My Favo(u)rite Things Part 1

Julie Andrews admonished her young charges to simply remember their favo(u)rite things, and then they wouldn't feel so bad. Well, I'm not feeling so bad (but I must admit, I am a little sad that some of nearest and dearest friends in this city are all moving on to new opportunities in the next couple of months... but that's fodder for a different post...), but I think it's a good time to start a series on a a few of my favo(u)rite things here in Jb.

Since I have to go shut off the generator in a few minutes, this will (hopefully!) be a shorter post. Item number one on the Favo(u)rite Things list. The following photo actually shows TWO of my favo(u)rite things. But let's focus for a moment, shall we, on the white object on the right.
This is my solar lamp. An amazing piece of equipment! Not so cheap. But amazing. Once the generator goes off at 10:30pm, this little light drives away the darkness and allows me to be a night owl once again. The little solar panel which it's connected to is on my roof, and it's a bit difficult to take a photo of... but every morning, I dutifully plug my lamp into it's panel, and every night, it dutifully lights my way. I'm very happy with it. And it is definitely one of my favorite things in Jb.

Notice, too, how it has a handy little handle on the top? When I wander around the compound (say, for instance, to go turn off the generator), I can hold it by its handle and feel like I'm a cloaked lantern holder from ages long past. You know those guys who wear cloaks and carry a lantern and shout things like, "Hark, who goes there?!" Yeah, for some reason, I get a kick out of feeling like one of those :) I say to the toads and snakes in the grass, "Hark, who goes there!" and the flee from my light! Definitely a good thing in this place.

Speaking of which, me and my light are going to brave the darkness and go shut down the generator. Good night!

Why we don't travel in rainy season

These photos are from Richard's latest trip down south to the neighboring country. This is why we don't travel by road in rainy season. But of course, it was 34C in my office this afternoon, making me think that rainy season is definitely over!
You're welcome for a visit any time :)

A Sunday

Things are heating up around here. I had the luxury of sleeping in this morning (without anyone coming in early and asking if I was sick because I was still in bed at 9am :)), but when I did wake up at about 9:30, it was already 27.5C in my bedroom. The rainy season is over. The worst part about it, I think, is the dread of knowing what's coming. It's been SO pleasant these past two months to feel cool and refreshed in the morning, to be able to sit at my desk and not drip, to not leave sweat stains on my computer, to be able to move faster than a sloth... but that's all coming to an end. It's the season of the melting margarine, the freezer that never actually gets cold enough to make ice cubes, the constant wetness, the lethargy, the over-night dehydration. Sigh. I'll get used to it again, and it's not really all THAT bad (well, ok, it can be rather miserable!), but it's just a part of life here. Today I'm just feeling the anticipation of *enjoying* all of that for the next 9 months (with, of course, a brief respite back home at Christmas!).

But I have found a new way to "beat the heat"! I was invited over to my friends' house this afternoon for a pool party :) Ok, so the pool was only 5 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep. But it's truly amazing how refreshing it can be to just sit in 2 feet of water! We had a really lovely time in the coolness of the pool, chatting and reading and enjoying the refreshment.

The best part is, a previous neighbor has left me her little swimming pool (again, it's really only one of those kiddie pools that you blow up and stick on the lawn for your 5 year olds!)! So maybe next weekend, I can host my own pool party on the compound! Stay tuned for your invitations...

A Saturday

Seems there haven't been too many blog-able moments lately, so I'll just bore you all with an account of my day today and wow you with my artistic prowress.

The young woman who helps in our house came extra early today, for some reason. She must think I'm the laziest girl on the planet, since I was still in bed when she came. Granted, I did sleep in a little, since I didn't really have to do anything until 9:30am today. I stayed up way too late last night, reading and poking around on the internet, and since it was Saturday morning, I figured I could sleep in until 8:30 :) It was nice to get up later, since it was then warmer when I woke up and thus warmer when I got into the shower. I actually had a shower this morning, instead of heating water on the stove for a bucket bath. It was 26.5C in my room at 8:30am, which in my books these days, is just warm enough for a cold shower (we don't have a hot water tank here!).

