It's the little things

And there were a few little things today which made me smile a grand smile:

The electricity was on this morning when I got up!  I could make coffee using my fancy schmancy electric little espresso pot, which was bequeathed to me last month by a visiting linguist.  Gotta love those visiting linguists sometimes!  (Not that I don't love the bodum which was also bequeathed to me, but, a girl needs options once in a while, doesn't she?) 
 
And, I took a shower with the lights on!  And, just because I could, I dug out a hairdryer and actually blow-dried my hair before going to the office this morning.  Just because I could.  The electricity stayed on, so when I came back from the corner at lunch time, all hot and sweaty from the walk to the corner to buy a shwarma, I could sit under the fan and cool off :)  The man who sells shwarmas is getting quite familiar with me - at least once a week, I wander down to the corner for one of the best versions of  Jb "fast food".  For a mere $2, you get a hamburger bun, stuffed with meat and tomatoes, topped with a sort of sticky "ketchup" and mayonnaise.  Delicious.    Once in a while you get a little bone shard in the meat, and I normally only get them for lunch, when they are selling too many for the flies to settle for too long on the meat...  We're not talking home quality shwarma, but, hey, this is Jb, and I will take any kind of "fast food" that someone will make for me!

On that note, another wonderful thing was that I got invited to a neighbour's house for dinner!  Yum!  She's Chinese, so we had amazing stir-fried veggies with shredded chicken and amazing garlic, ginger and onion sauce.  Amazing.  Normally, I'm not a fan of a lot of ginger, but this sauce - amazing.  It's always great to see what other people come up with to cook with the same kinds of available ingredients here.

And last, but not least... my shower is no longer dripping!  After 8 months of a dripping shower head, and a bathroom that never, ever dried out (neither the shower nor the surrounding floor, next to the toilet).  The shower drip was fixed yesterday, and, wow.  Amazing.  So not only did I have a shower with the light on, I showered in a dry, clean bathroom!  And since the floor was actually dry, I could use a shower mat when I stepped out of the shower, which meant that the bottoms of my feet also actually got dry.

And the best part of the shower fixing...  It was fixed up by this guy:











Yup, our new handy-guy here on the compound is the spitting image of Red Green.  I kid you not - he even SOUNDS like Red Green.  I heard his voice outside my office the other day... and I swore someone was watching Red Green.  So, I think we're going to have a good time with maintenance on the compound for the next few months!

Nom nom

It's been a while since I've posted any photos.  I guess there hasn't been anything too photo-worthy lately.  Or, alternatively, I've been here too long to think that anything is out of the ordinary and photo-worthy anymore!

But I thought you might like to see how we relax around here.  On Saturday morning, we had a brunch with all my colleagues who live here on the compound.   It's really been a very social compound lately - brunches, dinner parties, movie nights... a bit more fun to be had than in previous months! 

This is what we all look like on Saturday mornings:

I just couldn't believe the amazing food that we all came up with!  Cinnamon rolls, oat pancakes, baked french toast, egg casserole with sausage and CHEESE... amazing stuff, I tell you.  I can't take credit for any of the food, since I provided the coffee :)  I mean, a certified barista has got to use her talents somehow.

Now that the tukel is all cleared out and not being used as a workshop anymore, we can use it for FUN!  It's a great place, even on a hot day, to hang out.

Even "Max" thinks it's a pretty OK place:

Personally, I am of the opinion that monkeys have absolutely no business on our compound.  But it ended up that the day guard was feeding him guavas off the tree on the compound, and my other neighbours were feeding him bananas, in order to get photos like this out of him.  Surely there is some law against this sort of thing!  No one should be feeding the wildlife - especially when that wildlife has big teeth, is smarter than me, and is able to carry off small children and kittens!  My neighbours even named the creature!

I'm just hoping he doesn't remember the directions to our guava tree...

Comfort or Christ?

This afternoon I watched a sermon that my neighbours had downloaded from their home church.  It was a pretty challenging one about the letter to the Church of Laodicea.  It was all about, in our daily lives, do we choose Comfort, or do we choose Christ.  And even when I'm sitting here in Jb, in, frankly, sometimes not the most comfortable of situations, it would be pretty easy to say that "Yes! I have already chosen Christ over comfort... because if I wanted to be comfortable, I certainly wouldn't be sweating it out over here..."

But, in reality, I often do choose comfort over Christ, because I choose to do things that are easier or more convenient for myself than things that are encouraging or better for other people, things that will ultimately give more glory to God than the fabulous Pumpkin Spice Latte that I cooked up in my kitchen this afternoon, all by myself.  Mind you, it was a pretty darned good pumpkin spice latte, but perhaps there could have been other things, that could bring more glory to God, that I could have been doing this afternoon.

Anyway, like my beautiful pumpkin spice coffee this afternoon, the sermon was some pretty good food for thought.

