Hello all! All is going well we are excited about the trip that we are taking for Thanksgiving. We have had another bout with malaria, but we are almost done with the treatments and feeling much better. One day this week we were at a really low point being homesick and sick with malaria and we got three packages in the mail. It is amazing how Father (and wonderful people back home) provide things to lift us up when we are down.
There was another baby born in our compound this week and we have had headaches ever since. There have been many, many visitors who are excited to see one another and thus talk VERY loudly to show that they are excited. The baby was born to the family that we share a wall with and about the same time another family moved into the house that shared the other wall. I cannot express to you how unbelievably noisy this has all been. Oh, I forgot to mention that they are building a new house in the compound across the wall from ours and a new compound right beside our bedroom...and just down the hill they are building a new building for the Koranic school. On the bright side of things all of this commotion has us very ready to leave our compound to go visiting. Please yarp for us to have patience with all that is going on, for us to take it with a grain of salt and to be the salt of the earth.
Awhile back we were talking with some M-friends about our experiences with bush taxis and how we were not looking forward to taking one home the following evening. One of the M's commented "well at least you have not had one break down on you yet" and I jokingly responded "not yet". The next evening we hop onto a bush taxi to head to our house with plenty of time to get there before dark, that is before we wait an hour and a half for it to load, but then we are on our way! We are almost outside of the city limits and onto the open road when the taxi lurches and stalls, I was not too concerned as this happens all the time. I was even relaxed as the driver coasted the taxi off onto the shoulder, such things are normal, but then they could not get the van to start or more accurately they could not get the van to start with the clutch disengaged. We sat in the taxi for about 45 minutes while the driver and a couple of other men tinker around with things. Then the driver announces that we need to get our stuff out of the van, so we do and they roll start the van and take off...while I am shouting that our bags are still on the cargo rack. A kind old Fulani woman could see our distress and assured us that another taxi would come for us with our bags. This calmed me down and now we just had to wait. The taxi only had to drive about five minutes down the road, switch the bags over and then return. I estimated that this would take about fifteen to twenty minutes. Forty minutes later it is now pitch dark outside and we are surrounded by people begging and trying to sell us stuff. *It was about this time when I recalled the conversation with the M's the day before...sheer irony, I also remembered that they mentioned, in the same conversation, that there was a robbery just outside of the city limits a few days before and that two people were shot...I start to feel a little uneasy* I decide now would be a good time to call our supervisor and see if he has ever been in a situation like this. I got him on the phone and he told me that they would bring another taxi and that I had nothing to worry about. I thanked him and returned to my worrying. I started thinking about our bags and how inviting the white-people bags would probably look to anyone who is not entirely honest. I then remembered that I did not have enough room in the bag for my shoes and had tied them to the outside. I was picturing someone untying my shoes so that they could have a nice pair of athletic shoes. An hour and a half after taxi had left us standing beside the road I decide to call our supervisor again. We talk and he offers to go down to the taxi place and check it out. Once he arrives there the first person he talks to tells him that the taxi left a long time ago, I thought "I am never going to see my clothes or shoes ever again", but then he talks to another person who said there it goes now and pointed to a taxi going down the road. As he is telling me this I see a taxi (that honestly looked worse for the wear than the one that had abandoned us) rattling toward us. I see my bag on the top -complete with running shoes- and breath a huge sigh of relief. I say thanks to our supervisor and crawl into the replacement taxi. After we were on the road for a few minutes a friend calls us, I explain that we are on our way home and he says "Wow, you are so much braver than I am, I would NEVER take a bush taxi after dark. I would be scared of getting robbed or in a wreck or something". After we said our goodbyes I related this to Cheryl who was very encouraged by these soothing words. Anyway...our taxi finally chugs into the taxi station in our town and we crawl out reeking of exhaust fumes. We patiently stand there and wait for them to hand us our bags. The line of people get their bags and when it is our turn the man starts to get down and I attempt to ask why we did not get our bags. By this point the driver is starting the taxi to head on to the next town down the road. I give a stop sign with my hands and finally get our bags. We then trudge home, exhausted, but intact luggage and all. When we get into our house I look at the clock and notice that we got into the first taxi five and a half hours earlier...it is forty minute drive for our friends and it took us over five hours. What was I thinking asking for patience????
Since coming to West Africa I have frequently been thankful for my family and more specifically my upbringing. Here resources are limited to say the least, but having been raised out in the middle of nowhere I was taught to make do with what you have. The lessons in ingenuity apply to all aspects of life, the first one I made use of though was in the kitchen. Having been raised twenty miles from the nearest grocery store if we needed a certain ingredient when cooking and did not have it we either had to make something else or to figure out a replacement. This was invaluable to me here where we are limited on the kinds of food that we can buy because of lack of availability and lack of refrigeration. We quickly discovered “La Vache Quiri” literally translated “The Laughing Cow” it is a kind of cheese that does not require refrigeration and tastes kind of like cream cheese. With this cheese Cheryl and I created our West African version of feddicini alfredo, which is really quite good. We got creative and added several other creative recipes to our culinary arsenal and now we have about seven bush meals that we can create out of local ingredients. Since we have been having the same basic seven meals twice a day for the last four and a half months we are getting a little tired of it, but at first there were only two meals we could make, so seven is a blessing.
When faced with the problem of lack of storage space I made two sets of hanging shelves out of millet mats, Cheryl talked about these in one of her posts. When faced with needing screens on our windows and door to keep bugs (especially mosquitos) out I met the challenge with pink mosquito netting, millet stalks, and string (we even have matching pink curtains on the door and windows). When faced with a short supply of Christmas decor we improvised by cutting some of the left over pink mosquito netting into strips and using it as garland.
One of my more recent challenges has been due to the weather; now that dry season has arrived it is dry indeed. The heat and dryness combine with the dust and sand to make an environment that is none to friendly on these Missourians who are used to lots of humidity. The dryness caused me to get nosebleeds and a very sore nose. One day I was sitting in front of our fan preparing for one of our English classes when an idea struck me. I remembered how my relatives in Colorado use an evaporative cooler to add moister to the air and to provide some relief to the heat. This was it, a way to solve two problems at once...heat and dryness. I rose to the challenge with our fan, a piece of rebar, a used oil bottle, some string, and of course some pink mosquito netting. I combined these materials to create a home-brewed gravity fed evaporative cooler. It really works quite well!
Now the question is to whom do I owe this creativity that is serving me so well here...that would be my dad the man who made a machine to feed hay to the cows out of a truck axle, some scrap iron, a hydraulic pump, a piece off of a broken bulldozer, a window regulator, and of course the dynamic trio of duct tape, electrical tape, and baling wire. So thanks dad for the lessons on hillbilly ingenuity!!!
Speaking of thanking dads. . . thanks to the Father for how well things are going here. Yarp for our work here and that we finish strong in our last month and a half here. We have made some great friends here and are thrilled to have had this experience, but at the same time we are missing our friends and family terribly especially now that the Holidays are just around the corner (We are already missing deer season and to my family that is the beginning of the holidays). Yarp for us that we remain focused on our work here so that our hearts do not stray from the task at hand.