So I had a nice shower, then mosied over to the computer office where I had a "date" with our remote computer geek. We don't turn the generator on until 10am, but since we have this amazing battery system in the computer container for the server and the internet kit, I can work on that stuff at any time of the day or night! Thankfully, the computer geek I had to work with today is in the same time zone, just in a different city, so we were able to get a few things done. If we had a fast enough internet connection, he could take control of the computer himself and do what he needed to do on his own. But since our internet connection isn't fast enough, we have a text chat, and he just tells me what to type in the various dos windows that I bring up for him. It's quite a nice way to keep the computers going down here, and I'm learning a lot! But I still don't want to turn into a full time computer geek!

Once we were done that, I put my taxi driver hat on. Our translation coordinator has been visiting here from a different city for a week or so now, and she wanted to go out and see some new houses that one of our translation teams has been building. That was kind of a fun drive - once again, I'm reminded why we have a 4WD Hilux here! The road, though it is a relatively new one, is really, really bad this rainy season. It's one of the main throroughfares through the town, but in some places, you have to go through puddles that come up over the nose of the truck as you drive into them.

I keep asking myself, "How deep is that puddle?" And the only answer is, "I have no idea!" , so you put it into low gear and just try to keep going. I'm also getting good at finding fresh tracks through the puddles - if you can see where a previous vehicle went in, and find their tracks on the far side of the puddle, you know that somehow, they got out by driving in a straight line through that section of the puddle! I've also learned that normally, you don't go straight through the middle of the puddle - it's normally much safer to stay near the edges. Normally it's not quite a deep at the edge!

Last week, while driving home from a restaurant where we had enjoyed a lovely lunch by the River, Wes was driving us home along a terrible road. Huge puddles (I mean, we're talking serious lakes here!). Because there were so many of us, we didn't all fit in the cab of the truck (we drive a crew cab, but there were 7 of us in the truck that day!), so Jackie and I were in the box.

Wes, being the Wes that he is, didn't seem to get the whole concept of driving slowly through the edges of the lakes. Nope, he just gunned it and went straight on through the middle of them all! I started to get a little worried when the mud was splashing up over the sides of the box. At least it didn't start pouring in over the sides! Considering there is no sewage or drainage systems in this town, I really am not too interested in sitting in the truck box full of mud and... um... yeah... whatever else has been washed into that puddle!

Anyways, I digress. I was talking about my lovely day. We managed to make it to the new houses and back without getting stuck anywhere. And once again, I'm thankful that my brother-in-law got me a standard stick shift car when he did - without my previous experience of knowing how to drive a standard, there is no way I would be able to navigate these crazy roads around here! So thanks, Ronny for bringing home the Honda all those years ago! Who would have thought I'd be in the situation I'm in now way back then, eh?!

I took off my taxi driving hat, and put my computer geek hat back on again, and did some more work with our remote computer geek. We were successful, more or less, before he lost his internet connection in his city!

By then, it was lunch time! Mmm... ratatouille! There aren't too many veggies in the market these days, but tomatoes and eggplant are always there, so we eat a lot of eggplant and tomatoe based things! There was a whole crew of folks in the guesthouse who are enroute to a workshop called "Healing the Wounds of Trauma". In this workshop, they're learning how to translate a book which is aimed at helping people do just that - heal from trauma. It's a Christian book, and is much in demand in this country, considering all the crap people have gone through in the last, oh, 40 years of war! The translation of books like this go hand in hand with the Bible translation projects that are going on here.

Anyways, it was nice to have lunch together with those folks and chat with them. Some of them I know quite well, as they work with our organization in a different town, and it's nice to see them come back through here. They will get on a bus tomorrow morning and drive to the town where the workshop is being held. Hopefully the road won't be too bad - the town is less than 100 km away, but it's been taking busses 8 - 10 hours to get through lately.

After lunch, I put my napping hat on. Oooohhh, it was SO nice to have a little sleep!

And then, once we turned on the generator again, it was back to work for a little while. I then put on my Bilingual Education Specialist hat on. At the end of October, there is a 3 day workshop for Christian NGOs who are working in education. We've been invited to facilitate an entire day on the topic of language and education :) Jackie is going away for a week on Monday, so we had to get some ideas down on paper today, and figure out just what we want to do with the time that we've been given. What a great opportunity it is to talk about this issue! Most NGOs (and even government schools) are just operating in English - even though the vast majority of the students, not to mention the teachers, speak very, very little English! It seems that they just don't know what to do about the language issue, nor do they have textbooks or other resources to teach in the children's mother tongues.

So Jackie and I have a few ideas for them :) Pray that we can communicate well and that we'll be able to use the time effectively to give our NGO friends some ideas for how to deal with this language issue.

