Some Thoughts about our Daily Life

The sun rises about 6:30 a.m. and sets about 6:30 p.m. and it's pitch dark by 7 p.m.  I can hear children playing outside in the dark right now (7 p.m.).  It has poured rain today so the kids had to stay in (or were in school) so now that it's stopped raining, they are outside playing.  The windows are single pane so you can hear everything.

Trying to think of interesting things . . . our milk comes either in small boxes or in small plastic bags.  The plastic bag milk tastes better.  (Added note from later:  After our move to Karen, we shop at the amazing new Carrefour store where we can get milk in jugs like we do at home.  Nice!)  We soak all our fresh fruits and vegetables in bleach water (1 Tbsp per 1 liter water) for 5-15 minutes.  Then we rinse them with filtered water.  We drink and brush our teeth with filtered water.  We take malaria pills (doxycyclene) every day.  So far they agree with our stomachs.  (They are not like the pills that people took a few years ago -- those pills drove some people almost crazy.  They don't use that stuff anymore, thank goodness).

I boil a pot of water on the stove to wash dishes and then I rinse them in the cold filtered water.  We turn on the hot water heater in the night so we can shower in the morning and then we turn it off for the day.  Otherwise our electric bill is very high.

I have a small washer and dryer outside our front door.  Did my first load tonight and it worked well.

We're in the middle of the "long rains" right now so it has rained some every day and everything is green and water runs everywhere.  It poured and poured today.  I've rarely seen rain like that.  About June we will head into the dry period and then later it will be the "short rains".  No one talks about the weather here like they do in Alberta.

We leave for our mission work about 7 a.m. and then return home about 3:30 p.m.  If we leave any later than that we could be caught in traffic for 2-4 hours.

In the next couple of months the mission office will be moving out of this downtown area and we will be moving to a different flat so the drive should be easier.  Before we leave in the morning we always pray for safety and when we get to work we thank the Lord and then when we leave the office, we pray for safety again and then thank the Lord when we get safely home!

The people here are warm and friendly.  We wave at people who pass us in buses and we wave at those walking on the street.  We're usually the only "mzungu" (white people around) but it doesn't seem to matter.  The African missionaries and members we have met are wonderful people.

Well that's all for now.  It's pitch dark and time to close the curtains.  Elder Torrie is playing a nice keyboard that was given to him.  He's lost without his music so it was a blessing to be given this Kawai piano.  Another senior missionary couple had bought it and they left it here when their mission was over.  So nice for us.

Goodnight all.