April 26, 2015 - Shelley

April 26, 2015

This was us at the Provo MTC one year ago yesterday!  It seems like a lifetime ago!

We said good-bye to our landlord and his daughters this week.  They have had

a family reunion in France planned for more than a year.  His youngest daughter lives there.  So they are going ahead with it – his wife would have wanted it that way.  We’re quite sure that he will spend time – maybe a year or more – staying with his daughters before he returns.  One daughter lives in Canada and the other in Virginia.  They are all such lovely people!

Well, I’m going to recount our week.  It was very different than most.  We have a project that involves training local village people to repair their own wells.  We have paid for the trainer and will pay for the pump repair.  Their part is to start charging for water (50 francs - 5 cents - per bidon) and to put that money aside for future pump repairs.  It’s more complicated than that, but those are the basics.  And it has been totally uphill to get villagers to understand that they have to pay for water because they never have had to before.  If their pump breaks, they just wait for someone to come along and fix it.  Meanwhile, the women walk for miles to the river for water.  No women’s lib around here!!!!

Anyway, we spent the week at the training for the pump technicians.

This is Clark with Immaculée (head of the clean village projects) and the trainees.  Clark didn’t really get as sunburned as it looks!  We tried to explain about who Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer was to our translator Steve, but he just couldn’t quite understand.  He has no concept of cold and snow.  It was about like our explanation of Halloween or the April Fool’s Day – some things just don’t translate well!

Anyway, we did get quite a few pictures and gained more insights into village life.  These are trainees pulling

the insides of the pump out.  It’s amazing how deep the pipes go.  So the process is to pull everything out and see where the troubles are – like leaky pipes, etc.  Then they fix it and put everything back in the ground – a super simplified explanation.  (It’s obvious that I know nothing about wells!)

My job was to watch and take pictures.  I was interested in the process that a nearby village lady was using to make foo foo flour.  She peeled the cassava roots – they look quite a bit like potatoes.  Then she soaked them for three days in a big barrel of water – it got bubbly and smelled fermented to me.  Then she dried them in the sun.

Above are the peeled roots.

Here she is with the barrel of bubbly roots.  Then she chops them up and dries them in the sun.  The village has a kind of a grinder but some people pound the roots until they are really fine.

These are roots that are drying.  This has been a staple in the Congolese diet for centuries.  In the photo below, the gal

preparing lunch for the trainees is mixingthe cassava flour with water over a stove. These balls are then dipped in a sauce containing leaves and veggies.  This was lunch everyday this week.

This is hard to see but these school children are headed home carrying their plastic chairs.  Their school has no desks, so everyone comes to school with their own chair from home.

This cute onlooker had his brother riding along on his back.  Older children care for younger siblings, even during church.  Since there is no nursery at church, it’s very common to see Primary kids taking baby brothers or sisters to class with them.

Just some gals passing by.  Notice the combination of western clothing and traditional dress.

This abandoned transport has seen better days, but it makes a great play house for the neighborhood kids.

This might be hard to see, but the tall boy is holding a soccer ball he has made out of plastic sacks that are rolled up tightly and then bound with string.  It actually bounces, and they were having a lot of fun with it.  Pretty ingenious!

These charmers hung around all day wanting their picture taken.  It’s fun to

take pictures, but it can open up a can of worms.  Pretty soon you feel like you work in a photography studio.

Here I am showing them their picture.

And here’s my piped piper companion!  He always attracts a crowd!

Well, that was our week!  Lest I sound like I camped out in the villages all week, I need to make it clear that we drove home to our nice comfy bed every night.  I did, however, endure something scarier than having to use a Turkish toilet.  It was using a Turkish toilet with a hornet nest in the stall!  No worries – I escaped unharmed every time!  Maybe I’m becoming a local! ☺

We’re spending our weekend watching General Conference with the other senior missionaries.  It’s just the uplift we needed and has been so inspiring!  Much love,  Mom/Soeur Davis

p.s.  Happy Birthday this week to our wonderful son-in-law, Mike Muhlestein!