By the time I spent some time putting some of those ideas down on paper, it was almost time to turn off the generator! But first, I had to spend some time playing! A few weeks ago, I found some instructions on how to do some cool things on Photoshop, so I mucked around with a picture I had on my computer from Buchart Gardens, and made myself a nice Springy background for my desktop:
I think it's kind of a cool picture, if I do say so myself :)

I also played a few games of Scramble on facebook and chatted for a few minutes with my friend in Ohio online. I love the internet, I tell you.

I also attempted to go biking with some friends this afternoon. Turns out, though, there wasn't a truck available to take me to meet them :( The Hilux was engaged helping one of our translation consultants to move house, and the other truck doesn't have any headlights at the moment (I found that out the hard way on Tuesday night - I was out at a friend's house, and went to drive away at 9pm, and realized there were no headlights! Richard had to come and rescue me - he drove the light-less truck right behind me as I drove the other truck home. In a city where there are no streetlights, you simply can't see the road enough to drive without headlights!).

So I wasn't able to go biking :( Instead, I cleaned the rat poo out of my office desk drawer and reset the trap to see if I could get anything else tonight! Richard caught several small rats in the guesthouse last week, but alas, not the second one that has taken up residence in my drawer! Hopefully tonight will be the night for that little guy, because I'm getting a little tired of having the contents of my drawer live in a cardboard box!

And now it's time to do something other than stare at my computer screen. Congratulations to those of you who made it to the end of this rather long and boring and rambling post!

Life is tough... tougher for some than for me

When I start complaining about the cockroaches, rats, dust and grime and inconveniences of living without electricity and all those sorts of things, a news story comes along which reminds me just how incredibly blessed I am and how good I have it compared to most people in this part of the world.

I just read this one about Refugees from a certain beloved country of mine drowning as they were trying to escape the struggles that they face there. "Refugees drown in Sudan River" on CNN. Each one of those people who drowned left behind families who had great hopes for them... and families who will now suffer at the hands of the government because their sons, daughters, husbands, brothers, left to try to find a better situation.

Makes me sad. Please pray that people in this corner of the world will find true freedom and true peace.

Here a meeting, there a meeting, everywhere a meeting!

Yeah, so I've had one or two weeks of meetings. Meetings. Meetings. And more meetings. So I'm a little meeting-ed-out. So meeting-ed-out, I volunteered to do the airport run tomorrow morning so some of the meeting attendees can get back to their respective places. Normally, I'm not really into airport runs. Especially those that require me to leave before I've finished my breakfast. But maleesh (oh well, sorry, too bad), I'm so desperate to get off the compound and do something a little different. Even if it means fighting through the crowds in the hot, stuffy, bat-smelly airport!

So that's what I'm doing tomorrow morning. Then I will hopefully get around to doing all the work that I haven't been able to do whilst meeting all these weeks!

Actually, the meetings weren't as bad as I feared. I actually learned a lot about Robert's Rules of Order and about the Carver model of governance. Good thing I learned a few things, because I was elected as the secretary for the next round of these meetings, to be held again in 6 months! At least I have a bit of a clue of what's going on now that I've sat in on a few days of them. It's hard to be one of 5 people making decisions about the governance of our organization in this country when I really don't quite know the system myself. But, I'm willing to learn something new, I guess. Though I have to admit, I found it really hard to concentrate at times on the whole discussion about the financial policies. We have a treasurer who has spent lots of time figuring these things out... I figured I'd just go along with his recommendation, rather than trying to figure out the financial policies of the branch in 2 hours or less!

Anyways, I gotta go turn off the generator and get ready for my airport run tomorrow morning.

By the way, I haven't lost all my charm, apparently. I was bemoaning the fact that I haven't had a single marriage proposal in over 3 months! But today, when I went to buy my bananas at the market (I had to lead an expidition of those leaving tomorrow to the market to buy their pineapples!), I got a marriage proposal. I'm glad I haven't lost my touch - I was starting to get worried there for a while :)

A lack of blogging

Sorry, it's been a busy weekend. And I haven't had too much to blog about lately. Well, actually, that's not ENTIRELY true. I'm sure I could have found plenty of blog-worthy events (especially since I still haven't blogged about my amazing church-literacy adventure last weekend!), but I've been, well, um, busy watching dvds during my usual blogging time. Normally, I blog either just before or just after I turn off the generator at 10:30 pm.

