And in the meantime, one of the teams already based here was rummaging though yet another container to find some books that they need for an upcoming workshop! I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of these guys puttering around the compound with wheelbarrows full of books!
I tell you, it's all in a day's work as a literacy and bilingual education specialist around here.
Jackie and Grace seem to be concentrating rather hard on eating their meat stew and rice!
This is the cause of all of Grace's sweat and mud:
Richard is also working hard. Here, he's welding his little heart out. You can't really tell from the photo, but he had the welding machine perched on an old filing cabinet. He was straddling the machine with one his his legs perched on a ladder and one on the other side of the cabinet.
Richard really is a master at perching on things to get the job done. A few weeks, ago, he was perched on old diesel drums to bash out a hole in the wall for a window for the new meeting room.
So what is all this bashing and digging and welding for, you might ask? Well, it's all for new offices for a couple of translation and literacy teams that will be relocating here in the coming few weeks. They have previously been based in Uganda, but are now moving into this country. It's quite the operation to get offices and accommodation and all of the systems set up to get them up and running here. I tell you, things are going to change a little around here! But it's exciting to be here at this time, as the foundations for the work of Bible translation are being laid!
The only consolation I have tonight is the fact that face cloths are quite common in the market here. Most people keep them in their back pockets or purses and whip them out whenever they have to wipe the sweat from their brow... which is quite often, actually. Seems I fit right in with these sweaty Africans :) However, I keep my fuzzy face cloth for washing with, and I have a collection of delicate flowered hankies to use to wipe the beads of sweat from my brow wherever I go. I went to the shop to buy two, and the guy threw one in for free - so I have a blue one, a pink one, and a yellow one. And yes, I have been known to colour co-ordinating my sweat rag with my outfit.
The old men had to repair our tin roof... so that meant taking down the styrofoam insulation and making a big mess in our living room :) It was nice to have a sky-light for a little while in the afternoon. Thankfully, it didn't rain!
And here are the kittens that Grace found yesterday in her wanderings around the compound. They were SO cute! Richard took the orange tabby cat (who looks just like our old kitty, Tu-Tu) home for his family to love. Aren't they cute (and I don't mean Grace's dirty thighs!!).
And this is a nice photo of our lunch today. Since we haven't had anything except vegetables and eggs for lunch all week, we decided to make today a fish day. Mmmm.... very tasty fish head! Needless to say, I did NOT eat the head, or the tail or the fins, but I did very much enjoy the meaty bits. Somehow, fish tastes really good when all you've had to eat in several days is vegetables...
The hedgehogs are the only ones who ball up around here.
And that's just about enough photos for the day, I think. I gotta go get Zane inside for the night and make the tea for the night guards...
After our little walk, it was time to go over to the teacher training school that is run by the NGO that we were staying with. I was so impressed with that place! We had a few minutes before the closing ceremony to chat with the acting principal and the NGO team leader, who is very much involved in what's happening there. I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but at least I'm getting my little speech on the wonders of mother tongue education perfected :) The guys there think it's a great idea to do mother tongue education... but they, like everyone else, aren't doing anything to implement any sort of mother tongue stuff. But they seemed very open to having some help with it, if we were able to give them some consultation on it. If only we had even one more literacy person here... there are SO many opportunities to work!
But the funniest thing was when we passed by the Anglican cathedral (shown below). Sitting outside in the shade of the church was a group of young people, gathered around the ACCORDIAN singing away. Yes, I did say an accordian. And they weren't playing "On Top of Old Smokey".
As previously posted, I have, indeed, been on a small road trip. It sort of snuck up on me, and suddenly the day had come to leave, without too much anticipation. Oh well, I guess you don’t need TOO much anticipation for a 5 hour bus ride !
We also saw a lot of demining action happening. There were a few places where the land had been cleared of all the vegetation (and let me tell you, there was a lot of vegetation), and there were only red and white tipped posts sticking out from the ground marking where it was safe and where the mines were. The group that was demining was using a big contraption called a Mine Wolf to get find the mines. Once I get back to civilization where there’s a high speed Internet, I’m going to Google the Mine Wolf and see what that thing is!
In fact, when I went into the dining room the other night, one of the Aussies on the compound here was wearing an almost identical blue tie-dyed mumu J Really, these are my sort of people! I like people who can wear tie-dyed mumus without shame.
These people are pretty hard core here. There is no running water on the compound; the Aussie couple, until just a week ago, were sharing the squatty potty (outhouse) with 30 other people on the compound. No one has “real” showers – it’s all just bucket baths, and this is the way the expats live here. They do have a generator during the day, and solar batteries for the evening, so they have a good system for electricity… but the running water and toilets would be difficult for me to live with long term. I sure do appreciate the running water that we have in our house back “home’!
One of the other strange things about living in this guesthouse is that it is really a public place. People don't knock to come into our living room - well, I mean, they can see if we're here from 50 feet away anyways, so no use in knocking! 
And here's just another beautiful sight that Grace and I saw on the way to check up on our fence this afternoon. Funnily enough, there was a beautiful rainbow in a bright blue sky - not a rain cloud to be seen. I really wanted to get a photo with a nice mud and thatch tukel in the foreground with the rainbow above - it would have been postcard material. But there were so many people around, and I feel a little like I'm taking photos of a zoo when I sit in the truck and take photos out the window of the "quaint" little villagers... so I settled for this one where there weren't so many people around.
That means "Beautiful" in the local Arabic. And today, I was feeling rather "giafa" in my new dress! Our friend Sunday brought us to her tailor last weekend, and today we got to pick up the finished product. I feel a bit like an African princess in it, I must admit. It really fits well and is, well, rather flattering, if I do say so myself. Everyone agreed that it's a "slimming" fit (in other words, I look pretty fat in everything else I wear around here :) ) And I can still run and jump rope in it, which are important features of any dress.
Then I had lunch, and worked for a little while longer on my "sermon" for the evening gathering that I was supposed to lead tonight. Yikes! I was a bit nervous, but it ended up going well, I thought. And others said it went just fine, and appreciated with I had to say about my past week's enslavement to the generator and freedom that we can find in Christ, even from our generator enslavements.
This was the scene through the windsheild in one section. Unfortunately, not too many of the photos turned out too well... but I didn't want to be too obvious taking photos, either, since the road was lined with observers! It must have been better than TV to watch all the vans, cars, busses and SUVs try to manuever through the rivers and mud! We watched as one van in particular almost drowned in a ditch. I saw him go nose first in, about up to the windsheild, and then just splash his way out of it! I was mighty thankful that we were in the truck which has a higher clearance that our old little truck!
We wrapped Zane up in a towel as tightly as we possibly could, to try to avoid any scratches... but I guess when you go messing around with the, um, nether regions of a male cat, there's bound to be some injury to someone along the line. We tried to keep all of his paws and teeth inside the towel, but he clamoured his way out of the towel like a little sausage, using my shoulder as traction. Anyways, in the end, we succeeded, and it only took a few tries to get that little band on the appropriate anatomy.
He's running away from the rat, now that he's finished playing with it. Thankfully, he didn't eat it, and it wasn't too mangled by the time we got to it this morning to throw it on the burn pile!
