Pathfinder Honor Classes

I've enjoyed working with the Buea AY Pathfinder club through the last months and now that we're coming up on the end of our stay here we've been working especially hard!  The week of March 14-24 we had a special youth week of prayer and had honor classes each evening before the prayer meeting.  A couple of the nights when we got to church early the church was still locked so we had our classes outside.

Through the week of prayer I taught the stewardship honor.

Starting this Sunday we will be having classes each Sunday in April, Nutrition, Cultural Diversity, First Aid, and Christian Citizenship all to come!

Saloon

There's a constant fascination with the difference of our natural hair, they are amazed by ours and we're equally amazed by theirs!! Christian heard about my straightener and Mary's curling iron and wanted to know if it could straighten her hair, so we decided to give it a try!!  What we would call a "salon" back home, a place where you get your hair done, is called a saloon here... So we had our very own little saloon operating in the clinic Thursday afternoon when there were no patients. :)

I wouldn't call the end result of her hair "straight" but it was definitely straightER and we gave her some curls :)

Big Belly Jackfruit

Jackfruit, or in pidgin known as "belly fruit" is the largest tree born fruit in the world... they are HUGE, this one was a couple feet tall and weighed around 50 lbs I'd guess.

  The fruit is quite unlike anything I've ever tasted, it's edible, I eat it, and I'm sure it's good for me, but I'm not very tempted to over eat... ;)

The insides are so incredibly sticky, anything you touch with it or get sticky will pretty much never be the same again!!  The pods of edible fruit inside are surrounded by these extremely sticky fibers... then inside each fruit pod is a seed, you can see some on the plate on the left side there.  We boiled the seeds and they were delicious!!  The best I can describe the seeds as is a cross between potatoes/beans/cooked peas/and cassava.... I looked it up later and found that every 100 grams of Jackfruit seeds has 6.6 grams of protein and is a good source of vitamins B1 and B12!! Excellent!

Sleepover

We barged in on Christian the other night and introduced her to our idea of a good old fashion sleepover!  We had a great time teaching her to make brownies, chatting and laughing... 

We took her foam mattress off her bed and slept on the floor... it ended up being an interesting night as she had just put "insecticide chalk" on the base of her walls... I woke up confused in the middle of the night with Sarah and Alyssa laughing and things crawling on me... they deserted to the chairs higher off the ground for the rest of the night and Mary and I braved the floor... I just wrapped my sheet around me tight attempting to keep cockroaches off of me...

The next morning when we were all more fully awake it looked like the plague had struck with dying cockroaches all over the place... that insecticide really did the trick and that was apparently why they were all going crazy and attacking us through the night!! Alyssa said she just decided to laugh and sleep in the chair instead of cry!

Church member neighbor's boy :) Shadrach

District Come-together

This weekend we had a district meeting for the Fako district in Limbe.  It was such a blessing and very amazing service, even though church lasted until 2:30!  All pathfinders were asked to be in uniform and I got to be part of them, so exciting!!  It was a very special day!

Communion foot-washing ceremony, ordinance of humility.

Our good friends Smiling and Christian.

Classrooms behind the church.

Prosper and I.

Mary and some of the pickens :)

Potluck! :) It was pastor's idea to take this "snap" ...not sure why he forgot to smile :)

Friends

We are so incredibly blessed by our group of friends here in our Buea church!!  What good times we've had together!  Especially this week through the youth week of prayer.

Ruth and I <3

Somba

Psalm 133:9

How good and how pleasant is is when brothers live together in unity!

The Many Faces of Mauye!

Mauye Discovered the camera on my ipod today and also how much fun it is to play with "smooth hair" he's given me a couple of hairdos once before, including a "Chinese" one which was a process of making a bun at the top of my head and furiously wrapping the rest of my hair round and around.... leaving me with less hair than I started with.  With every picture we snapped he laughed harder and harder until eventually collapsing on the couch until he regained control and came back for more!  Just another reminder of how much I'm gonna miss this little picken!

School Days in Cameroon

Here's a collection of some pictures I have from multiple different schools (4) in and near Buea.  Teaching here has been a huge learning experience in so many ways.  I've witnessed many new and different styles of teaching, discipline, and accomplishing things.  I've gotten used to some things that were so different to me at first, but other things... I don't think I'll ever be "used to."

 This picture is at CRC class 1A, the new school I'm teaching at this semester, the teacher was doing a lesson on human rights and teaching the students about the flag and respect for their country.

This was when i was on my way to my interview at CRC, I didn't think interviewing for a volunteer position could be such an excitement, but it was! :)

CRC (Children's Reading Corner) is a "small school" but 400 children learn here everyday, and there are so many, MANY more schools around Buea, lots of kids!!

 playground of Hotpeck orphanage school.

This is the orphanage school, most of the children are orphans who stay at the school, but also some are from farms and villages nearby.

Classroom at Tole

Kids from Hotpeck.

The broom and "water fountain" equivalent.

teacher's desk, complete with a couple different whip options.

Whip and chalk board eraser.