Also, on a more superficial note, I've been a bit immersed this week in the Hunger Games.  My neighbour lent it to me on my Kindle app, and oh, wow, I got a bit obsessed.  Ended up reading the entire trilogy in less than 4 days.  I even had dreams of Katniss, and muttations, and people with blue hair.  And I gotta find some place that will sell me some gold eyeliner!  One of the urgencies of reading the first book was that my neigbours got the DVD of the Hunger Games while they were out of the country last week on their holidays.  But, I really didn't want to watch the movie until I'd read the book... and then once I'd read the first book, I really didn't want to see the movie and have that destroy my own images of Katniss and Gale and Peeta until I was finished the entire trilogy.  Also, I just couldn't seem to put the book down, once I started...

So we watched the movie last night, and I ended up reading the final few chapters after I saw the movie - Peeta, especially, was nothing like the Peeta that was in my mind, but, such is life.  Remember, I live in the middle of nowhere, and so I hadn't even seen a trailer or an advert for the movie, so I had no clue what the characters actually looked like.  And I liked it that way!

It was quite an interesting story, with some unexpected twists and turns.  And definitely turns me off reality TV.  Good thing I don't have a TV here :)  But, now that the books are over, the movie has been watched, I can extricate myself from Panem, and will get to bed a wee bit earlier tonight...

A New Office?

Since the austerity measures dictate that the generator goes off at 4pm, I have borrowed a long-life battery from the office :)  So, now I have a few more hours of power in my battery so I can keep on working... but the other issue is that itꞌs smoking hot in my office!  So, I have found a new one.  Iꞌm enjoying the open air!  Itꞌs not all that much cooler, and Iꞌm still sweating as I sit here... so much exertion to move my fingers over the keyboard... but at least there is a breeze once in a while.

The downside, there are also a lot of people wandering by!  Iꞌve been interrupted by 8 people already in the last few minutes!  Pleasant interruptions of people just wanting to say hello... but, interruptions all the same.  So, not quite sure if this is the ideal office spot yet, or not.

On that note, with all the interruptions, no actual work is getting done, so I might as well go and start on my supper.  On the menu tonight - guacamole with an avocado, gifted from a friend from Uganda, and homemade flour tortillas (because, well, are there really any other kinds of tortillas found in this neck of the woods?!).

Sundays...

Have I mentioned lately how much I love them?  I love Sundays.  Today, I didn't venture out to church. It was just too nice of a day.  Sunny, but a nice cool breeze blowing.  And I was itching to sit home on my own and eat french toast and sip my coffee.  And wow, it was a lovely, lovely morning.  My french toast turned out perfectly, the maple syrup seems to just keep lasting and lasting and lasting, and the Tim Horton's mug holds enough coffee to make me imagine that I am sipping an extra large double double.  So nice.  To top it off, the internet was working well enough to listen to a sermon from my home church.  So, there I was, laying on my couch, a belly full of french toast, sipping my coffee, and listening to Pastor Mike.  And then, my cat came and plonked himself down on me, and listened to the sermon as well.  Every one of God's creatures needs a little spiritual refreshment now and again, don't you agree?

I think the cat came because I was wearing a black shirt.  He somehow has some sort of instinct that causes him to like to sit on things that match.  If there is a black bag, a black shirt, a clean black anything, no matter what size it is, he will go and make himself fit onto the blackness of it.  Crazy cat.  But his strategy seems to have worked so far, as he's over 5 years old, and for a cat in Jb, that's downright ancient.

Downside of the day - with all the rain lately, and today's beautiful sun, all of God's vegetation decided it was time to pollinate.  I've so far taken 3 doses of two different kinds of antihistamines... and my nose is still dripping like my faucet.  The whole compound can hear my compounded sneezes, and I can hardly hear the howling dogs outside because my ears are so plugged.  In fact, even my teeth hurt because there is so much snot inside my head.  And my forehead is itchy.  So, I think it was best that I just stayed home all day, because I am not a pretty sight.  I have also gone through 3 hankies with my leaking nose.  Due to austerity measures (and the fact that a box of tissues will run you about $4 and a roll of toilet paper almost $1, my sweat rags (about $0.50) are doing double duty as snot rags today.  But that might be more than you wanted to know on that topic...

Gotta go wipe my nose.

Austerity Continues...

... But I'm still eating well :)  Since the generator goes off at 4pm these days, I've been having time to do some exercize, and make some nice suppers, all on the same day.  And it's been making me happy.  There is something to having a bit of a balanced life, you know?  Today, I made beautiful scalloped potatoes (without the cheese, butter and heavy cream, of course, but by Jb standards, I thought they were pretty darn amazing!), and I ate them with the last of the sausages in the freezer (and I use the term "freezer" lightly, since it's more of a very cold fridge, without much electricity, but so far, I have not poisoned myself with the sausages :) ). 

