Thursday, August 30, 2012

W'apow mu e, 

The boys were busy trying to build things this morning.  Sammy came over to play.  Danny said that he needed some nails to make a boat.  He found some tiny nails and was afraid to try to hold the nail and hit it with the hammer.  So, he enlisted Gilbert's help.  Amazingly, there were no smashed thumbs.  Danny had a thin little strip of wood that was his "boat."  He brought it in to show me where they put the nails.  He was so proud of it. 

Our power was on this morning.  I almost got two loads of laundry washed before the power went off at noon.  It was off until 4:00.  Then, it stayed on for two hours and went off again at 6:00.  We are still waiting for it to come back on.  We read an article that said that load shedding was being intensified in some parts of the country.  In our case, it seems to be that our area is the only part where load shedding has been intensified.  We live on top of a big hill and can see lights all around us; just our little area is in the dark.

Joe went into town to run errands.  He went to pick up the kids' school uniforms from the tailor.  The tailor didn't do the boys' pants or their shirt collars quite right; so, he is going to fix those.  Bonnie's jumpers look good.  Then, he went to get our bulk meat.  We got some bad hamburger meat the last two times that we bought it.  Joe talked to Ahmed, his friend who is a grocery supplier, and he said that he had gotten some rotten meat from that guy too.  So, he went across the street to Garden Mart with Joe and had them grind some fresh meat.  While they were in the store, there two men with cameras.  They represent the grocery part of Walmart in South Africa.  They interviewed both Joe and Ahmed.  They didn't make any promises, but maybe they will come to Takoradi someday.  There are several large grocery stores in Accra, but we don't have anything like that here.

In the last load of stuff that Joe brought back from Ivory Coast, he brought some Leap Frog refrigerator magnets.  One is a barn.  You put the front and back of an animal in, and it tells you which animal it is, what color it is, and what sound it makes.  If you put the head of one animal and the back of another animal, it tells you what your combination is.  The kids had so much fun with that this evening.  They were supposed to be doing dishes.  There was a lot of laughing going on.  Danny had to come in to report each combination that they tried.  For example, "You put a horse in front and a pig behind; put them together and what do you find? A horsepig!  That's silly!"  They thought it was funny that the machine was saying "behind."

Nantsew yie!

Joe, Laura, Gilbert, Danny, and Bonnie