A trip to the bush (country)...

Though the rest of my weekend was uneventful, I was grateful to have Monday and Tuesday off. Monday was just a day for sleeping in, relaxing, spending some time with the Lord and praying, , and then going to be early. :0P A very good kind of day!

Tuesday, I decided to join a group from the ship on an inland ministry, sanding and painting an agricultural training center in Hevie (pronounce " Ha-vee' "). For generations, the Benninese have grown just the same few crops. They did not think the land would grow other things because "if the ground would grow it, my father and his father before him and his before him [etc] would have been growing it from the beginning." However, a long-term crew member from Congo has been working with several men to grow all manner of vegetables and plants in their garden at the center. The dormatory is in the building stages and will be a small but beautiful school for training in agriculture. Each of the rooms will house three men, each room with its own bathroom. The center of the building is divided into two large areas--the first from the front door is a classroom; the second, by the back door, will be filled with flowers! It will be beautiful! The front of the building has a large curving portico with large pillars. Most of the windows are slatted and can be opened for ventilation. Around the top, however, there are cement blocks in scrolled patterns that allow constant airflow through the building without letting the rain in. The whole building has a corrugated tin roof over most of it but is open over the garden area, letting in a lot of natural light and rain. The actual garden plots for the center, where the men have been working, are further down the road.

There are only three slots open for helping with painting and cleaning each day, all day, Monday through Friday. I signed up to go and, forgetting about African time, met another nurse outside Tuesday morning, ready to go on time at 8:45am. We didn't actually leave until around 9:30am and then had to stop at several hardware stores to pick up supplies on our way out to the site. The hardware stores were generally a shed-sized shack with buckets, pipe connectors, paint rollers, and other odds-and-ends hanging from the porch roof; piles of small tree trunks--no bigger than poles--and loops of wrought iron (laid in large u-shaped loops and somewhat flexible) sitting out front. We had to stop at about 3-4 before we found one selling paint brushes!

Well, when we finally got to the site, it was just my friend and I--the only white women--working with about 15 nationals! We ended up working with the painter who only spoke French--both of us girls are able to speak Spanish fairly well but neither of us can speak more than two words of French! So through hand motions and one or two words of French and English, we were assigned the job of sanding the outside cement wall with power sanders and a generator, and scraping out the extra globs of cement from the scroll work of the upper windows. The painter would then come along behind us and seal all of the cracks with a mixture of paint and white lime--making a plaster similar to dry wall plaster. Then we'd come back and sand over those patches once they were dry. However, being on an African work site, we had to completely finish one section before moving to another. Therefore, we would sand, he would seal, we would wait for it to dry, then we would sand, then we could move to the next section. There was no typical American efficiency of working on sanding the next area while we were waiting for the last one to be sealed and dry! But then our painter had to leave with our translator/driver and was gone most of the afternoon, so we were able to finish sanding most of the wall for him before he got back! ;0P Another man, who spoke a few words of English, came to work with us in the afternoon (so that their guests would not be lonely left by themselves!). He was painting the windows we had cleaned out so we could not move the scaffolding down to the last section until he was done. And by then it was time to leave but we did complete most of the wall and had a lot of fun doing it!

The men we worked with thought it was so funny that we would come to work with them without knowing any French but they seemed to show us quite a bit of respect for doing the work alongside of them. They also were eager to discuss American music and movies with us. In their broken and heavily accented English, it was sometimes very difficult to tell what they were saying but, working together, us girls would figure it out! One in particular, Alba, really liked Arnold Schwartzanegger and many music artists, such as J-Lo, em&em, and many others I don't remember. He was very surprised and disappointed that I didn't know their songs and very, very disappointed that I didn't cry when Michael Jackson died! Alba knew a little bit more English than most of the others so he explained that he used to dance to Michael Jackson's songs when he was little and that he was very sad that Michael had died!

We shared the noon meal with them--chicken stewed with peppers over rice. It was delicious but a little bit spicy-hot so I drank quite a bit of water with the meal. By mid-afternoon, my bladder was sending my brain urgent signals; however, we had noticed throughout the morning that the men would just go a short ways into the bush to relieve themselves. It then became a discussion over the next two hours between my friend and I as to what could be done. No one spoke English well enough to ask. Two white women heading out amongst mid-level low brush would be a lot more conspicuous than a black man out in the brush. Just being women made it more complicated than the men. Many of the men were up on scaffolding or on the roof so the view would be even more clear. The ladies who had served us lunch were no where around to even attempt to communicate with. So ... what to do.... . Well, our new friend Alba said that we could climb the water tower to take pictures--from about 15 feet in the air, it offered a beautiful view of the surrounding fields and the building site! Walking back from there along the path through thicker brush, we got the idea to try to send our friend on back to work and we would come back in a little bit. The downside is he had no idea what we were trying to say or what we needed to do! The upside was is was hysterical trying!!! Alas, soon after getting back to the work site the painter and our driver came back, telling us that we would be leaving in about 10 minutes. He offered to take us over to the gardens and we readily agreed. We did finally get to ask about a bathroom (it's now about 4:30pm!) and he said that there was a "place you can use near there." It ended up being a nice three-hole, stand on the blocks and squat to pee outhouse with walls! My friend found that this was too much for her and stated that she didn't have to go that bad, she could wait until we got back to the ship. I, on the other hand, didn't have much choice! Ah, relief!

The gardens were beautiful! They were planting lettuce and put sections of palm branches into the ground behind each plant to help shade it from too much sun. They also had tomatoes, corn, and many other plants. Their corn was really, really tall, ready to harvest. All in all, it was very fun and so nice to be away from the ship and the city, out in the country, breathing fresh air and just seeing lots and lots of green around us! After this experience, I have to agree with my brother, Zeke: "I'd rather be in the middle of nowhere than downtown anywhere!"

I'm off this weekend and am planning to head back out to Hevie for the workday Saturday. There's a group of about 20 people going out that day in a push to get it done for the grand opening August 31st. I put a few pictures from Hevie on the slideshow and I will add a few more when they're available. I also added pictures of our cabin and some that another crew member took while out at the "stick village"--a village on stilts over the water. The people there don't like us coming through all the time, so I probably won't go there unless we have a specific outreach there. But I did want to show you the pictures so that you can see a little bit of how they live.

Well, enough of my adventures for now. Talk to you later!