Sorting lentils

Around here, most foods are sold by the kilo. I (Misha) can buy big yellow lentils (dal) at our local market, which gives us a little variety of how to get protein in our meals. I like making spicy Indian dishes with the lentils, which go nicely with rice, which we can get in abundance here!

However, eating lentils can be very dangerous to your health in these parts. What looks like a lentil on your plate is not always a lentil - watch out for rocks! Before coming here, I never realized just how similar rocks and lentils can look. But to the poor tooth that bites down on one, they are most definitely NOT the same.

So, before doing any sort of cooking with lentils, I spread them out on a cookie sheet, one little handful at a time. I peer down and pick through them, plucking out little rocks left and right. In the picture, you can see my findings - that little pile of refuse is comprised of rocks, little green beans (I think they were being sold in the basket next to the lentils, because quite a few of them seem to have gotten mixed into the lentils I bought), and a few pieces of dried lentil "husks". I guess lentils have some kind of brownish skin covering them when they are growing or something like that.

These lentils ended up in a very tasty, although slight too-spicy for me (Andrew loved it) dish. Take out the rocks, add some spices, and cook them for a long time, and lentils make a great meal!

Dinosaur in the yard!

Well, not quite a dinosaur, but a monitor lizard. They look kind of like dinosaurs, though! This little fellow visited us the other day and sunned himself in our front yard for a while. A bit to our surprise, Clive didn't seem to mind too much. They cheerfully co-habitated in the sunshine. Clive watched him a bit, but didn't bother moving or anything.

Some monitor lizards we've seen here are nearly six feet long, but I'd guess this one was about two feet (not including the tail, which is another two feet). They whip their tails around to kill their prey. They are a bit creepy looking if one is afraid of snakes or crocodiles (or dinosaurs...), since they look a bit similar. They have long, darting tongues that scare me a bit. But so long as they stay well away from me, I'll take the Clive route and give them their space, but not let them bother me.

Unplanned Trip

Well, when I woke up this morning I was looking forward to a regular day in the office. What a regular day in the office is I'm not sure, because it seems there's always something happening around here! And since we have 22 Austrian guests in the office this week (short-term missions trip) and Andrew is out of town for several days, I guess I already knew it would be an out-of-the-ordinary day.

Before beginning this story, let me back up a bit. Yesterday the Austrians descended upon us. They are here to pray for the translators and bless them with gifts and to pray for the peoples of Mara Region for a week. The team members range in age from late teens to retirement age. It felt like an extremely prayerful Christmas yesterday in the office as each Tanzanian was blessed with prayer and a gift bag. Many of them had no idea what some of their gifts were, and I somehow ended up being the "gifts interpreter". I explained how to open an unusual sort of necklace clasp, what a suncatcher/rainbow-maker was, how much a euro is worth, what a paperweight is, etc. Several of the translators shared their candy with me, and I loved being in a situation in which Tanzanians wanted to share with me because they felt they had more than I did (there were no gifts for expat staff). So you get the idea, yesterday was a bit out of control at the office, but in a good way.

Anyway, I was worn out after all of that (I did a presentation for the team about the cluster and various other things) and looking forward to "normal". But when I got to work this morning, my computer would not start up properly! I won't go into technical detail, but suffice it to say that there was no using my computer all morning and it wasn't looking too hopeful, although a technically-inclined co-worker was trying a few things to try to get it going. This one aging laptop (over four years old) is my lifeline for skype, e-mail, translation work, entertainment, everything. I couldn't figure out what to do at work without a computer, so was pondering just going home.

Just then, one of the translators came to me looking very worried. He explained that his daughter was very sick (from his description she sounded delirious, so I thought maybe it was a bad case of malaria). She is a secondary school student and her school was a bit over an hour away out in a village. The headmaster of the school had called him that morning to say he needed to come pick her up, and that she was not in good enough health to travel on his motorcylce or in public transport. So the translator came to me, wondering if I could arrange anything.

Usually I'm extremely busy at work and can't ever just leave. But since I had no computer, here I was at the office with nothing to do. "Give me five minutes and I'll drive you out there," I told him. He was shocked and very relieved. We took the wife of another translator (Sara, the one who was the bride when I was a bridesmaid) who just happened to need to go to that village and also the mom of the sick girl, along with her baby, the sick girl's little sister.

