Settling in

We're settling in to Dapaong.  We've gotten our first mail, had our house blessed, killed a nasty spider, found a surprise in our eggs, enjoyed a lot of African food, figured out when to shop and where to shop and what we can buy at a good price and what we can buy at a not so good price, and our woodwork order was delivered.

Sam and Liza were really excited to open our first mail.  FYI- We've learned that it takes about 20 days to receive mail from the United States (if all goes well).

Sam telling the workers how to set up the tent for our house blessing.

All the produce for the festivities. (note the coffee table, temporarily, in our kitchen)

We had a house blessing service with holy communion.  It was a great way to demonstrate to the students at CLET how to proclaim Christ's presence (and not another) amidst a family and their dwelling.

All the students and faculty at the CLET and members of Alpha & Omega Lutheran Church were invited to the house blessing service.

Empty courtyard the day after as the kids enjoyed a beautiful day.

A little "friend" Micah found in our bathroom at midnight.  Anybody want to identify it for us?

Surprise!  This might not look like much of a surprise, but we haven't seen any white eggs since we left the States.

David really gets into his African food.  Here he's eating cassava.

Less than $10 for all this organic produce.  Anything that can be grown or made locally is extremely cheap and everything that is imported is extremely expensive.  Of course, we have to wash all the produce in bleach water before we can eat it, but our salads are extremely tasty and worth the extra step.  Incase you are wondering, from left to right we have: tomatoes and peppers in the blue bowl, lettuce in the salad spinner, mangos, oranges in the green bowl, bananas, carrots, melon (so cheap I feel like I should give the lady more, about 20 cents a melon), cucumbers, eggplant, and plantain. 

We hardly had any counter space in our kitchen when we moved in. We had to use our coffee table to prepare food, but it is less than 2 feet off the ground, so we had this made by an excellent woodworker to prepare food on and store things.

We also had this made to put our propane tank in and have a place to put things by the stove as well.    Now, I can let David safely crawl around in the kitchen!

These 2 pieces of furniture along with an armoire, desk, and a couple of tables and chairs have really helped us feel settled in.  When you are living out of containers, because there's no where to put things, it's kind of hard to feel settled in.  The house blessing certainly helped a bit as well.