But I have really gotten addicted to old episodes of "The Amazing Race". Someone who came up here to help on a work team for a few weeks brought me a whole load of old Amazing Race episodes Tivo-ed off of an American TV station. So not only do I get to watch the show, I also get to watch commercials from Minnesota :) However, the best part about watching tv on dvd is that you can fast forward the commercials... though I have to admit that I actually DO watch some of them. I mean, we don't have a tv here at all, so apart from the commercials I see on the dvds, I haven't actually seen a commercial since I left home in January! And when a girl has grown up being innundated with commercials, I have to admit, I start to miss it once in a while. Who would have thunk, eh?

Anyways, I've been watching old episodes of the Amazing Race and neglecting my blog. There, that's the true confession for the evening.

Welcome to my bathroom...

Here is a nice photo of my bathroom cupboards.
Can anyone guess what's behind door number 3?
Poor little guy got himself into a rather sticky situation after lunch this afternoon. And all he wanted was a few bites of peanut butter sandwich. At least he's not going to be chewing through our extra toilet paper tonight!

Ok, so maybe it's not THAT exciting...

Now I'm feeling a little sheepish, because come to think of it, my weekend wasn't all THAT exciting. I've been chatting with my dad (I LOVE yahoo messenger!) this evening, and he was asking me what was so exciting that I needed an entire day off to blog about... and I realized that, well, maybe I should hurry up and blog so I don't raise all your expectations TOO high and have you turn off your computers in utter disappointment!

Anyways, so Friday night, Jackie, Annamarie and I all bundled into her little Suzuki (it's like a cute little mini-jeep!) and headed off into the night for a friend's birthday party across town. We're all dressed up (I was even wearing my cute new shoes that I got in Addis!), but on the way out the gate, we had a very typical conversation which precedes any outing in Jb:

"So, which way should we go?"
"Well, have they filled in that ditch along the road that goes between the market and the Ethiopian restaurant?"
"No, I went by yesterday and there was still a car nose down in the mud"
"Ok, so we'll try going around by the gas bottle place"
"Yikes, that guy was driving fast!"
"No, we tried to go through there the other day, too, but the mud was too deep"
"Right, so I guess we'll go around by the goat market and the stadium".
"Exactly, but let's take the tarmac road, because they've got the other road blocked off up to the University"
"Great"
"Oops, watch out for that motorbike!"
20 minutes later on the other side of town (about 4 km away!).
"OK, I was here the other day, and I saw some other cars go through this swamp. You have to go to the right first, then veer around that big tire in the middle of the road and then go to the far left. The mud isn't quite as deep there".
"Oh, wait for that truck to come through first"
"Gack, he's headed right for us!"
"Oh, never mind, he was just trying to stay out of that mudhole"
"Great, now stay on the right side of this mud hole... but don't hit any of the graves on the side of the road!"

Thus went the conversation in the car. All this just to go 5 km for a dinner party!

Anyways, we had a lovely dinner, but just as we were starting to think about going home, it started to rain. And I don't mean a light drizzle. I mean a downpour! To get to the restaurant that we were eating at, you have to cross a little wooden bridge between the parking lot and the restaurant itself. Normally, the bridge just crosses a sandy little creek bed. I've never actually seen any water in it.

However, after about 20 minutes of downpour, the water was literally a raging torrent! The water rose almost 3 meters (and I'm not exaggerating) in 20 minutes. And it was coming fast... carrying all sorts of rubbish with it!

At about 11, the owner of the restaurant came over to us and told us that if we were going to leave, we should go soon, because he wasn't sure if the bridge was going to hold if the water rose much higher!

So off we went, running through the rain and mud into the dark night, over the raging torrent and to the relative safety of the Suzuki.

Then we had to get home. So the conversation went in reverse, with the new considerations of the raging torrent that we had just crossed and all the likely new mud pits and hidden ditches and trenches. How deep is that puddle? No one knows! "Snorkles up!" became our new catch phrase every time we held our breath and dove in... er, I meant drove in.

We actually made it home in quite good time - there were few other cars on the road! No one here goes out in the rain. We wouldn't have, either, except that we were fearing the bridge!

We got to the front gate of our compound, and lo and behold, the dam had burst. Which meant that a ton of sand and rubbish had washed right into our front drive way, resulting in a huge mud pit right in the middle of the drive way. And of course, all that sand completely blocked the gate, as well! So there we were, in the pouring rain, me in my cute new shoes, behind a completely blocked gate, with a couple of guards on the other side, completely helpless to let us in.

