Harvest

It is harvest time here for many crops at the moment. I called in to see some friends yesterday, and they were just de-husking their corn. This can be done by hand, but when you have a certain amount of corn, it makes sense to hire a machine to do it. In the photo you can see the corn husks to the right of the photo. They were being put into sacks, from which they were fed into the top of the machine. Behind the machine to the left you might be able to make out the big bowl on the ground into which the grains were falling. From there, they were poured into large sacks. There was a lot of husk dust around, and it was very noisy!

A day in the life...

From time to time I think it's interesting to give you a taste of our
daily lives, so here is my Friday:

6.30am Wake, read Bible in bed, get up and dressed before breakfast as a
family. Then get Eve to get dressed, clean her teeth, and then do her
hair while Marc reads the Bible to the family.
7.40am I'm just chopping things for lunch when my laundry girl, Musaala,
arrives, so I stop what I'm doing to finish filling the dirty-washing
basket and ask Simon to take it out to her. She'll be able to do the
washing with the 4 big basins of rainwater we managed to collect on
Wednesday night. It's far cleaner than our well water at this time of year.
8.00am The kids and Marc are off to school, and I have finished
preparing lunch ingredients, so I have nearly half an hour of quiet to
journal and pray. I very much appreciate this time of day!
8.30am I make my way over to the translation office, about 50 metres
from my front door. No fighting the traffic, but not much chance of
getting fit either! I already know Philémon won't be in to work, he's
still off with the infection in his leg, and Pastor Samuel phones me to
say that he has to go to Social Services for a family problem.
I catch up on my work emails and finally manage to send my 6-monthly
report to our Projects Manager (the connection wasn't good enough for it
to send yesterday, and today I ended up putting the English and French
versions with separate emails, which was enough to get it off). Then I
begin working on the introduction to the book of Deuteronomy, which
first involves reading the whole book in Monkolé and taking notes on it.
9.20am I hear Musaala on her way out greeting the pastor's wife Hélène
as she arrives to clean our house. She'll do some washing up, sweep the
floors, dust and then clean the bathroom.
10.30am I take a half-hour break, and head over to our house to cook
lunch. I have a quick chat with Marc, who's made me a cup of tea and is
just about to go back to school with the kids, their break having
started earlier than mine.
11.00am Back to work, back to Deuteronomy.
12.30pm Back to the house, to heat up my sauce and eat lunch with my family.
1pm I make bread dough, and leave it to rise during...
2pm Siesta.
3pm Official end of the siesta for our kids, but I've already got up to
knead my dough again, and later to put it into the oven.
Friday's afternoon ended up not being so typical and since "a day in the
life" is supposed to be typical, I'll drop back and tell you about
Thursday's afternoon. I spend most of it doing reading practice with
Eve, giving her a dance lesson (her PE this module is dance so it's me
not Marc teaching it), and doing Spanish with Benjy then Eve. The
internet is actually working - slowly but well enough - so it's good to
get both a lesson and their evaluations done. On afternoons where I am
less taken up by Spanish or housework, I try to get out to do some visits.
We eat at 6, and then it's into the bedtime routine for the kids ...
easier now that our boys are autonomous, and Eve just needs help with
her hair (though she likes me to stay in the bathroom so that she can
chat with me).
On Thursday evening Marc went out to the church prayer meeting - on
foot, brought back afterwards by a church member on a motorbike at
9.30pm - and I spent my evening knitting. I am knitting a skirt for a
crocheted doll I've been making for Eve's birthday next month, and have
also started knitting a jellyfish for a little girl born prematurely
last year who is now coming up to her first birthday.
10pm Bedtime, and if we're lucky we won't be woken by a storm and have
to run round closing windows during the night!

They say patience is a virtue...

Generally speaking I work quickly. Speed and efficiency please me. So living in Benin has its challenges. One of my colleagues is very good at what he does, but he really takes his time to think everything through. Fortunately my predecessor told me about this, so from the beginning I knew that patience would bear fruit.

The internet drives me to distraction. Literally. It is hard not to become distracted when I am sitting looking at my connection counting off the seconds "33 kbps, 0 kbps, 45 kbps, 67 kbps, 0 kbps, 112 kbps, 28 kbps..." as I pray that it will hold steady enough and especially not cut out before I have finished sending my work files to the central server, or sending an email to which someone needs an immediate response. (Please don't send me emails which require an immediate response!)

I also like to plan. At the moment I can't plan our work very well because one of my colleagues is off sick, and a lot of the work on my to-do list is work which I know would be best done with him present. And now that our consultant has "postponed" (a new date has yet to be found) our next checking week, the work on the to-do list is less urgent, so I am reluctant to insist on the other two of us doing it in that colleague's absence.

My afternoons look flexible on paper. I am supposed to do Spanish with Benjy and Eve, and in past years we scheduled that in for Monday and Thursday, and when occasionally the internet wasn't working well enough, we moved it to Tuesday/Friday. But nowadays the new website requires a better connection, even to the point of using videos (where they really aren't very necessary), so I feel like every afternoon I have to say, "We'll do Spanish if the internet is working!" and then if the internet isn't working at 3, I leave my computer on so that I can check the connection at regular intervals, ready to grab a child if it suddenly starts working. This makes it much harder to plan outings or even fit in spontaneous visits to other people.

My evenings are relaxing. I don't even bother to check whether the internet is working. Sometimes I write emails which will (hopefully!) be sent the next day, sometimes I read ... but often I crochet. At last, something which depends entirely on me, and which gives me a sense of satisfaction because I can always achieve something visible!

People tend to say that God puts us in these kinds of situations to teach us patience. But I wonder a bit about this. Overall I think I am a pretty patient person, as people go. Yet I also feel sometimes that having to continually exercise patience wears me down and actually makes me less patient. What do you think?

Nature

We live in a fairly large compound, which had quite a lot of trees when we arrived, and has even more now. So we find we don't have to go far to see "wildlife", though it isn't quite the lions and elephants people immediately think of when you mention Africa. At the moment we have a lot of nests close to our house. Here's a dove sitting on her nest just under our roof. Doves make what seem to be quite scrappy nests, just enough twigs to stop the eggs from rolling away.



If you look carefully you should be able to see a slightly yellow coloured ball of grasses in this next photo. This is a red-cheeked cordon bleu (that's a bird!) nest just outside our bedroom window. It was lovely to watch the tiny birds arriving with individual sprigs of grass in their beaks.



And the architectural marvel of little weaver bird nests. If I were designing a nest, I would never think of putting the entrance hole at the bottom...!



This fellow amuses me. From the kitchen window, I can often see him sitting by an ants' nest, having an "eat all you can" buffet. What a life!



And this magnificent dragonfly was sitting on our washing line last week.