No OSHA in Congo

Here in the Congo, there is no OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). When we arrived here, we noticed a building was in the process of construction across the street from us. It's three stories high plus a roof with a steep pitch. The workers never wear harnesses or hard hats or even shoes. We have very windy storms sometimes, and they stay up there, clinging to the roof with one hand and working with the other, until the rain drives them down. Yesterday, they were nailing pieces of roofing on and there weren't enough hammers to go around, so one guy was hammering with a piece of 2x4. Some times they sing in Lingala while they work and if we are doing school outside on the porch or have the windows open we can hear it. This is one of the many things here that are hard for me to see. I pray often for their safety, and for their families and salvation. It's not hard to find things to pray for here. When we go places, all I have to do is look out the car window and I see plenty to pray about and plenty of people to pray for. Sort of like prayer-walking only we move faster, though not much.

Surprise!

When we arrived in Congo, two MAF families here had recently been blessed with litters of kittens. As soon as they were old enough, we acquired one female from each litter, hoping they would become good mousers and buggers. (Is "buggers" even a word? How about "roachers?") We named them Lydia and Fiddlesticks, Liddie and Fiddle for-short. Well, Liddie rapidly learned to catch roaches, earning her lots of brownie points in my book, since I detest them so much. We'll just say Fiddle has other endearing qualities. I happened to glance up as Liddie was walking away from me the other day and I noticed she did not look quite right. Liddie, we discovered, is a boy cat. So, now I have a boy and a girl, both rapidly approaching sexual maturity, and I am thinking I need to find a vet AND FAST. Emily and I decided this morning that calling him Lydia just won't do, and unless the rest of the family votes it down, we want to rename him "Elliot". We thought about naming him Merlin, since he tricked all of us, but he really does look more like an Elliot. This will take some getting used to. We all keep calling him a her out of habit. Poor guy. Here are some photos. The little calico on the bottom is Fiddle. The one on top with stripes is Liddie, I mean Elliot.

A Couple of Triples

Yes, it's been a really, really, really (triple number one!) long time. I could make a bunch of excuses, such as we have power outages nearly every day, we have internet problems frequently, I'm busy home schooling two kids and cooking from scratch, I got caught up in Thanksgiving and Christmas and potlucks and all that - all of which are true, but whatever the excuse, it has still been a really, really, really long time. I'm sorry. Ok, quick "catch-up", in as few words as I am capable of. All of the windows have been repaired. And the roof. Last month Emily told us her wall, the one between her bedroom and the bathroom (yes, the same bathroom that flooded with sewage and has a broken toilet) was wet. It had been wet for a while and she just thought the spot was a stain from when the roof leaked until she actually left something touching the wall and it got wet. The stain was wider than my arm span and about 3 feet high, and a nice mold was growing. So, the plumber came out and made holes in the walls to fix the pipes. At least he filled in the holes though, and Emily's wall is drying. We celebrated the holidays with our MAF team and other missionaries here. It was hard to be away from family, especially since our skype wouldn't work. Josh played in the orchestra for the school musical in December. We searched for things to buy for the kids for Christmas and could not find anything here, so I bought some local fabric and sewed gigantic bean bag chairs for each of them. We filled them with bags of chopped foam that we bought at the local mattress factory. They were a big hit! We still have power and water issues, almost daily. Once we had no power for 72 hours. A couple of times we ran completely out of water, even in our reservoir, and had to haul water from the Francis house. We had the annual MAF family conference in January. It was our first conference and we really enjoyed it. We have hired a tutor to help us improve our French. There are two things which make French more difficult here than I had anticipated. One is that our vocabulary is too small, we just don't know enough words. We're working on that. The other is the accent here. The Congolese don't pronounce their vowels the same way we were taught, and it has caused some misunderstandings. For instance, when they say "two", it sounds just like "ten". That makes shopping fun. A couple of weeks ago, I asked our guard how his family was doing and his response sounded like "sah vah impay". I knew what the first part meant, "ça va" means "it goes", a way of saying things are fine. I couldn't figure out what "impay" was, but I knew "paix" means peace, so I thought "he must mean all is well and peaceful", so I said that was good news. He looked at me strangely but said no more. Then David asked me a couple days later "what does impay mean?" Our guard had just said the same thing to him, again in response to an inquiry about his wellbeing. I told him I didn't know, that I couldn't find anything like it in the French dictionary, and what I had guessed it meant. He said he had guessed something similar and said "that's good" and got the same strange look. So the next time our tutor came, we asked him about it. He said it the same way our guard did, but when he wrote it out for us, he wrote "un peu", which sounds more like "uhn puh" (short nasal sounds, not long vowel sounds)in International French. Ding! The light was now on! It means "It goes a little", which here means the same as saying it is not going well at all. So our guard was telling us things were not going well for his family and we were telling him what great news we thought that was! I felt even worse when we learned that he had two children with malaria that week. So, that's one lesson we shan't forget and a mistake we won't make again. One more small chink out of the language barrier.
Ever since Christmas, my friend Sandy has been waiting patiently for me to remember to share my recipe for crescent rolls. To atone for neglecting my blog for so long, I'll share it here also. I got this recipe from my sweet mother in law and it makes nice flaky rolls. And the smell! Amazing! They are really, really, really (triple number two!) good! Here you go, Sandy!

Crescent Rolls

4 1/2 cups flour
3 eggs, beaten
1 package plus 1 TBS yeast (so you don't have to look it up like I did, one packet contains 2 1/2 tsp)
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup Crisco (I try to avoid shortening. You know, the whole hydrogenation thing. So I use real butter and it works fine.)
1 cup scalded milk

Mix milk, butter, sugar and salt. Allow to cool to lukewarm. Add yeast and eggs. Add flour a little at a time until dough is too stiff to stir. Let rise, or chill until later. Three hours before baking, divide into three sections. Roll out into circles and baste with melted butter (not too much). Cut like a pizza into 8ths and roll into crescents. Let rise. Bake 6 minutes at 375 degrees.