Mango Worms, Sugar, Spoons, and Darkness

So we have been with our family for a little over a week now. We are all adjusting well, healthy, and getting to know our family. We have been in the clinic all this week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and have met several new people as well as some old friends. We are, as of now, working to build upon relationships that were started last summer as well as starting new ones. We also started working at the same talibe* house as last year as well as working at an Arabic school run by a friend of some of our brothers and sisters who live here. They were all happy to have us back.

Now, you may be wondering about the title. We are still new to the village and are mostly just getting to know our way around again, and re-establish relationships, so I don't have any big news about our ministry yet, however, I do have some interesting stories.

For those of you who kept up with me last year, you have heard of mango worms, but for those who are new; mango flies are like giant, slow, green flies. They like to lay their eggs in the most comfortable and moist place they can find, which could be in a goat or dog, in the sand, but, I think, their favorite place is in wet clothes hung out on the line to dry. So, if one does not either iron their clothes or give them a few days after they are dry to sit around, the baby mango flies (worms) will find their way into an even more comfortable place, your skin. So, I've never gotten to see one of these before, but, luckily for us medical people, one of the other American girls living in our village got one and needed us to come take a look. She thought it was a spider bite, as did we until we squeezed it and got to see a cute little white grub come crawling out. If you know me well at all, you wont be surprised to hear that it made my day, and that we are looking forward to tomorrow, as she has another one that is just about ready to crawl away. :-)

Sugar. Just a testament to our lack of language skills and cultural knowledge; our family has begun to trust us and accept us as family members more, and asked us to do them a favor, gave us some money and wanted us to run to the store and buy them some sugar. Long story short, they wanted just a few cubes of sugar, and we misunderstood greatly and returned with a huge bag (2 kilos, to be exact) of sugar crystals, and had to send them back to the store to exchange it, as they laughed and told the story to everyone they met the whole way there.

So, some of our brothers and sisters who live here taught a few members of our family to play the card game "spoons". So, we thought it'd be a good ice breaker to play with them, little did we know that it would become a four night long tournament that ended in them diving across the room and tackling us to the ground to get the spoon at the end of the game! We thought we had the advantage, it being an American game, however, we greatly underestimated the intensity of Africans playing cards!

And the final, more of a request than a story, but darkness has been a common theme as we have been having our power go out just about every night, which makes for fun playing cards by candle light, but difficult showers and long nights in our small room with no fan to cool us and keep the mosquitoes off.

Thank you all for uplifting us! please continue to ask for open doors, continuing friendships, and opportunities to share who we know with our family, friends, and coworkers that we love so much.



*Talibe, for those who don't know, are young boys that live on the street, and learn scriptures in arabic, they have a "house" that is little more than concrete walls with dirt floors and no roof. They beg for food and money and are more often than not in very bad shape medically speaking.