What to do? All the shovels were locked away in the shed, and the shed key in a locked key box (which the guards don't have the combination for). We tried calling Wes, as he's normally a bit of a night owl... but he had his phone turned off. So we had no other choice but to call Matt, who is normally sound asleep by 9pm. He was none to happy to be called out of his bed... but we weren't about to sleep in the car in the rain outside the gate!

Anyways, after about 20 minutes of serious digging by the guards and Matt, the gate was ready to be shoved open enough to get the car through. However, in the meantime, Jackie had gotten her little Suzuki stuck in the sand. So I took off my cute new shoes and hopped out into the ankle deep water, hoping to help Jackie get the car out. No such luck. She was mired in the mud pretty good, even though she had it in 4WD!

So we had to get Matt to come and dig the car out, as well!

Anyways, we fared better than our friends on the way home that night. They were driving a hard top Landcruiser (they're bigger than the normal landcruisers that you see at home - they are tough vehicles. They actually have a special "snorkle" so the water doesn't get into the air intake (or something like that... someone explained it to me, and it made sense, but I can't remember what the exact part is called now :) ) It looks something like this, but the one my friends were driving is only about a year old, so looks much better than this one!
My friends who were driving their big landcruiser were actually swept away on the road going to their house! If it weren't for a few huge boulders which prevented the vehicle from being washed down into the river, they would have been in Egypt by now!

The vehicle was pretty much completely submerged and stuck on the rocks. My friends had to escape through the back hatch, as their front doors were under water! So while we were trying to dig ourselves out of the front gate, they were trying to find someone to rescue them. They ended up at some other friends' house at 2am, and didn't make it home until the following morning! Their Landcruiser, unfortunately, is kaput. Their engine has to be sent to Nairobi for repair. Oops. So I'm thankful that we made it home safely. If Jackie's little Suzuki had been swept away, we would for sure be in Egypt by now! This is a photo that I pulled off the Internet of a Suzuki, like Jackie's (for some reason, I can't find a photo of Jackie's car on my computer... and it's way too late to go on a photo safari out there!):
So that was Friday night. All we wanted to do was go out for a nice dinner... but alas... we ended up soaked to the skin and up to our ankles in mud! From now on, I'm taking my gum boots as a fashion accessory when we go out!

Life is tough... even for lizards

As I mentioned a few days ago, as I was unpacking some boxes, I found a little lizard friend amongst the envelopes. I didn't have a camera at the time, but I saved the little guy until today, when I finally got in there with a camera.

This poor little lizard came all the way from Uganda! Apparently sitting in a container for a few months in the heat will do this to a body - I'm kinda wondering what happened to all his skin etc... but anyways, I'm just glad it's not a stinking mess on top of the ABC book master!
And now it's back to work.

Will blog more later, but I just couldn't justify taking the WHOLE day off to blog! Unfortunately, it's really hot today, and I know I'm not going to manage to get anything done after we shut down the generator at 5pm and my fan stops blowing... so I best get as much done now as I can... and blog later when I'm drowning in sweat :)

A day off to Blog?

I just asked my boss (Jackie!) if I could take tomorrow off to catch up on my blog.

She just snickered, as if I were joking! Really, I think I need to take the day off work tomorrow to blog about all the adventures that I've had since Friday! It's been a weekend, let me tell 'ya!

I'm not even sure where to start... but here's a few photos to wet your whistle until I'm ready to start telling the stories in an entertaining fashion. I'm just SO tired at the moment - but this tired is a good tired; the kind of tired you get when you've just really enjoyed yourself so much that you just can't help but feel exhausted!

Anyways, these are some photos of the people I spent the majority of the day with today:

And since I got a teensy tiny bit bored near the end of all the speeches, I started trying out some artistic shots... all whilst trying to look interested in the proceedings (which I WAS interested in, really, but there's only so many hours a girl can sit and listen to a couple of languages that she doesn't understand!).
And now, since I was sitting there sweating for way too many hours, and haven't had a chance to have a wash yet... I'd better hit the shower before it's time to shut down the generator! I will write about my adventures tomorrow... I hope... if only Jackie would let me take the day off...

