to the airport to meet me, either look for the crazy girl wearing her summer clothes in the middle of winter, or look for a chic trendy airport outfitted sort of hipster :)

Blog worthy events

Throughout the course of the day, there were a few blog worthy quotes that came out of me and Jackie's mouths... but of course, now I can't remember any of them. So this blog may end up being rather anti-climactic. I think one of the quotes had to do with the fact that we wake up every morning and find bug legs all over the kitchen counters. Yes, I said bug legs. I don't quite know what kind of bug legs they are, but they are definitely bug legs. So we're really not quite sure what happens on the kitchen counters at night. Are the rats coming out and feasting on the cockroaches? Are there spiders or bats that are feasting? Are the bugs just spontaneously losing their legs on our counters? I just don't get it. What it does mean, though, is that our counters get a good bleaching every day, since we just don't know who's dancing on them at night.

Last night, in fact, I heard some noises coming from the kitchen. Good old Zane, the might hunter that he is, was sound asleep at the foot of my bed. He was completely zonked out. But there were some sort of creatures having a little party in the kitchen, so I woke him up and threw him in there at about 2am. By 4 am, he was back in my room, biting my toes to get me to wake up and let him outside! He's a clever kitty, that one. He knows exactly how to get my attention!

Speaking of the cat, I rented him out this evening for his rat hunting abilities. Our neighbors (the ones with the baby that I love to hold) also have baby rats in their house! So I've sent Zane over a few times now to try to put an end to that little rat family. So far, he's already had a few tender morsels over there. He's spending the night tonight, so I have no one to wake me up in the middle of the night here :) I just hope he's not making a nuisance of himself over there.

Since I rented out my cat to them, Julia came over and used our oven to make an amazing chocolate cake! So I will certainly rent out my cat for a piece of fresh from the oven chocolate cake anytime.

I also went to the market today with a friend. I love going to this market here because you still see a handful of people wearing their traditional clothes and ogling at the white girls, because you know they have had very little contact with white folks before. Today, though, there was a family wearing clothes that I didn't really recognize at all. They were quite different from most of the clothes we see around here. They were similar to some of the clothes that the bedouins in the desert near where I used to live wear. They were quite stunning people - definitely of Arab descent, but certainly not from the city, which is where most of the Arabs here are from.

In fact, one of the women wanted to talk to me, but she was holding out her baby as she was calling me over. So I didn't get too up close and personal with her. I've had the experience before of people giving me their babies and expecting me to take them, assuming that I would give their baby a better life or something. Maybe I was assuming too much out of the situation this afternoon, but I just really didn't want to cause a scene in the middle of a crowded market! So I just waved, smiled, said "salam alekum" and kept on walking! But it would have been very interesting to talk with them, with my extraordinarily limited Arabic, and find out where they were from. Maybe I'll see them again, and will have a chance to talk with one of them who isn't trying to force a baby into my arms!

Ah, the joys of life around here. You never quite know what's going to happen next...

Bugs

Even though it's relatively early tonight, I have fled my verandah to the safety and comfort of my bed... more specifically, to the safety and comfort of my mosquito net. Some nights, there are just WAY too many bugs out there for me. They like to gather around the fluorescent lights that we have (only kind that happen to be installed in our house :( ) Then they drop onto me and into my water as I sit on the couch! Some nights, it's just too much for me. So I fled tonight. I took a photo of it, just 'cause I thought I haven't hardly posted any photos lately. So here's a photo, albeit a pretty crummy one, of the collection of bugs on my ceiling in my living room:
On a completely different note, we got confirmation today that we will actually get funding from the gov't to do some workshops that we've been planning for several months! This is really exciting news, but it also means that there is an overwhelming amount of work to be done in the next three weeks. It's exciting to actually get down to the nitty gritty of some of these things that we've been planning with the Ministry of Education for months now... but it's also a bit scary to actually get all the logistics of it worked out, as well as make sure we have all the materials ready for teaching!

But this is just one step in rebuilding the education systems here. This workshop will be the first of three two-week workshops which aims to get people from various parts of the country together to discuss how they're going to address the issue of languages in education. I already know there are going to be some seriously heated debates by the participants in these workshops - please pray that we're able to keep things on track and to facilitate good dialogue which will really benefit the school children in this country.

