mmm-BELLY-may Days

Back to school with Barakisu

Meet Barakisu.  Her name means "blessed."  She's one of the volunteers on the mmm-BELLY-may storycrafting team, pictured here getting her certificate after a training session.  Even though she's a full-time student, she works hard with me to craft Biblically accurate stories into her heart language.  I haven't asked her, but I'll bet she tells them to her mother, who is blind.

The Saturday last year when I took the second picture, we were the first to arrive for a storycrafting work day, so I got to chat with her. 

Being a teacher, I asked her about school.  Being a teacher, I was horrified to find out that out of the 7 or so subjects she was taking, she could only rent textbooks for 2 subjects that she would be tested on, and she had to share those with two other people.

Of course I bought her books and a dictionary.  Her pastor, who is shaking her hand in the top photo, told her that she needed to organize her class of 50 into study groups so that everyone could benefit from the textbooks.  She did.

After tests kind of like midterm exams, she came and told me that she passed, as well as 23 other people in her class.

The other classes only had 5 or 6 out of 50 pass.

I asked her pastor how it was that she was lucky enough to be in the most hardworking class that did the best on the tests.  Pastor Olivier looked at me like I was kind of dense and said, "It was the books."

One set of textbooks shared among 50 kids more than quadrupled the pass rate.  Priceless.

 

Corded

Living in another culture means always having to wonder if I really know what's going on, no matter how well I speak the language.

We're building a little shelter (read as, I am watching people build a little shelter) in my front yard.  On market day, I was sent to buy some cord.  Ok, cord.  I know what that is, brightly colored plastic stuff.

Except I never really entirely know what anything is.  So, since market day comes around only once a week, and I was in a hurry to get this thing at least placed before I had to leave for the States, I asked a friend to help me buy the cord we needed.  Not green plastic stuff at all.  Here's a picture of what it was used for, pretty cool.

Overflowing

So, three days before I left Africa for my little sojourn in the States, I noticed that the batteries on my solar power system weren't holding a charge as well as usual.   I concluded that in order to fix this I would have to...

DUM DA DUM DUM

touch the batteries.

True confession-I don't like touching car batteries.  There's acid in them.  There could be acid on them!  I could touch acid, and then touch my clothes or my eyes or my cat...not much good comes of touching the batteries.

So.  I go to unscrew the little cap on one of the cells to see if I need to add distilled water.  As you can see, the battery is filthy, because dusting it would involve touching it. 

Apparently I haven't looked at my battery either, because there was this little sticker on the cap, in English even.  Oops.

So, I take off all the little stickers, and start merrily topping up the distilled water in the batteries.  I have two sets of batteries-one on a table in my office next to all of my computer equipment and language materials, and the other on my kitchen floor.  I'm a little paranoid about the acid (big surprise) while I'm filling the ones on the kitchen floor, because I notice my eyes stinging.  Turns out it was sweat dripping into my eyes, and not horribly toxic and dangerous and nasty acid fumes.  I hurried up and finished my little filling job.

I'm really glad that I overfilled the batteries on the kitchen floor and not the ones in my office. 

Note to self:

If you put too much water in a battery, it overflows. 

A lot. 

Of acid. 

Everywhere. 

Thankfully, no damage was done, and the cement floor around the batteries and out my back door has never been cleaner. 

Phone home!!

Last night, my cell phone rang.  I jumped up and down and yelled because I was so happy!  Then I called all my friends that live in the same village to tell them the great news-they've turned on the cell network where we live!  No more climbing up a mountain or driving into town to make a phone call, we can do it from the comfort of our own living rooms!  Hurray for technology!

Potty break

My outhouses, like most I see here, have these pipes sticking up.  I didn't know what exactly they did, and honestly didn't want to think too much about it.  Today I found out!  AfriGadget is a great blog, celebrating African ingenuity.  I'll be spending hours poking through it, I'm sure!  I'm adding them to my blogroll so you can find it anytime you're in need of an AfriGadget yourself.