Photos, as promised

I finally got a couple of the photos that Pam took of my little play date with Sue, Richard's 4 year old who came with him to work last week. Amazing how much fun a girl can have with a frisbee! Of course, I didn't have too much advance warning that Sue was coming to play, so I was still wearing my skirt, which, of course, isn't the most appropriate attire for running around with a 4 year old... but anyways, I'm learning from the women who work in the guesthouse how to bend and squat in a skirt and still be decent :)

Anyways, how cute is Sue?!

Huh?

I read this article just now about goats getting freed from jail in DR Congo.

The best line is, "The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining". Um, yeah.

On another 'huh' sort of note, I was unpacking some boxes of book masters this afternoon (they're the master hard copies of all the literacy books that have been produced throughout the years). And I found a little lizard skeleton squashed between the envelopes of books of one my favorite languages! Now that's not something you get to see every day.

A cool blog

I'm addicted to reading other people's blogs. Some people are addicted to tv. I'm addicted to blogs. If I had more battery power in my little laptop here, I would explore this blog addiction a bit more. But since I don't have much battery power left (I've been sitting here reading my favorite blogs since I turned off the generator!), I will leave that for another day.

But I wanted to point you to my friend Steve's blog. He's riding his bike around West Africa, and having quite the adventure. He's just about crazy. But if anyone could ride his bike to Jb, it would be him! So I've got to keep reading his blog to see when he's going to show up at our gate here...

As promised!

Yes, indeed, today is International Literacy Day! Makes my little literacy heart go pitter-patter to think that around the world today, people are gathering together and extolling the virtues of literacy! Ok, that sounds a bit sarcastic, but really, it's true. Literacy is something that's rather close to my heart - seeing people enjoy the freedom that comes from being able to write their name, to read the newspaper, to understand the directions on their packet of oral rehydration salts... it's rather exciting. And rather important in the world today. Since there are, according to UNESCO, about 800 million adults (that would be about 1 in 5 of the world's total adults) are illiterate. That's a heck of a lot of people who are not able to take information from the written word and make choices based on that information.

And even in countries like this where the literacy rate is estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 20%, so much information is conveyed via the written word. And obviously, the vast majority of people have no access to it, simply because they have missed the chance to go to school and learn a skill that most of us take completely for granted. Want to read more about literacy around the world? Here's a few of my favorite websites:
UNESCO's Education page
SIL's Literacy page
British Association for Literacy page
Multilingual Matters journals (you can download back issues for FREE!)

Oh, sorry, I got sucked into the free journal articles online on othat last website...

Anyways, there's lots of great stuff to look at online about literacy and the state of the world today. Take a look... and then go teach someone to read!

And now, as promised, as well, here are some photos from the celebration here today. Like I said, it was supposed to start at 8am. I got there about 10, and they were still setting up the sound system! Ah, life in Africa. We stayed until about 2:30, when it started to get really super hot and I just couldn't stand it anymore! But it was really neat to see the parades of all the literacy classes and schools in town:

Here are some of the school children walking down the main street behind the stadium.
This is the marching band that played while the classes marched through the football field in the stadium, waving their flags and banners.
Of course, no celebration would be complete without every participant (and there were at least 500 people there!) receiving a bottle of water, a can of soda and a little plate of biscuits, popcorn, dates and wrapped candy. I don't even want to think about the amount of money that is spent on water and soda for such occasions. Really, I just don't want to think about how many textbooks all that money could pay for... but at the same time, when I'm sitting in the sun for 4 and half hours, it sure is nice to have a Coke and a bottle of water in my hand...
Most of the day was spent listing to speeches. This is His Excellency, the Minister of Education, making a speech in which he at least mentioned the fact that all this literacy stuff should actually take place first in the language that the learners speak. In the previous 4 hours, people were making speeches, assuming that all this literacy stuff was happening in English. Meanwhile, whenever they made announcements or said anything really important, the speakers and master of ceremony would switch into the local dialect of Arabic to make sure that he was understood!

So I was glad that the Minister took this opportunity to put a little advocacy in there for the languages. That was the main reason I went today, was to make sure something, anything, was said about literacy in the mother tongue first! Anyways, hopefully by then, people were still listening...

Since I sat out in the sun for way too many hours today, I'm actually feeling quite tired tonight! Somehow, I got a bit of a sunburn from sitting in the shade all day. Silly me, forgot to put the sunscreen on before going to sit in the shade...

Don't worry, I'm still here

Seems everytime I've sat down to blog in the past several days, something else has come up, or it has started raining. When it rains, the Internet doesn't work here (VSAT issues - don't get me started...). So, I haven't written in a while, even though there's been quite a few very interesting things to write about!

