Bits & Bites

Bits and Bites…
*Still no phone… (-:
*Yesterday our church celebrated its fifth anniversary and the 53rd birthday of our pastor. They had an enormous sheet cake made for the event and after the service we all sang and had cake and chatted. I think these events are great times for church-bonding.
*Yesterday a little pipsqueak of a kid came up to the door and asked if he could get some water so we said sure. Then when he came to say thank-you he was kind of looking around and was acting rather suspiciously so when he started to walk away Hugo went to the door to see what he was up to. The little guy decided that he would try to get himself a new pair of flip flops and was walking away wearing one of Marc’s and one of Christiaan’s sandals. What a stinker!
*There are guys working furiously on our road. I’ll try to get some pictures this week. They are digging enormous ditches along side the road and then lining them with concrete and stone walls. There are other guys who’ve begun to fill the holes in the road with gravel and sand and tar. It looks like they are widening the road a bit too. However, further to the top, closer to our house, they are still at the digging the ditches stage and of course you have to put all that dirt somewhere… They’ve just piled it on the road making the road there even narrower than it was. There is one spot in particular where the road is just barely wide enough for one vehicle to drive. If you were to drift a little too far to the side of the road that doesn’t have the dirt pile, you would find yourself falling of a little cliff into someone’s front yard. I know, I really need to get a photo of this for you as it is really hard to describe accurately. Let’s just say I breath a sigh of relief each time I have successfully negotiated that section of road…
*We took a visiting family to the beach on Saturday. We started off with a flat tire before we’d even left. So we departed an hour later than planned but the spare was on the van and the flat had been fixed. You do not want to have a flat tire and no spare when you are at the beach.
*You know how back home you need to store playdoh in a sealed container or bag? Well, we need to do the same here but not because it will dry out, it will become a glob of mush if we don’t. There’s that much moisture in the air here!
*There is no telephone operator here in Papua. So no possibility of collect calls…
*We have one street light in town. It is located on the main drag where it meets up with another fairly busy shopping road. This road only meets the main road, it doesn’t intersect it. The lights on the main road are your standard red, yellow, green. The lights for the other road are only red and green. The hilarious thing is that the lights change simultaneously. There’s no yellow light warning to clear the intersection before allowing the other direction of traffic through… no, just say a little prayer, maybe honk your horn, and off you go!
*I gotta tell you, the rice cooker is a wonderful invention. Put the rice and water in and press go and you don’t have to worry about a thing… except the power going off before the little lever goes from cook to warm…