The current scene

The time:

• 7:04pm

The sounds:

• The fan (it's getting hotter every day)
• The local band warming up for a whole night of funeral dirges again (at least they're only using drums and voices - no keyboards or Celine Dion for once! Seems there's a funeral in the compound next to us. If we're lucky, the funeral is for a man, and will only last 3 days. If it's for a woman, it will last 4 :( )
• The crickets singing
• My belly is rumbling
• The frogs outside are bouncing around, rustling the dead leaves outside.

The smells:

• Dust, as usual.
• Smoke from the burning trash outside the compound

The feelings:

• Hunger! Haven't eaten since lunch. Am waiting for Jackie to come down from the office so we can eat.
• Tired. I didn't leave the office until a few minutes ago.
• Excited. We MAY get to do some teaching in some workshops later this month! We've been waiting for funding for these workshops to go ahead for the last several months... and now it may finally happen this month!
• Trusting. That my friends who I asked you to pray about are going to be ok. I'm waiting to hear news of how the question session went, but I know that God is with them, and that He loves them, and that He loves me. So really, what should I be worried about?

The ending:

• 7:10pm. Jackie's here. Time to fill my belly with something good. Perhaps the "Winter squash Bisque" (aka "Pumpkin Soup" *with pumpkin fresh from the garden*) that I made yesterday will do the trick!
  

Prayer Request

For those of you who need something more to pray for, please pray for my friends from the place where I used to live.

I had a quick chat online with two of them today - one was on his way to his family's house because he was just released for a little 7 day "holiday" from the prison where he's serving time for... well, not quite sure what he's serving for, since he's never been charged with anything. Don't want to go into too many details, of course, but pray that he has a good reunion with his family and that he'll be refreshed, both physically and spiritually while he's on his "holiday".

The other was also on his way home from a place where he'd been questioned about something. Please pray for protection for a couple of my other friends there. Pray for protection for them and for wisdom as they answer a lot of questions about a certain situation. I don't want to post more details... but please pray that they will know the presence of Christ with them this week.

Idiosyncracies

There were a few little things today that gave me a little chuckle:
1. As I was driving down the main street into "town" to book a plane ticket today, I almost hit a PIG. Yup, a real live porker and two of his buddies were munching on the trash on the side of the road... right in front of the mosque :) Tee hee. These were the first pigs I've ever seen here, and I happened to see them hanging out at the mosque.
2. In a meeting today about the state of teacher education in this country, one of the "lead partners" answered a question that "yes, we will provide materials for all the teachers who are being trained in all partner's (other NGOs) teacher training programs. He then went on to say that they are training 6,000 teachers, and that they are printing 5,000 teacher's manuals. Didn't even realize the fact that not only are they NOT printing enough manuals for their own teachers, but they're certainly not printing enough to provide manuals for the other thousands of teachers who are being trained by the other partners! Something's not quite adding up here....

But anyhow, speaking of pork, the highlight of the day for me was a wonderful meal - complete with bacon tonight! One of our friends just came from Nairobi today, and she happened to bring a whole package of bacon with her! And I just happened to invite her over for dinner tonight, so we got to partake of the bacon. Yum yum. Life's little pleasures around here!

I love the market!

I went with a friend to a different market this afternoon. We had a great time - I love the market! This market, for whatever reason, is a lot quieter than the market near my house, and there are a few different sorts of things in it. Since there's a big party tonight (which I'm not going to because it doesn't even START until 11pm!), my friend needed to find a costume. From some bits of wire, some beautifully tacky fake flowers and a bright pink mosquito net, she created some lovely fairy wings, and will be going to the USAID Halloween lock-in party as a fairy princess. I'm not really into staying up all night and drinking with a bunch of UN folks that I don't know... so I didn't need to come up with a creative costume! But I sure had fun helping my friend get hers together!

I have never spent much time in this particular market, since it's on the other side of town. But it was great exploring the place together. I was also really encouraged because I could use a lot of the Arabic that I've been learning. People in the market were so surprised, first, to find two white girls wandering around in the bowels of that market, and second, to find that one of them could bargain, and even ask for directions and where to find things, in their language :)

Because of our combined charm, beauty and language ability, we managed to get free halwa sweets, a free roll of wire, a deep discount on the fake flowers, and a lot of laughs from all sorts of people! So my 5 Arabic lessons have really paid off so far!

