We'll keep this one short but wanted to wish everyone a Happy Valentine's Day and give you some pics to look at.
Valentine's day has passed: turns out Hallmark hasn't reached Guinea yet. But Rihanna, Psy and Akon have- a big outdoor party was running until 3:30 AM. The party ended just in time for everyone to get home before the 4AM call to prayer.
We celebrated Valentine's Day with the Kendalls at Brenda's house.
Brenda cooked us up a meal, and the three Kendall kids (Philip, Marie, and Talie) served us a tasty meal.
They decorated the whole dining area and everything. Pretty minor compared to most Valentine's Day celebrations but we enjoyed it.
During the dry season, the solar panels have to be washed regularly which means hauling water and a squeegie up onto the tin roof.
The Kendalls recently purchased some land to develop a small school on. While Hannah is in French class, I have been helping clear the land and haul bricks across town (Kankan has a large brick making industry-it used to be much larger before they stopped maintaining the railroad and now the factory lies empty and bricks are fired on the riverbanks. Maybe we'll have pictures in the future.)
I also spent all of yesterday sick in bed. I seem to be doing better today and I haven't thrown up in about 12 hours. Plus I ate some of Hannah's banana bread which is more than can be said of yesterday.
We had to grind our own meat, as they don't sell ground beef. For this we a hand meat grinder and added bread to the meat to supplement. It was messy work! The meat here is so lean that they sell fat separately to supplement it. We even had to add oil to the pan to fry our taco meat--in the US we DRAIN our 97% lean beef after it's cooked.
-Brandon
I remember buying ground beef from your Gramma Shirley when I worked in Africa 1988-1990. That as a real treat, even in Korhogo. She did all the work (or maybe it was Dennis) :-)
ReplyDeleteThey are going to start calling you brick hound
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