I also had a very successful shopping trip today - I found little cakes for a farewell "tea" that we're having tomorrow for one of our colleagues who is leaving. Because I used my few words in Arabic, and smiled prettily, I got some free candy out of the deal :)
AND, this is the best part, I found YOGURT! Mmmmm.... I've been searching in vain for yogurt for the past two weeks - the one shop where they used to have it all the time is getting sick of me coming and asking, I think. They don't even say hello to me anymore, they just say, "no yogurt yet", and I carry on my way. I didn't even bother getting out of the car as I passed by today, and they let me know that there was no yogurt!
Oh, and I actually did get some good work done today. I had to bring some documents in to the Minister of Education, as well as a print out of a report that we wrote to a consultant who's also working there. It's always a wild goose hunt around that Ministry to try to track people down. The Ministry is a collection of pre-fab buildings, with desks and chairs lining the inside of each one. No one has a specific desk assigned to them, and no one seems to sit in the same place on any given day. I honestly feel for them, because I don't know how anyone could ever get any work done in that sort of environment! I mean, they don't even have their own desks on which to leave a pen or a piece of paper, not to mention a filing cabinet or anywhere to access any sort of information.
Anyways, having to wander around and find various people can also be a good thing. I was asking around to find the consultant when I was ushered into a nice air conditioned box inhabited by another consultant who's working on the "Education Act". So I had a chance to sit down with her and have a really nice conversation about the act, and to advocate for the language policy within that act. It's always very informal, and you sort of have to be on your toes whenever you go over to the Ministry, because you just never know what sort of impromptu meeting is going to happen!
I should get going - I need to go and clean up some of the sand dunes in the house before I go turn off the generator and get into bed. The girl who's helping in the house didn't actually show up for work today - perhaps I made her feel really bad yesterday when I asked her to wash her name out of my table cloth (for some reason, she had written her name with pen on the table cloth which was on top of the kitchen table!). I'm all about literacy, but couldn't she have at least found a piece of paper to practice writing her name on?!
Oh yeah, and I wanted to write a bit about Lent, which starts tomorrow! We had a great discussion on Sunday evening in our little International Fellowship about Lent. It gave me a lot of food for thought, and I'm praying that this time of Lent will be a really good one. I'll write more about that tomorrow...
For now, since I haven't posted any photos in a LOOONNNGGGG time, here's a photo of Zane, feasting before his lenten fast begins tomorrow. One of our friends got invited to the UN grocery store this evening. There is ice cream at that shop. Of course, the freezer doesn't get enough electricity to actually FREEZE anything, so we had to eat it all up this evening :) Zane got to lick out the bowl.
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