I had a bit of a confused moment, though, when I heard someone calling out to me in the middle of the market in Tigrinya! For a few moments, I felt like I was in a completely different country (though I was sweating a lot more than I ever sweated in that other place!). Turns out, it was the guy that I buy my bread from at the Red Oven bakery here in town. So we had a little chit chat there in the market, as well! Such fun!

All in all, it was a great day - we got everything that we needed, and I got some practice at the language, and I got to talk to someone for most of the day who has absolutely nothing to do with the work that I do :) So I had a real holiday from work, which is a rare treat around here.

The market is always filled with interesting people. There seemed to be a lot more people in this market from the rural areas who were wearing their more 'traditional' clothes. I love seeing that, and they're always so curious and interested in us funny looking white people, too! Many of the tribes in this area do a lot of scarification on their faces, to mark various rites of passage in their lives. I find them quite beautiful, but also quite fierce looking sometimes! Their colorful clothes and beads, and big smiles really make up for their fierceness, though!

Not for the squeamish

Since I've been painting such a rosy picture of life here over the past few weeks, there were a few incidences today that made me remember that I do still live in an old house in a pest infested town.

For the second day in a row, I opened my desk drawers in my office this morning to find quite a mess. There are creatures (either mice or rats - probably the latter) have quite the jamboree INSIDE the locked office drawers at night. Who knew that rat pee could be so yellow? Seriously, it's absolutely disgusting. I had to bleach my calculator, and somehow, doing my finance work will never quite be the same again. I'm rather thankful for anti-bacterial hand soap, as well.

As if cleaning up the rat latrine that my desk drawers have become wasn't enough, this evening I had another surprise when I went to make a yummy new recipe (found in "More with Less", of course) using eggplants, eggs and green peppers. The saucepan, with the LID tightly screwed on, was home to a mid-sized cockroach, who just couldn't quite make his way up the sides of the pan to make his escape. Ew, is all I have to say. Once again, I'm thankful for the pan of bleachy water that was left over from cleaning my veggies earlier.

Of course, on my way to the bathroom to wash my hands with more of the antibacterial soap, I almost stepped on an even BIGGER roach that was in the middle of dying in the hallway. When I turned on the light in the bathroom, I saw a very much alive one scuttling away on the bathroom counter. Sigh, no matter what we do, we just can't seem to get rid of them. I think, however, some of the powder that we put out for them must be working, as we keep finding dead ones in the hallway!

Maybe I need to start keeping hedgehogs in the house - they'd hunt out those roaches pretty quick. On that note, I'm going to bring Zane up to the office to spend the night there. Maybe he'll be able to interrupt that little rat jamboree up there and save my calculator from another wet night!

Home made Mayonnaise

Whilst others are making yogurt, I tried my hand at mayonnaise, or, as I am dubbing it, "Creamy Country Garlic and Herb Salad Dressing".

One of my neighbors loaned me her Mennonite "More with Less" Cookbook today. As I was looking through it, I was suddenly overcome with a desire to create lovely things in the kitchen. This, obviously, is not an every day occurence for me! But I thought, since we've already had dinner, that I would make something that would keep for tomorrow... and I happened upon a recipe for "Salad Dressing". Which, as it turns out, is just really yummy fresh mayonnaise. But it's really tasty, and I added some of my "Country Garlic and Herb" mix (which I splurged on a few months back at the import supermarket!) to it, and it's fantastic!

Jackie and I, while we watch our episode of ER tonight, will be chowing down on cucumbers and fresh salad dressing. Do you realize how long it's been since I've eaten a nice creamy salad dressing?! Considering the fact that we eat salad every day, this is going to be a nice treat! (by the way, when I say "salad", I mean raw tomatoes and cucumbers, sometimes with some green pepper chopped in - ain't no lettuce anywhere to be found in this country!)

By the way, until yesterday, the F button on my keyboard was sticking. Today, the problem seems to have migrated down to the C button. I now have clear evidence of the fact that "C" is a much more common letter in English than "F".