However, I must confess that I do not use these outhouses.  Here's a picture of my favorite thing in the house.  No running water yet, so I fill the tank by hand, but that's fine with me!  That way I can use laundry water and other gray water very easily for flushing.  On a completely unrelated topic, for some reason every time I used the red eye remover tool in PhotoShop to try to fix this picture, it put black spots on my teeth and not on my eyes where I was clicking.  Strange.

I am a wimp...

...compared to the women I know here. 

My friend Sarah writes:  "The women here are amazing – they are so strong and resilient.  Three come to mind just now.  I visited Amina in the hospital yesterday.  ...  While they were at the farm last year, Amina confided that she wanted to have a child, and none were forthcoming.  A doctor was able to help, and she became pregnant, due in February – so they thought.  On Friday she felt some pain, and fearing complications she and her husband made their way to Tanguieta.  As if it wasn’t hard enough riding a motorcycle on the bumpy dirt road, the motorcycle broke down about 13 miles from Tanguieta.  So they walked.  They arrived at midnight and went straight to the hospital.  She gave birth the next day at 1pm to a beautiful little girl!"  Read what Sarah says about the other two women here.

The incredible growing skirt

When I was teaching right after college, I had one of those broomstick skirts. It was pretty, but a little long. I’d roll it up at the beginning of the school day, but by 3:30 it was dragging on the ground, even though I kept rolling it higher and higher (doing wonderful things for my waistline.)

Yesterday I thought I’d wear my nifty new wrap as a skirt-it’s cooled off a little here, so it wouldn’t be too hot even though it was rayon. Same thing. At the end of the day my skirt was dragging (and my feet were filthy) even though I kept rolling it higher and higher.

I think it will make a nice tablecloth.

MMLRPH

Had an electrician in today to do some odd jobs. He’s great with normal electricity, less so with 12 volt, which he’s not very familiar with. I usually supervise everything that he does with my 12 volt solar system, and check it before he goes. Today, however, I didn’t. In retrospect, I would have made the same mistake he did. I am not a master electrician. Anyway, I plugged in a fan he’d wired after he left-short circuit. Destroyed at least one of the solar components, the charge controller. I’ve borrowed one from a friend, and ordered two replacements from the States. Should have had a spare anyway.

 It’s not a huge deal, I have lights with town power at night, and a separate solar system for running my computer. Just kind of a pain in the neck, you know? Those wonderful wire nuts came in very handy today, as I disconnected the whole solar system and capped off the wires so that there wouldn’t be any wires touching and causing any more excitement.

Harvest time

A friend of mine is one of the few that has had a good corn harvest this year. He planted early and worked really hard. Even the rains ending early weren’t a problem for him. 

 His field is about 10 miles from his house, and he just has a bike to bring the corn home, so he was doing it little by little. He built a shelter out of straw and temporarily put the corn that he’d harvested in there. He needs it to feed his family until next year.

 Then someone’s big pigs huffed and puffed and blew his shelter in - and ate a lot of his corn. You can’t blame people for not keeping their animals penned up-the soil is so poor here that they just graze wherever they can find something to eat. Unfortunately for my friend the pigs found his corn, even though he didn’t do anything wrong.

 “Don't store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. 6.20NLT Matthew 6. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.” 6.21NLT Matthew 6. 

 I think of these verses every time mold, termites, weevils or mice destroy my stuff. It happens all the time. But I’m not complaining. They can’t get at my stock of canned green beans, so I’ll have plenty to eat. I’m blessed.

Clothes shopping at the mall?

When I was growing up I used to play with a table made out of the bottom of an old foot powered sewing machine at our neighbor's house.  Back then I thought it was an antique.  Maybe it was an antique at  home, but here it's what's used to make the gorgeous, complicated outfits that people wear.

Pretty cool, huh?  Good question, Mark!