When we got to the school, the headmaster asked us to come into his office. Another woman and man were already in there. He then sat down and explained that he was a Christian and had studied in seminary. He said that demon-possession had been traveling around the school, being passed from girl to girl as they shared clothes and other possessions, as teenage girls are prone to do. He said that daughters of the two families in the room were currently affected. He explained it began with a girl whose mother was a witch doctor and had given her daughter some spirit-objects. He also said a few things that didn't quite sit right with my theology, such as how males are more resistant to demonic attack because they are smarter than women and that demons inhabit the eggs in females' ovaries, so women are susceptible. But anyway, he was calm and just explained the situation (the two girls had walked stark naked into one of the classrooms the day before, etc. - not their usual behaviour) and said that the parents needed to take their daughters home, pray for them, get them demon-free, and then the girls could come back to school to take their end-of-the-year tests. The two girls then came in, and the other family's daughter seemed out of sorts and very strange. The family I was with, their daughter seemed very quiet and tired, and like her mind wasn't fully present.

We got in the car and started driving home. I asked if they still wanted to go to the hospital immediately, as their original plan had been. They weren't sure and asked my advice. I suggested that since there was a group of 22 people committed to prayer at the office, maybe we could go there to have the girl prayed for. We got there just as they were praying for the people group which this family was from - it was perfect timing! They prayed for her and the girl suddenly became normal and happy again. Her face, especially her eyes, became free and relaxed. Her parents took her home and have decided she will not be returning to that same school.

So then I went and checked on my computer. It was working!!! While I was away, it had been fixed. :-) I am writing this blog post on it and am thrilled that it works.

What a day! I came home and went for a walk and ate chocolate... :-)

Prepaid Electricity

We have prepaid electricity at our home. This is a "special feature" that some houses here have, and is considered a good thing, as odd as that may sound.

The usual system is post-paid, in which case you have a little meter in your home that scrolls along (like an odometer) counting how many units of electricity you have used. Every month the electric company comes and reads your meter and produces a bill and delivers the bill to your home. You then take the bill and go to the electric company's office in town and pay it.

This system can go awry if 1) they come to read your meter at a time when you are not home and thus they cannot get to the meter to read it; 2) they do not deliver your bill in a timely fashion or they attempt to deliver it when you are not at home to receive it; or 3) you are late to go pay it. Then they come out to your house and cut off your electricity.

For people who work full-time, it is basically impossible to be at home at the right time to have a meter read or a bill delivered. And since if we weren't home they would probably give the bill to our landlord instead of to us, then we would have to rely on our landlord to deliver it to us quickly so we don't get our electricity cut off. As you can see, that is all rather complicated and problematic!

So, we are blessed that the tenants previous to us had a prepaid electricity meter installed. (This came about after several instances of cutting off their electricity when the aforementioned system did not work well for them.) So now our system is that we go to the electricity office and pay them however much we want to pay. They give us a receipt with a 20-digit number on it. We go home and enter this number into the meter and voila! It then shows our new amount of units remaining. For example, the other day we were down to 763 units in the morning, so we realized that by the end of the day, we'd be in the dark if we didn't get some more electricity soon. We went and paid 50,000 shillings (about $30 US) and got a receipt (you can see Andrew holding it). Andrew entered the number, and suddenly we were up to 30,000-some units.

It's a little risky in that we have to remember to check our meter and buy more electricity when we need it. It's our own fault if our power goes off now - we can't blame anything on the power company or landlord with this system! (Excepting power outages, of course, which are still happening daily.)

Side note: despite power outages, our electricity bill is not any lower these days. The power company has simply raised the price of electricity per unit used, so that even though they keep the country in the dark about 12 hours a day, they aren't losing any money.

Working Together

Little baby orphan leopard


Leopard all grown up in the village

Andrew and I just completed our first real work project together, and it went quite well! We worked together on a tract in the Ikizu language. It is an animal fable designed to share the gospel and is a fun little story with a great message.

In the story there is a man who tells a story to his friends about a man who goes hunting and finds a little baby leopard. He thinks it is innocent and cute, so takes it back to his village so the children there can play with it. The village chief tells him that he must kill the baby leopard, because little leopards grow into big leopards, and big leopards kill. The man refuses, insisting that it's just a cute little baby leopard. Eventually, the little leopard grows up and develops a taste for blood. He kills the man who brought him to the village. The village chief then kills the leopard and is wounded in the process. The storyteller then talks to his friends about what the story means and how the leopard represents sin and how the chief is like Jesus, because "by his stripes we are healed" (it has a summary of 1 Peter 2:24).

Earlier this year Andrew took a Scripture Use checking class and checking this tract in Ikizu was his first major item to check. Since I am the Translation Advisor for Ikizu and am familiar with the Ikizu writing system, I was present during the check to help Rukia, the Ikizu translator.