AND, I got to do a little dance of joy last night! The pesky email problem that I've been dealing with for the past 12 days finally got fixed! Wooo-hooo! I was skyping (again!) with the guys in the UK and the US, and they finally were able to get things moving. What a relief to see emails actually downloading into my inbox from my work email address!

Well, that salad dressing is calling my name...

Yogurt and blogs

Seems everyone is making their own yogurt these days. I'm feeling a little left out, actually. One of my nieghbors was just showing me the fancy box he made out of left-over ceiling insulation in order to keep his yogurt at a perfect 100F for 10 hours. Another one of my friends has been blogging about her yogurt methods. My other neighbor had a yogurt making lesson with someone else who came here for a visit this past week. Everyone's making yogurt, and I just want to make some yogurt so I have something to talk to my neighbors and blog about.

However, it does seem like an awful lot of trouble to go to just for yogurt. And it IS available at one of the shops here - we even get strawberry yogurt once in a while! That's a real treat, I tell you. It's the closest thing to ice cream that we have here.

Another one of my beefs tonight is that none of my friends (or families!) have been updating their blogs lately. When a girl has no tv, no movie theaters, only BBC or crappy hiphop stations on the radio, and just a handful of dvds that she's already watched a few times before, blogs become my main source of entertainment. So if you are the owner of an un-updated blog, please do something about that so I can be entertained!

I heard from my Arabic teacher today that the city generators have been fixed... and indeed, we have had electricity since last night, with only about 20 minutes outage this afternoon. So maybe, just maybe, we are back in the electrified world again! Which means I have that many more hours in my day to surf the internet and read un-updated blogs.

And yes, that was a reference to my Arabic teacher! Don't know if I mentioned this before, but Jackie and I have hired the groundskeeper here to teach us some of the local Arabic! We meet twice a week, from 5 - 6pm. It's a hard time to concentrate, since it's the end of the day and I'm usually tired and hungry by then... but we all have to do it after our "normal" work day. We basically just sit around and chit chat and have funny little dialogues with each other. It's great fun, and we come out with some good lines once in a while :) I love making my teacher proud of me when I put together a proper sentence. Today we practiced our gossip, "Jackie told me that..." (Jackie weri le ana geli...), and we got some fairly complex sentences going, which made me pretty happy. Who knew that I'd be able to say, "Jackie told me that she was looking for her book but she didn't find it" after only 4 lessons!

The whole "someone told me that..." is a very productive sentence around here. The grapevine is very much alive and active, and someone is always telling you something... and you can't really report it as fact because there's really no way to verify the facts... so you just say that someone told you that...

On that note, someone told me that the President of the country called a press conference today and invited all NGO personnel. I really wanted to go, just to see what the President had to say. But I had my Arabic class. Someone who went to the conference told me that the president said that he is committed to the peace agreement. That's all he wanted to say. So now, tomorrow, I can tell someone that someone told me that ...

Fun and Games

I haven't really said much about all the fun we've been having around here all week. It was a great week for a social butterfly like myself...

On Monday night, we were invited for dinner to some friends' house. That was lovely! It was so good to just get off the compound and have some time to chat with some friends and get to know them a bit better.

Then on Tuesday night, Jackie and I invited some of the translators who are staying on the compound for the workshop over to our house for some games. We had a great time playing charades and Four on the Couch. It cracks me up to get older African men to play charades! They LOVE it, and everyone has such a great time laughing together. We can all be completely silly together. And then, since they're all real pastor-types, we ended the evening with a good time of prayer together. That was great - to be able to go from completely silly to completely serious and united in prayer. I love that sort of mix!

Here's a photo of some of the guys acting out something... don't even remember what it was that they were acting out anymore!
The next day, Jackie and I hosted a spa evening in our house! We started off the evening with some pilates, then spent some time making ourselves beautiful... manicures, masks, deep conditioning for the hair, foot-baths... there are some photos of me being beautiful, but of course, they're not on my camera! So here's a photo I took of my friend here making herself beautiful, just to give you an idea of what the evening was like! There were 10 of us in our house looking just like this. I'm sure the guard, who was doing his nightly rounds, must have thought we were all completely nuts!
So yeah, it was lovely to feel a little beautiful for once. It's tough to do around here when everything is so dirty and I'm always so sweaty!

