Ice Cream in Juba?!

Yup. We ate ice cream from our freezer at home this evening! Here is yet another perk of living in a guesthouse.

One of our guests this week is working closely with some folks from the UN. She has, in particular, one good friend (who happens to be from a city three hours North of where I'm from!!!) who comes around quite often. Tonight, the two of them made dinner for all of us. Man, it was amazing. We had garlic bread with CHEESE. We had pasta with real canned tomatos. We had avocado with garlic and real OLIVE OIL drizzled on top. And then to top it all off, we had ICE CREAM from the Netherlands!

Yes, truly amazing. Seems there is now a store that's been set up for the UN folks to go and buy all their fancy-schmansy imported goodies. And tonight, because of our guest, we reaped the fruits of that wonderous place! It never ceases to amaze me how things are changing around here. For the privileged few, it's almost becoming the type of place where you can actually get some nice treats.

Because of our contact with Sarah, we've also been introduced to the JIT shop where you can even buy shampoo and deoderant... for a price, of course. A bottle of shampoo, depending on the brand, of course, goes for anywhere from $7 - 10 US. It's a bit steep for me to do all my shopping there, but at least I know that if some sort of disaster befalls my own shampoo supply, it is possible to replenish some of these basic items that you just can't find anywhere else. This shop actually has a computer cash register and they print out a reciept and everything. Amazing. Um, maybe I blogged about that shop last week... if I did, sorry. At least you can see the impression that it made on me! I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when I get back to Nairobi next month - I think I'll have some serious culture shock.

Anyways, after dinner tonight, we had a nice little game of frisbee in the parking lot, by the headlights of a UN landcruiser. That's the first time one of those has been parked in our lot! The night guard was a bit astonished, I think.

Oh, another highlight of the day was our first session of pilates! Someone who used to live here left some therm-a-rest sleeping pads in a container, so I've adopted them for pilates. Our neighbor, Ruth, has a pilates book, and Jackie and I went over there after work to do some stretching and rolling around on our mats for a while. It felt SO good to stretch and move a bit. In fact, my back and shoulders feel better than they have in weeks!

On the work front, today was another strange day. We were supposed to have our newly instituted Center prayer meeting this morning. Most of the translation teams that are here completely forgot about it, but it was just as well, since a truck full of lumber arrived just as we were supposed to start praying. So instead of praying Grace, the two old men, and two of our Dinka translators ended up unloading a lorry full of lumber! And of course, everything with the Dinka turns into a bit of a laugh... so there was much merryment to be had, even in unloading 110 2x4s from a big truck!

But while I was unloading the truck one of our colleagues from the Ministry of Education came by, and we met with him and basically charted our course for the remainder of the year! Yup, I'm now committed to training workshops until November! It will be a ton of fun, but it's still a bit scary to me to be committed to something so far in advance... even though I know it's not really that far in advance, it just SEEMS so far in advance, especially around here when you never really know what's going to happen from day to day!

Um, I think that's enough for the night. I'm still a little buzzed on chocolate ice cream and cheese! Maybe an episode of Smallville will help me calm down a little for the night.