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!

Roosters in the kitchen

Since we've had a housefull of all sorts of people for meetings and workshops, we've had our Ugandan cook come in to help us out. Today, for the first time, she went to the market to buy some live chickens to cook up for lunch.

That there sitting on our kitchen counter is a basket full of $30 worth of live rooster, waiting for the pot.

This is what it looked like a few hours later:
Thankfully (?!) I was teaching a computer workshop for the translation and literacy teams who are based here now while the whole process from basket to pot was taking place. So I am blissfully unaware of what went into the whole thing.

No wonder we don't eat chicken very often!

Am I turning into an eccentric?!

I was musing over some of the, um, well, interesting and eccentric personalities of expats that I know who have lived in this country for a long time (no, I'm NOT mentioning any names...), and then my little kitty, Zane happened to come along. I found myself talking outloud in a funny little cat voice, telling Jackie that I was hungry and she should feed me some chicken pizza. I was actually speaking outloud on behalf of the cat.

Please pray that this trend doesn't continue and that I don't turn into a crazy eccentric lady who spends all her days spying on the neighbors and dialogging with her 15 cats!

On a happier note, Jackie and I recruited the young man who helps us around the compound to be our Arabic teacher! So we had our first lesson today, and it went quite well, I think! He seems to be patient enough, seems to know at least the basics of the language well, has been educated as a teacher in a nieghboring country, and is just a very pleasant young man.

I was encouraged because about halfway through the lesson, we tried out having a whole conversation with some of the phrases we had been learning, and we could both manage to have a whole conversation without even looking at our notes! So today marked my first "formal" language learning session. We're going to try to meet twice a week with Justin and see how it goes. I just might learn something yet :)

In language learning, there seem to be certain "windows" of opportunity where it's most effective. One of those windows was when I first arrived - and I didn't have the time to do anything about it then. But I think another window is opening up... and it seems this time to be more a case of the fact that I am just tired of all the other bits and pieces that I'm doing, so my brain needs a bit of a different sort of challenge. And learning some language seems to be just the sort of challenge that my brain is up to at the moment! I hope my motivation doesn't wane too far... it's too easy to get swallowed up in other things around here!

Num kwais! (um, that means, "sleep well", 'cause that's what I'm off to do fairly soon...)

Connections

Funny, but I keep running into Eritreans everywhere I go. This week, as Jackie and I were in the new "Fish Supermarket" (um, they don't sell fish, just stationary, cleaning products and imported food stuff), we figured out that the owners and all of assorted people sitting around the shop were Eritreans. So we had a good laugh and I got to hear some more Tigrinya. They invited me over on the weekend for some coffee.

And then tonight, we went to the "Queen of Sheba" restaurant for my fill of injera and shiro, and lo and behold, the waiter was from Asmara. So we chatted for a while, as well. As we were leaving, he invited me over on the weekend for some coffee.

Then, on the way home from the restaurant, we stopped at the newest bakery in town, called the "Red Oven", which happens to be the name of a nice bakery in Asmara. I started out buying my bread using Arabic, but then I noticed that the guys there were speaking to each other in Tigrinya! So, of course, I asked where they were from. I then switched into a little bit of Tigrinya, and ended up getting my bread for half the price! As I was leaving, they invited me over on the weekend for some coffee.

I guess I have my choice of places to go for coffee this weekend!

It's really a lot of fun to meet people from Eritrea here. I also have 4 friends here who are currently in, or will be travelling to, Ethiopia in the next week. I tell you, I'm starting to wonder why I'm suddenly surrounded by Habesha things again! I feel almost a little traitor-ish to the country that I'm in now! While I do really like this country and I have grown to love the people here, I still feel like I've lost a bit of my heart to the "horn of Africa", and I wonder when, or if, God will lead me to that part of the world...?! But for now, I know that God has put me here, in this place, for this time, and I will make the most of every opportunity that I have here!

Fun around town

As I was sitting in the Electric Company office this afternoon with Richard, trying to figure out how much money we actually owe the electric company, the electricity went out! Somehow, there's a good, entertaining blog entry into the irony of that... but I'm not feeling so funny tonight. Maybe it's the fact that I'm still thinking about how one of the Dinka translators here told me that I should drink less coffee because I'm getting fat. Or maybe I sat in too many hot and sweaty offices this afternoon... anyways, I can't think of anything funny to say about the fun I had in town today!

After unsuccessfully paying our electricity bill (really, how many people do you know who go and pester the electric company to tell you how much money you owe them, going so far as to sit in their office for over an hour, helping the billing lady figure out how to use her computer program?!), we went over to the immigration department. There we sat for a while again. We waited. And we waited. At least there was a young woman there with her really, really cute baby, also sitting and waiting, and waiting and waiting. So I could make cooing noises at the baby and discuss baby things with the mother.

Richard decided that it was taking too long, and we had a huge list of things that we needed to do, so he left our money with his buddy who also works in the office, and told him that we'd come back in a little while.

So the next stop was the bank. Where we couldn't get any money changed because the bank, get this, ran out of money. Ooops. So we couldn't change any money.

We then tried going to the other bank in town, but unfortunately, by this time, it was closed, even though it was only just after 3pm!

So that being unsuccessful, we headed back to the Immigration office. Still, we waited. And we waited and we waited. Finally, there was some movement of our papers, so Richard went into a different office and left me waiting out on the bench. Of course, by this time, the lady and her cute little baby had left... and I was left alone with a bunch of guys in uniform. It was alright until two of them came up to me with the lovely opening line, "We are here to amuse you.". Um, right. I didn't need any amusing at that very moment, thank you very much. After trying to brush them off when they told me that the one guy would come to Canada with me, I decided that now would be a good time to go find Richard again.

Thankfully, he was just sitting and waiting in a different office, and there happened to be a free chair nearby. So I think my "friends" who were so eager to amuse me got the idea!

Since we were out, we also did a few more errands, just running around trying to find some various bits and pieces in some of the shops. We did manage to find some bug spray for our Kenyan workers who are living in a tent in the yard at the moment. They're getting eaten alive at night by the mossies, so hopefully they can now spray their tent before they go to bed! They're helping a team of Americans who are here put a new roof on our guesthouse! I would hate for any of them to get malaria.

Oh, speaking of those guys who are helping us out here, can ya'll pray for one of them? A few days ago, one of them, Freddy, who has been here a few times before and is quite a good friend of ours now, got some bad news from his wife back in Nairobi. His 11 month daughter suddenly passed away! Of course, we wanted to arrange for him to fly back home to be with his family, but he insisted that he would prefer to stay and work and for us to send the money that we would have spent on his flight back to his wife to help cover the costs.

He's a believer, but quite a new believer. So please pray that he will know God's comfort during this time. It's quite a shock to me that he would prefer to have the money, rather than go to be with his family. It's not because he doens't love his family, or because he doesnt' care, but in his mind, providing the money for all the funeral arrangements, doctors and hospital bills etc. is his way of loving his family. And he doesn't have much choice in how to do that. That's one of the worst things about the poverty that I've seen around here - it just doesn't give people any choice. So when things like the death of a small daughter happen, they have to do whatever they need to do in order to make the ends meet. And for Freddy, that means staying in a foreign country and working to make the money to cover all the extra costs involved in a family member's death. Please pray that he finds some way to grieve and mourn the loss of his daughter, even so far away from his own community.

Sorry to leave you on a little bit of a sad note, but that's just the way life is around here sometimes.

Photos!

At long last, here's a link to a few of the photos that I took last week. I'm hoping that someone who was on our flight will email me a few more photos soon, and maybe I'll get around to posting those one of these days, too :)