Blogging Whilst Waiting...

Seems I'm always blogging whilst waiting for something else to happen... (tee hee, I love that word, "whilst". I'm learning to use my best Jane Austen English with Jackie around!). At the moment, I'm waiting for my turn in the shower. And hopefully once I've showered, supper will be on!

Ok, so here I am all showered up. But still no sign of dinner... I made our lunch, so it's someone else's turn to do dinner :)

This morning, I went off to the market with Sunday, one of the girls who helps us out here at the guest house. I love charging through the market with a Sudanese girl! They don't really have a sense of Canadian politeness like me, so really, it's just fun to see how she can just order people around and tell them to give her this and pass her that, and take THAT tomatoe, not this one... And we had a little argument about the onions - I wanted to buy them in the "local" section which is cheaper, but she absolutely wouldn't buy them there. We had to go buy "kwais" (good) onioins in the Ugandan section, which are about 50 cents more expensive because they're shipped here from Uganda. I couldn't tell the difference between the two onions - an onion is an onion, isn't it?!

We also bought some meat in the market, the only meat we've had since coming here. I'm getting to the point where I can start to examine the different bits of animal sitting on the "tables" in front of the butchers. There seem to be an awful lot of tables full of unrecognizable creature parts! But I know they're all beef because of the various heads and hooves sitting around under and on top of the tables.

When I came back from the market adventure, I had a short meeting with Moses, one of the participants in the literacy course that I was teaching at for the past few years in Kenya. He's assigned to work with the government, but is also continuing his work with the Dinka translation and literacy team until things really get going... Anyways, it was good to get a little work done today!

I also continued thinking about our teaching training schedule and the "Available books" list whilst supervising the whole stew lunch thing. I boiled the meat for quite some time, and then Sunday was a little shocked when I started chucking vegetables into the pot with the meat! She had gotten all excited about eating meat. Meat and only meat for lunch. Both Vicky and Sunday were a little dubious of my attempts at making stew, but it turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. I am now adding Italian seasoning to my list of things to never leave home without.

Whilst eating lunch, we were getting all excited about going to the UN for our Mine Action meeting. We were wondering, will everyone get a T-Shirt? How many free bottles of water could we take? What should we wear so we don't get too cold in the A/C?

However, once we arrived at the place, we were rather disappointed. The Mine Action office apparently gets shafted in all things good about the UN. No Water. No A/C. And horribly enough, no sign of the promised T-shirts. All we came home with were heads full of knowledge of how horrible landmines are, a cd of info, and a few posters, pictured here:
Since we didn't get water or a T-shirt (not even for ME, who ended up working as an IT tech during the presentation), we decided to head over to Mango Camp for a nice cold Coke. We stopped in at the State level Ministry of Education to drop off some papers - the place was deserted, but we were able to just push open a few doors and set the envelope on the desk of the Ministry of Education. We were hoping as we left that we wouldn't get shot at or something for being someplace that we shouldn't have been!

At sundown, Jackie and I convinced Grace to play a round of Frisbee Golf again. We weren't able to convince Richard to join us, but he was let off the hook today because the poor guy's suffering from malaria. The best part of the whole game was when Jackie's frisbee landed right on top of one of our poor chicks... he met his demise yesterday, but hadn't gotten cleaned up since his body was left in the cage. Only Jackie could succeed in landing her frisbee right on top of a dead chicken inside it's cage! Thankfully, that was the second to last "hole" in our game, and we promptly soaked the frisbee in some bleach, not quite knowing what these chickens are dying of! Wouldn't that be something if we suffered from the first case of bird flu contracted by humans through a frisbee?!

Man, today was so exciting, I can hardly wait to see what tomorrow holds...

Perhaps if nothing else happens tomorrow, I'll write about the horrors of landmines. Really, they are terrible weapons of war that just end up hurting innocent people! But now I know all about them, so I should be relatively safe...