One of the punishments for kids at Hotpeck is to "carry a stone" which means they're sent to kneel in the corner for a "time-out" and have to pick up one of the rocks laying there and hold it above their heads until the teacher says they can go back to their seats.  (see the two against the wall holding a rock up?) I know this isn't a very good picture, but it was one of my sneaky pictures because it really wasn't an appropriate time to take one... but I snuck it with my camera under the table... because I thought it was a shot worth capturing.  Creative punishment in my opinoin, better than the whip.

This is my English reading tutoring class at Kingston.

Kingston Students.

Proverbs 22:6  
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Ephesians 4:11-12 
And He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ."

Muea Market

Muea Market (sounds like "Moon ya"... took me awhile to figure out how it was spelled) is probably our favorite for the equivalent of "Wall Mart shopping" in the sense that it has about anything you're looking for... it's just a matter of finding it!

 Mary was asking one of the meat men how much a leg would cost because Trixy had been talking about getting a leg to teach them how to do sutures and stitches for closing up wounds and incisions... this is where I use my common comment... "this is why I am a teacher!!"

 This is the oven that our favorite yummy bread comes from every week.  When we first got here we heard all about this yummy bread and that the bakery was in Muea Market.  So when we were in the market we asked someone where to get the bread from the bakery.  She took us to this super rough looking plain cement building.  the outer part looked dirtier and rougher than a mechanic shop and there were guys just sitting around.  I was convinced this couldn't be the bakery, but we went in to the very inside and sure enough, all the bread was just piled in there on shelves with questionable cleanliness.  Now we're so used to it we just walk right in there and get our yummy bread.  It's also kinda fun when you see the cars they transport it to our neighborhood in.  a regular taxi, filled to the brim, seats and trunk, with bread, and no, the loaves are not in bags or "wrappers."

Beef (skin) anyone??

More Of The Fun With Ericksons

 On Friday afternoon Sarah and I set to the task of making pizza with no oven, a special treat for Friday night supper with Ericksons since it's their family tradition to have pizza every Friday night :) turned out really good, we've learned to do things I never knew you could with only a gas stove top and limited kitchen supplies.

 Making food for potluck at church.

 Girl's night out at Andrea's house, she made us lentils for a treat, only place to get them is Yaounde (6 hour bus ride away).

 Trixy and Claire tackled a Jack fruit (or in pigin, "belly fruit").  It's quite the process, they are wearing gloves because until you get into the heart of the fruit it is unbelievably sticky, next to impossible to get off, the knives used for Jack fruit are forever the Jack fruit knives because they are forever sticky.  The fruit itself, the part you eat, is not sticky but is very slimy, a texture I can't quite explain, and almost a bubblegum flavor.

 These are "weaver bird" nests.  They strip long grass like pieces of banana and plantain leaves and use them to literally weave these round nests in the trees, very neat!

 My good friend Elizabeth invited us over to share an African meal with Cheryl and Heidi

This is their kitchen, while we were posing for this picture a rat ran across the floor in front of us and I let out some sort of combination of a moan and scream while holding the pose and smile for the picture.... Elizabeth just said, "oh, a rat" with no concern at all in her voice.  Totally normal.

Speaking of rodents, we discovered we had a little friend living in our room.  Cheryl and Heidi wanted to perform a very kind deed by removing it from our room before they left, we moved everything on the floor out of the room and the rustled and banged and did everything that would scare a mouse out.  I had borrowed the cat from next door the night before, so when no mouse came out we assumed that either the cat  had gotten him, or he was just plain gone.

However, that very night, when I was laying in bed I heard something below me, we had a bag of TVP on the floor and I could hear whatever it was rustling the bag.  We do have a lizard we see around from time to time, and earlier that night Mary found a frog in the bathroom (we couldn't get him out from behind the door so had no choice but to leave him there).  So I'm laying in bed, wide awake now, not sure if it was our mouse, lizard, or frog.  I threw something in the direction of the sound, then huddled back into my covers... a few seconds later, the sound again.  I did this several times, tried whispering to Mary, but she was sound asleep.  I just laid there, didn't know what to do, couldn't sleep, just kept hearing the mouse making valiant efforts to eat my TVP!  I felt like he was mocking me!! tried to get rid of me today huh? haha, well here I am!!

I reached the bathroom light from my top bunk and sat up half expecting to see it making faces at me.  I didn't see or hear anything now... so I waited, there was no way I was going to fall asleep now, plus, I had to go to the bathroom.  I threw one more thing in the direction of the sounds and then worked up the courage to climb down from the bunk and put my feet on the floor, I took a wash bucket from the bathroom and picked up the  TVP with a long stick (you never know if the mouse OR all his friends were INSIDE that bag, just waiting to jump out at me!!).  I put it in the pail and put the lid on with a smile and sense of pleasure and accomplishment, There! NOW try to eat my TVP! 

I got back in bed but left the light on, thought maybe I could trick the mouse into thinking I was awake all night if I left the light on.  Turns out the mouse didn't care if I was awake or not, now that the TVP was safely stowed in our washing machine he moved on to whatever was under Mary's bed.  Granted I'm pretty sure it was only one mouse, it made enough noise for an army of rats!  I had been courageous, but there was NO way I was going to reach under Mary's bed and rescue the trail mix or whatever it was she had under there.  The light stayed on all night, and I was awake until after 2, helplessly listening to the unwelcome visitor rummage around our bed, I'm sure laughing the whole time.