On Saturday, I also got to go out for lunch with a young woman who's just moved here from the UK. She's a friend of a friend, so I took her out to the Ethiopian restaurant for some lunch. Yum yum. One of the very friendly Eritrean waiters there told me that he had become a believer this past week! So that was quite interesting and quite exciting! I think I'll try to hook him up with someone that I know here and I hope that perhaps he can get some discipleship or something from this older man that I know. I think this waiter would be more than happy to have some, um, er, one on one Bible study with me... but yeah, well, I just think it would better coming from someone else! I had a really nice visit with this new girl who's come.

Then, since I was over on that end of town, I stopped by the new houses of some of the folks who used to live on our compound. Of course, only one couple was home - everyone else was in the office! But I had a nice visit with the ones who were there. It was just so nice to have the time and opportunity to get out on my own and do some visiting. It felt like such a "normal" thing to be able to just go out with friends. Little things like that really make me feel like this is "home", and that I do live here and have a place to "belong" here.

Goodness, this blog is getting really long, so I think I'll stop now. I was going to post a picture of the beginnings of the water colour that I started this afternoon - again with some friends who came over to spend an "art afternoon" with me here. I was very ambitious and got a start on something, but it might take a few more days for it to turn into a complete picture. I feel quite refreshed and ready to face another week of work, now that I spent a great weekend relaxing with friends!

Maybe the email will even start working tomorrow!

Wonders of Technology

We haven't been able to download our work email for 10 days now. That's a big problem for a group of people who spend a very good portion of their days sending and receiving emails about everything and anything.

So, lo and behold, guess who ends up getting involved in the trouble-shooting of this problem?! Uh huh. Your resident literacy and bilingual education specialist.

I'm rather sleeping this afternoon because I was up WAY past my bedtime last night (for the third night this week) online with "real" techies in the UK and the US who are trying to get to the bottom of this issue. It's not just us who are experiencing it, but it's people who are in other locations around Africa, who use the same VSAT provider with our particular organization's email system. But it seems that I'm the only one in Africa who is online late enough at night and who has the ability to help these guys with what they need help with.

So I've been sacrificing my sleep for the good of all of us here in Africa :) Anyways, it's pretty strange to be sitting in my bed at 2 am over here, watching some strange person in the States move my mouse, open and close various programs on my computer, checking my email, all sorts of crazy things... from his office in the States!

I had been logged onto SKYPE at the same time, so I was able to chat for a bit with all three of the techies who were discussing our case here, but then somehow, I lost Skype and wasn't able to log on.

This morning, I was able to log on, and found their messages that they had been writing about me - I must admit, I was a bit flattered by them :) They were all fairly impressed with my computer trouble-shooting skills. So maybe I am actually learning something around here! But they also were talking about their stealthy plans to recruit me for their computer troubleshooting department... but now that I've read all their offline messages, I'm on to their evil plan, and it will be foiled! Bwah ha ha (um, that's supposed to be an evil laugh).

Oh man, maybe I AM turning into a complete computer geek. So when you see me back home in December, don't be scared of the eccentric computer geek that I've become... I guess it was inevitable...

When it rains...

Today is was raining visitors.

As I was sitting in our verandah preparing for our Arabic lesson, Jackie came with a couple of white folks in tow, saying, "I've brought a few visitors...". So we gave them some water and had a little chat. Then a couple more white folks walked in. And then a couple of more. By the time they were finished, we literally had a whole bus load of white folks wander into our verandah.

Good thing our Arabic teacher never showed up today.

Then, in the middle of all of that, another young woman, a friend of a friend who just moved here, showed up unexpectedly. I also invited her in, but she declined coming into our over-packed verandah, saying she would come another day!

Anyways, we had a nice visit with these white folks, who are from an organization that sends Christian university professors to work in Universities all over the world! We had an interesting visit with them, and I look forward to seeing them again when three of them actually come to work at the University here next Fall. And the other young woman will be nice to get to know, as well, so I'm looking forward to meeting her again, too! But I tell you, it was raining white people in our house today. Dear Sunday, the young woman who helps in our house, was a little shocked when she came back from the market to find our house full of white folks, as well!