This morning, however, I need to run off to the International Literacy Day celebration at the stadium. I got an invitation from the Ministry of Education, with a stamp on it and everything, so I'd better show my face. It was supposed to start at 8am. But I'm waiting for one of our literacy workers to come to the office so we can go together. Sitting around in a stadium waiting for people to make their speeches is so much easier when you have a buddy around!

Maybe I'll have some photos later even. Oh, which reminds me that I should go and get my camera whilst waiting for Peter to show up...

What to write?

Hmmm... things are becoming so normal around here. Well, I mean, they will never be "normal" in the normal sense of the word, but I'm just getting used to things being like that. So I can't really think of anything all that interesting to write tonight. I have accomplished a few things today, but I never, ever seem to get to certain things on my "to do" list, which seems to only be getting longer, not shorter :(

Oh, one funny thing happened to me on the way to a meeting this morning. Traffic here is crazy. I mean, really, I've never seen anything like it. I'll try to post a video of it at some point - I just have to get myself in a car when someone else is driving sometime! Anyway, on the way to this meeting this morning, I had to make a right turn at a T-intersection.

So I'm sitting in my hilux truck, waiting for all the motorcycles, pedestrians, bikes, goats, oh yeah, and other cars to get out of my way and leave a little break in the traffic so I could pull out onto our only tarmac road in town. It was pretty busy with all the aforementioned moving things, so I had to sit at the corner and wait for a few minutes. I'm patiently waiting for a break in the traffic, when I hear someone shouting at me from the side of the road (of course the window was open, since it was already 32C at 9am and we don't have A/C in the truck). The voice shouting said something like, "Hey, you, go! What are you waiting for? Go!". I'm thinking, this guy is crazy, has no idea how to drive, just wants to make trouble for the white girl.

But I looked over at who it was shouting at me, and it was none other than the friendly neighborhood traffic police officer! Yup. The traffic policeman was yelling at me to hit the pedistrians walking in front of the truck and pull out into the path of swiftly moving SUVs and motorcycles. So I yelled back at him :) Maybe that wasn't quite the right thing to do to the traffic policeman, but honestly, what did he expect me to do?! Anyways, I knew he couldn't do anything to me, since I was in a car and he was just on his feet :D Gotta love it.

On the way home from that same same meeting (oh, that's a total East African English thing that just slipped out, yes, I meant to write "same" twice!), on that same same corner, there was a truck smashed beyond recognition. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what had happened. But obviously the traffic police were directing traffic very effectively...

In case anyone's wondering...

... I got a text message from Richard at 7:20am yesterday, saying that he would be at the airport here in two hours, so would I be there to meet him?

So I went back to sleep for another hour and 45 minutes, tumbled out of bed, put some clothes on, stuck my hair in a ponytail, and I was off to the airport where I very happily collected Richard, along with my peanut butter, goat cheese and new phone sim card :) This stuff added to the stuff that Annamarie brought me from Nairobi (shown below) and I am one happy camper.

(And no, I don't think it at all odd that I can write one post about how my colleagues are talking about visiting witch doctors in one post and in the very next post, talk about how happy my stuff is making me. I don't think it's unreasonable to be happy about a new jar of peanut butter and new flip flops!)

Um, yeah, I'm in Africa

One of my favorite parts of my week is Monday mornings when we get together with all the translation and literacy teams that work here (5 language groups) and we pray for each other. What a privilege it is to get to pray for and with these guys who are so incredibly committed to the work God has called them to do.

It also gives me such a glimpse into their worlds. This morning, we had one of the team members who is based in the village with us. He spends most of his time out in the home area, collecting words for the dictionary that they're putting together. Every couple of months, he comes into the center here and types the words into the computer. So far, they have a couple of thousand words in their dictionary, which isn't a bad start!

Anyways, this morning, he was telling us about his 12 year old son who had been tormented by demons for several nights in a row. The demons would scratch him at night while he slept, and he would wake up running, screaming from the mud hut that they live in! Most of the people in his village told him to go see the witch doctor to do something about it. But he's a Christian, and he didn't want to go to the witch doctor. Instead, he called his pastor and some of the elders in his family together, and they prayed for his son.

And the demons left the boy. So this morning he wanted to praise the Lord together with us because he saw that Jesus can defeat even Satan and his evil spirits. He said that Jesus has the victory!

Now that's not a story you hear in our every day prayer meetings back home, is it?