I was a wee bit nervous going into the check because I know how assertive I can be if I think I know how something should be and I'm more comfortable with Swahili and Ikizu than Andrew is. I was worried that I'd start running the check instead of him! Rukia, too, is a fairly strong-minded person and is not afraid to be stubborn when she has an opinion about something, and she almost always has an opinon. So I felt like Andrew was being thrown to the wolves/agressive women.

We ended up having a really successful check, much to everyone's relief. Andrew was well-prepared with lots of questions, quite a few of which led to some positive changes. Rukia and I corrected spelling and natural language issues along the way, so we took turns to initiate changes, too.

The most difficult part of the check came when Andrew asked Rukia, "What is the message of the story?"

She answered, "The importance of obedience." The way she read (and had translated) the story, the sin was the man disobeying the village chief and keeping the baby leopard.

Andrew and I both got a bit worried at that point, because the point of the story as we understood it was that we should not allow "innocent little sins" into our lives, because they will end up killing us, but Jesus can save us.

We ended up resolving the issue by making it a bit more general. But it was interesting to me to see her perspective as a Tanzanian reading the story. Obedience to authority and following rules from above is a high cultural value. When I was trying to explain to Rukia the difference between how she'd understood the story and how we'd understood it, she turned to me and asked, "But how does all sin start? Disobedience to God's commands. We must obey him." It was at that point that I saw she was right, and we were right, too. How we each understand God and sin depends on our cultural worldview.

Something slightly less significant but somewhat amusing was that Andrew and I discovered that we have different opinions about comma use. We're both extremly detail-oriented ("There's a forest? I can't see it - there are too many trees in the way!") and we both kept asking Rukia's about comma placement. It seems we have different opinions about where they ought to be! (Conclusion of that issue: because I was the one who originally taught Rukia about commas, she and I tended to agree, too bad for Andrew.)

Makoko Family Centre

We live in a place called "Makoko Family Centre", and we are happy you came for a tour! We're really excited to show you where we live. We're on a pretty large compound that has buildings for raising pigs, rabbits, and chickens; a health clinic; a vehicle repair area; houses for the compound plumber, carpenter, and electrician and their families; a basketball court; a soccer field; elementary school classrooms; a large kindergarten complete with playground; a dining hall; an internet cafe; a small convent; a guesthouse; two houses for renters (one is ours); two chapels; and a house for priests.


Just to the left of the entrance gate, there are some topiary bushes to welcome you. The bushes say "Welcome to Bakhita English Medium Primary School". This picture just has the "Welcome" part of that. You can see the school chapel in this picture, too - the kids gather here for mass. The school is run by Catholic missionaries from India - most of the teachers are Indian nuns. The person in charge of the whole center, our landlord, is an Indian priest. Some of the students are boarders and live in dormitories on the centre, and some are day students who come and go each morning and evening. They are kindergarteners and elementary school kids, so they range in age from about 5 to 13.


Straight ahead when you come in the entrance gate is a figurine of Mary surrounded by fake flowers and other decorations. Sometimes at night it is lit up with multi-color lights and looks quite Christmassy. They change the clothes on Mary periodically - she has a little wardrobe stored somewhere on the property, I guess.


To the right of the entrance gate there is a small health clinic. The signs above the doors say "Mother and Child Health", "Eye Services", and "Laboratory". I've never been there as a patient, so I can't say much about the clinic, but maybe one day I'll fall ill and can report back to all of you.


This is the kindergarten and its playground. I love how they have painted all the buildings! I think it looks like a fun place for kids to learn. Every morning when we leave for work we see little kids coming in the gate to go to school. The kindergarteners wear red checked skirts/shorts and red sweaters, so they are easy to spot. The older kids wear gray, which makes them look like serious students.


These are the school buses that transport the non-boarding students every morning and evening. Depending on where we pass the buses on the road to/from town, we know if we're early or late to work! They pack a LOT of kids into these buses - it's not just two kids per seat like they would be in the States. During the weekend (when I took this picture), the buses are just parked on the centre by the girls' dormitory.


These are three of the houses on the centre. There are more houses for the centre workers on the other side of the centre, but these three are all a bit larger. The house on the far left (you can only see a wee bit of each house - this is the only angle at which I could get at least part of each house in the picture) is where I lived from 2007-2009. The house on the far right is called "Adoration Convent" and several Indian nuns live there. Our house (you can barely see it) is in the center. Since we have a hedge and gate and are in the corner, it's a quite private little spot. We like it that way. :-)

So thanks for visiting Makoko Family Centre with us! It's a nice place to live and we're happy here. Come again sometime!