We're also having a house full of some of the translators tonight - we've invited them over for tea and games this evening! My job is to think of some good games to play with everyone! Yikes, the pressure's on...

A new bakery and new friends

I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the church service I attended at the Anglican "cathedral" this morning. Normally, there is an awful keyboard player and obscure hymns sung. But today, they just had a little percussion section, and a really nice choir leading some really nice songs. Who would have thought that "When the Saints Go Marching In" could actually be worshipful?!

On the way home from church, I stopped at an Eritrean bakery that I found last week. Unfortunately, "baani yellen", which means "no bread". Their generator was broken, so there was no bread available. Oh well, at least I got to greet the folks there in Tigrinya and have a little chat with them.

Since I couldn't get my bread at that place, I decided to try to find a new bakery someone had told me about the other day. Fortunately, it's right on the main road, right where I thought it should be. And they had a lot of bread, and it's amazing. Nice crusty rolls - like mini-baguettes. Yum yum. I couldn't quite tell where the bakery owners were from, but for sure they weren't from around here. They were speaking Arabic with an awful lot of pharyngeals (um, if you're not a linguist, never mind what a pharyngeal is :) ), unlike the local folks.

After eating some bread for lunch, Jackie and I set off to have coffee with a new Eritrean family that I met at the grocery store a little while ago. It was such a nice time with them. While we waited for the rest of the family to come home, Jackie and I got to sit in the shop and watch Martha Stewart on satellite TV. She was making a pomegranate and banana pavlova. Yum yum. But not something that we'll be doing around here any time soon.

Once the rest of the family arrived, we were ushered back through the store room to the family's living area. There, we were served shiro and bani (bread). In fact, it was the exact same bread that we had just eaten for lunch. So I asked if it was from the same bakery - and lo and behold, it was from the same bakery, which, funnily enough, is owned by... Eritreans! (Which would explain the pharyngeals. Next time I'll go practice my own pharyngeals with them :) )

I really enjoyed the Shiro, and afterwards, we got to have the whole coffee ceremony. It was so nice to sit in a local home, stuffing my face with amazing food and washing it all down with strong, sweet coffee. I was really happy that the family didn't go all out and cook a big feast, but instead just served us an "every day" sort of meal, which is my favorite dish, anyways!

We sat and chatted about Eritrean politics, about Asmara, about what we love about that place. I loved it. I'm still feeling all excited about happy about the wonderful afternoon that I had... or maybe it's just the three shots of syrupy sweet espresso that's coursing through my veins...

Choir Rehersal

Part of my job here is to do whatever I can to support the Bible translation and literacy work that's happening with our teams that are based here. One of the translators here is also a pastor at a local church. A highlight in his week is to lead the choir practice - and on Friday, he invited me and Jackie along to practice so that we could record some of their songs. It was great to see how this group was using their own hymn books (written in their own language, of course) for their worship. It was amazing to see them actually using literacy in the church! It's one of the whole goals of what we're doing - encouraging the life of the church through translation and literacy projects.

They didn't have any of this horribly irritating keyboard music, but instead, just used the drums and gourd shakers that they have used for centuries. It was beautiful music, and you could tell that they were all really into the songs and the music. Even though I had no idea what they were saying, it was beautiful to listen to. I felt very privileged to be sitting in their mud and thatch church worshipping together with them.Before we left, both of us were also invited back to preach sometime in the church. Now that's a task a certainly DO NOT feel equal to. But perhaps I would take them up on the offer to speak with the Sunday school or the youth group sometime...

Night of the amphibians

Sounds ominous, doesn't it? Well, I did have a bit of a traumatic evening yesterday because of the slimy little creatures that make their home in my house. You already know all about the drama that happens when Zane the cat eats a frog. And he hasn't seemed to have learned his lesson.

Because our door fell apart last week, and we haven't been able to get it fixed yet, there's a huge gaping hole between the doorstep and our living room. Which means that the frogs and other creatures can just hop right on in.

Last night, as I was getting ready to turn in, much to my dismay, I found a frog happily hopping around in our kitchen! So after an initial squeal, since I really don't like those creatures, I figured that I had to do something with it before Zane found him.