It's nice to have had a bit of a slower week in terms of the office work - the past few months have been rather crazy, and I was pretty tired.  I'm feeling much less tired at the end of this week than I usually am, so that is a very good thing.  I'm sitting here on my couch, listening to the how the world is going a bit crazy out there on BBC radio, enjoying the cool breeze from the fan, and thinking about the fact that life is not too bad these days. There's lots to be thankful for:

• I have a bucket full of peanut butter (yes, I mean a bucket full of peanut butter - I asked one of the women who works here to make me some peanut butter.  She goes to the market, buys the peanuts, shells them and cleans them up, roasts them, and then grinds them into pure deliciousness for me.  But she doesn't seem to realize that I am one person in the house and even I really can't eat THAT much peanut butter!  Anyway, it does last for quite a while, and I might even could make some peanut butter cookie things.)
• I have a very cozy house which is full of more stuff than I really need (even though I got news this week that my rent is going up $100 as of 1 October!).  
• I get to spend my days doing a job which I really quite enjoy (at least, most of the time!)
• There's no one protesting at any embassies here in my town, and I am safe and pretty secure here in my little compound.
• God is here.

So, really, there are so many things to be thankful for - those are just a few of the little bits of life that are, at this very moment, making me a bit happy... even in the midst of this rather interesting place...

Austerity Measures

I know, I haven't blogged in a while.  Frankly, I've just been tired in the evenings, and our internet has been slow, and there hasn't been any electricity.  So, all in all, not a great combination for me sitting with my computer and thinking of something entertaining and somewhat coherent to say.  Anyway, I don't even really know if anyone reads this anymore!  I've been feeling a bit disconnected from, well, from life lately, too, just because there's been so much going on, so that also doesn't help motivate me to expend the energy to write.  But, maybe it's time to turn over a new leaf yet again and come out of my shell a bit again.

At the moment, I'm sitting in the dark in my living room.  Austerity measures have come to our organization.  There's been no diesel in town for some days now, and no good prospect of more diesel coming in soon.  Which means that we have cut down the hours that our generator runs each day.  Of course, the government ran out of diesel a long time ago, so we haven't had city power in quite some time, so we're solely running on our own compound generator once again.

And, since my computer battery has somehow been pooched by the heat and crazy power situation, I only get about 10 minutes of power on my laptop before it also loses power.  So, when the generator goes off, I have to come home and plug into my back-up battery system.  Which I am so thankful that I have!  I had gone for quite a few years without any kind of power back up.  Because I kept being so optimistic that we'd have more stable electricity from the government.  And it's a relatively big investment to get a back up system set up.

But finally, early this year, when I realized that I would be sticking around this country for another little while, and that the electricity situation was not likely to get better, I finally put out the cash and got myself a big old battery.  My neighbor happens to have an inverter and charger, which he uses in his mud hut.  So I just added my battery on to that system, and we ran a long wire from the mud hut into my house.  He kindly wired up a light in my main living room/kitchen area, and ran a little extension cord down into the house itself.  So now, when the power is off, as it is now, I can come home and plug my computer into my little extension cord, attached to the battery in the mud hut!

I don't have the light switched on at the moment, since I'm trying to conserve the battery a bit - without long hours of generator, the battery doesn't always charge up completely.  Having this system has made a huge difference in my frame of mind over these past few months of little electricity!  What a joy it is to be able to actually SEE the vegetables that I'm chopping in my kitchen for dinner at 6:30pm!  How much fun is it to be able to see my contact lense container when I take out my contacts at 10:30pm?  And is there nothing better than actually being able to work on my computer past 4pm!?

That being said, the austerity measures have definitely hit here. No more milk for our tea at tea time at the office.  No more Nescafe option, either - just black tea with some sugar!  And we have to pay for our snacks at tea time - though $0.75 is a small price to pay for a little bowl of freshly roasted peanuts. 

At least I can eat for free from the fruits of this compound!

Mmm.... that's right, it's pumpkin season!  These were the first fruits, that came off the vine last weekend.  So deliciously sweet.  I tried to ameliorate the austerity measures in the office today when we cooked up a huge pumpkin to share with all the folks here.  A very normal breakfast for people here during pumpkin season is a chunk of steamed pumpkin - just chop the thing into pieces, with the peel still on, and put it in a big pot on the charcoal.  Put a little water in the bottom of the pot, and let the pumpkin bits steam for a while.  When the pumpkins are as deliciously sweet as these ones, you don't need anything else with it!

At the moment, we've also got a ton of guavas growing on a tree, and greens growing wild in the back garden.  There's even a tree bearing a funny fruit, which I think is called a custard apple in English.  But it's most delicious, and the strangest looking fruit you ever did see! 
 
So, even in these austere times, I am a very blessed girl.