Please Pray for the Ikizu Luke Dedication!

We have just heard from the group of Ikizu people who are planning the dedication event for Ikizu Luke. They informed us that they have not been able to raise money for the celebration, so they want to postpone the dedication until some future time.

There are several reasons for this:
• This is a difficult year for farmers; there is a drought and people do not have much extra money available to contribute.
• Because the translation project office is in Musoma, which is about two hours away from the Ikizu villages, the churches in the Ikizu area are not very aware of the translation project.
• Ikizu people do not yet understand the value of having Scripture in their own language.
• Spiritual warfare opposing the work.

Please pray that the dedication will happen when and how God wants it to happen! Pray that the planning committee will know whether to organize a smaller event, delay the event until after there is a harvest, or find effective ways to communicate the importance of involvement to local churches. Pray that somehow, someway, the Ikizu people will have the Gospel of Luke!

We are looking at the boxes of books in our office and pray that these books will cease to be in boxes, but will be in the hands of Ikizu people.

Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was really quite a nice day! Just in case you're curious how one celebrates a birthday in Musoma, here's about how it went:

6:00am - Andrew woke me up and I discovered he'd made me fruit salad and hot chocolate for breakfast! He hadn't realized that our cocoa is just straight, plain baking cocoa and not hot chocolate mix so I had to add some sugar, but it was a nice treat in the morning.

6:30am - I exercised (marched in place) in the bedroom while reading a great book I'd borrowed from a friend here, "The Calligrapher's Daughter". I usually make myself work out a bit more energetically and use my arms, too, but since it was my birthday I let myself just march and read.

7:45am - As we were heading out the door to work, I realized that Andrew had fed the cats for me and put their bowls of food (dried fish) and water outside for me, even! What a husband, doing my morning chores for me on my birthday.

8:00am - Right when I got to work, Rukia, the Ikizu translator, immediately noticed I was wearing a shirt she hadn't seen very often (I don't wear it much so it'll stay looking nice) and complimented me on looking pretty. It was a nice surprise that she noticed and said something!

8:30am - When my friend Rachel got to work, she came by my office and gave my a present: a dish towel, two hot pads, and some hand-santizing lotion that smells great. It was wrapped in a great reusable ribbon, too, so that was also sort of part of the gift!

10:30am - After our morning devotion time with the whole office, Andrew announced it was my birthday and everyone sang to me. Then during our morning tea break, Rachel showed up with cookies, which was a fun surprise! She'd put candles in 29 of them, which I utterly failed to blow out. 29 is a lot of candles! The cookies were great and I ate a lot of them, definitely more than my fair share.

11:00am - I spent a few minutes on Amazon looking for what to get with the gift certificate my father-in-law gave me. I love Amazon!!!

8:00am - 4:30pm - My workday was quite nice, as I assigned myself my favorite tasks to do. I checked one and a half chapters of Ikizu Genesis, which is something I really enjoy doing. However, I happened to be on Genesis 19, which is just about my least favorite chapter in Genesis, so that was a bummer! Nothing like getting to celebrate my big day by spending hours thinking about the men of Sodom trying to break into Lot's house and then Lot and his daughters in the cave...

4:30pm - Since we were out of cat food and toilet paper, two very, very bad things to run out of, I had to run to the market after work. It wasn't terribly celebratory, but hey, it was better than going home to desperately lacking both!

5:30pm - I had done some dinner prep already, so when we got home I got to go lounge on the back porch with a cat in my lap instead of having to start working on dinner right away. Andrew gardened for a while outside and I enjoyed some book/cat time.

7:00pm - We had Korean Beef Pulgogi for dinner, and it turned out great. I opened a gift (a promising-looking book) from my mother-in-law. Andrew apologized for not having made me birthday cookies but offered to share his hard candies from Nairobi with me. I put on a doleful face and said that having some candies would be nice, and asked him to go into the kitchen to get them. He walked in and exclaimed, "Where did this cake come from? When on earth did you make this?!" I had secretly made a cake while I was making dinner and he had no idea. It was kind of fun to shock him and then we enjoyed our cake.

8:00pm - We played Quiddler and I creamed Andrew. We don't usually play too many games together on non-weekend days, so that was kind of out-of-the-ordinary and fun.

9:00pm - I finished my book with a cat on my lap. What a nice way to complete a birthday evening!