So, armed with a dustpan and a piece of cardboard, I successfully herded the frog back out the front door! Who would have guessed that in addition to goat herding, my list of duties as a literacy and bilingual education specialist here in Africa would include frog herding.

Thanksgiving good ness!

Well, my thanksgiving for city power was short-lived! We had electricity for exactly 24 hours, and now it's off again. So maybe it will come again tomorrow night...

I have just a few minutes before I have to go turn off the generator to post these photos that I took on Sunday night.

The first photo is the table as we were setting it up. We had a huge long table in the middle of the veranda, and it fit perfectly! I had bought a piece of cloth to use as a table cloth the day before at the market, and since the guy refused to sell me 3 meters, I ended up with 6 meters of the cloth... which was exactly long enough for our huge table!Jackie picked some flowers from the garden for center pieces, and we asked all the nieghbors and guests to bring us their chairs. So everyone, even the baby, had a place to sit!
It's SO nice to have a baby on the compound - I think she's the only expat baby in the entire city, if not the country!

Since the generator is going to go off any minute now, I'd better post these and save my ramblings about them for later. Anyways, at least you can see that we did have some fun together being thankful!

I need a word

One of our translators here has been asking all of us mother tongue English speakers here for a word. He's doing a back translation of a story that he wrote, and he needs the English word for that bit of food that sticks to the bottom of the pan after it's cooked. Since you're all feasting on mashed potatoes and roasted turkey, I think you know what I mean - the yummy crunchy bits at the bottom of the pan.

None of us know a good, widely accepted English word for this stuff. So I'm appealing to all of ya'll turkey-stuffed people out there...

What do YOU call it?!

Thankful for...

... Electricity! Yup, look at me, 11:43 pm, and I am on the Internet :) Seems it's our nieghborhood's turn for some city electricity today. I wonder how long it's going to last? By all accounts, the city here has 5 giant generators which supply electricity to the city. Seems that 3 of the 5 are out of commission at the moment. That means we haven't had any electricity for the past 5 days or so. Funny how quickly you get used to having electricity... and how long it takes to get back into the routines of turning on the generator, switching the fridge back and forth from gas to electricity, keeping the solar lamps charged, using the printer and internet only between certain hours...

But I'm thankful that the electricity came on just before our Thanksgiving feast this evening. But, since it IS nearing midnight, and I have a lot of work to do tomorrow, I will leave the photos and blogging about our feasting for tomorrow.

Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and have countless things to thank our loving Father for!

FYI

This:
And this:
Do not mix.

Since part of our door has fallen off, the local toads can now hop right into our living room. Of course, Zane thought we had brought home a new toy for him. So Jackie and I didn't think anything of it when Zane started to hop around after the little toad.

But we thought again about the whole thing when Zane actually caught the little toad. Who knew that toads here excrete a toxin on their skin to keep predators away?! Apparently Zane didn't know that, either. When he started foaming at the mouth, though, we knew something was not right. I have never seen a cat foam at the mouth, and I had no idea so much slobber could come out of one little kitty cat!

I went running over to the neighbor, who seems to know a lot about a lot of different things, including pet care. She suggested washing out Zane's mouth and then feeding him lots of milk. That's what she did when her cat (the white one with big teeth) ate rat poison and he's still alive.

So we grabbed Zane in all his slobbery glory and tried to wash his mouth out with a cloth and lots of water. You can imagine how well he liked that!

Then we tried syringing a bunch of milk down his throat, since he wouldn't drink anything (he was foaming too much!). You can also imagine how well he liked that!

Finally, he calmed down enough, drank some water, lapped up a ton of milk, and seemed no worse for the wear.

So Jackie and I settled down to watch a DVD. In the middle of the DVD, though, Zane started his nightly bathing ritual... and sure enough he started foaming at the mouth again! So we went through the whole thing - and figured that he must have had some toad toxin on his fur! So we rubbed him down with a wet cloth. And you can imagine how well he liked that!

I also got on the internet and found out that there are all sorts of things that can happen with toad toxin and cats - paralysis, convulsions, death... foaming at the mouth seemed the least of Zane's potential worries! But thankfully, today, he seemed just fine. He was a bit sick over night... won't give you the details of that, but we kept him in the porch, so at least the mess was a little contained!

And now, speaking of the cat, I'm going to go and see how he's doing!