What life is like in the eyes of Steve

For the last 3 weeks our lives have pretty much looked like this:


Monday-Friday:

7-8 Bible Study

9-11 French Class

11-12 Culture Class

12-1pm Lunch

1-2 Nap time (because it’s too hot to do anything then [even in the winter!])

2-5 Service project or go into town

5-7 Free time (is dark at 6:30)

7-8 Dinner

8-9:30 or 10 Free time

Saturday and Sunday are usually days to take it easy and one time we went camping in the bush, but I’m sure I’ll write more about that another time.

Every day here has felt like 2, partly because we nap in the middle of the day, and partly because we are learning and experiencing so many new things. So, here is a compilation of things I have observed and learned so it may seem quite arbitrary.

So, the Ivory Coast. First thing: it is not a desert, it is very tropical, so it has lots of trees, bushes, flowers, and plants. It is a very green place, like Minnesota in the summer. Right now we live on an old boarding school campus outside Bouake. On the campus there are a ton of fruit trees, banana, grapefruit, papaya, orange, lemon, and a bunch of other ones I don’t remember. We go and hit the fruit off the trees with a stick and eat them. Grape fruits and papaya are what we have been eating lately.

We are learning French and about how they do things differently here (culture class) . The best example is the left hand. The left hand is considered dirty, so it makes people mad if you give or take anything from them if you do it with your left hand. So I have to learn to only use my right hand for things like that, and the hardest time to do that is when eating. You can’t pass, take, serve, or even eat with your left hand. It pretty much gets in the way and I feel bad all the time because I forget, because I’m trying to listen to the others speak French, which I can only understand some. It’s a lot of work in my mind so I am tired fairly often.

More exciting than that difficult stuff. Motorcycles! That is pretty much the way to get around here, some taxi cars, and a few vans that are actually busses. But motorcycles are EVERYWHERE! But they are all normal sized motorcycles like the one I owned, but the engines are ONLY 125cc (very small). So some SERIOUS power pushing those suckers (the reason they are so small is so no one has to have a license for them!). Better yet, it is not common to see a bike with 1 person on it (if you do it’s loaded down with giant bags of rice or something), very common to see 3 people on one, and not uncommon to see 4 adults, 2 kids, and a baby strapped to a mom’s back riding around. When we take a moto both Jess and I ride behind the driver. The only reason there is enough room for both of us is that all the motos have racks that stick straight out the back. The roads are so bad most of the time spent driving is purposely maneuvering pot holes.

Another exciting thing here is the food. The main thing the people eat here is rice and sauce. There are many kinds of sauce, most have meat in them and are good. I’ve been told that the national food is Atteike (sounds like “a check-eh”) which is kind of like rice, but smaller and has more flavor, and you eat it with chicken, and the best part is you eat it with your HAND!!! But only your right hand because you offend people if you use your left hand. It is by far the best food here.

Devin (the ME) and I worked on some florescent light fixtures there. It is funny how reliant I became on the internet when working on things. If I ever needed to understand how something worked here I would just google it, here you have to just figure it out. One great thing I learned working at Medtronic was how to trouble shoot circuits by comparing a function one to the broken one. I will get to trouble shoot some stadium lights at the soccer field/track on campus later on this week. They are doing work to get the campus ready to rent to the University of Bouake for the medical students, which should happen in January. It will be nice to have more people around campus, it’s a huge campus and it feels deserted and kind of like an apocalypse movie because everything is kind of run down, but mostly just not been used.

Culture: It is completely opposite of the culture here to not have kids right after getting married. The way you know a woman is married in Cote d’Ivoire is that she has an extra pagna (wrap skirt thing) on because “she should always be expecting a baby.” The extra pagna is used to hold the baby on the woman’s back. And we thought we got out of the trouble the single people have with everyone trying to marry them off. I guess we won’t fit perfectly into this culture, but that is to be expected.

Rice! We eat rice here all the time, but this story is about how we got to be part of the harvesting process. We went to a rice field on the outside of the campus on Thursday Dec. 12 to harvest rice. Tenanan (don’t pronounce the last n, it’s French) a guy who works on campus had invited us to go help and when we arrived he showed us the rice field and said it wasn’t ready to be harvested. But there was some already harvested that needed to be thrashed. So he gave each Steph (a 2nd year journeyer), Jess, and I long sticks to thrash the rice. *Rice looks like wheat (I didn’t know that before) and they had it stacked in a U shape with an extra row inside with the grain end facing in.* The group of guys who started beating the grain end of the pile and scooping it away from the pile with their sticks. As they beat the pile one guy would push more onto the pile and they would alternate hitting the pile in 4/4 time, if more joined they would hit at the same time as someone else, usually someone on the other side of the pile. It was really cool. Once they had thrashed it a bit, the chaff (with some rice left on it) was passed from their pile to our pile (at first we were pretty sure they were just being nice to us [like small children] and our step wasn’t necessary). So we were the secondary thrashers and we beat that rice with our sticks. As we thrashed the grain, the rice is disconnected from the chaff and because it is smaller it falls to the bottom and the chaff can be pushed over the top. So we swung our big sticks over our head and beat that rice. When the other guys finished with the inside row (about 1/4th of the total rice) they came and took over our pile, the girls took a break and I stayed and finished it. They guys said I could stay because I worked hard. When it was thoroughly thrashed, we all picked up the chaff and shook it a bit to make sure all the rice was on the tarp, and tossed the chaff into a compost heap at the side of the rice field. At the end of thrashing I was exhausted, but we all stopped for coffee so it was alright. Then we went on to do another 2/4th of the thrashing before we had to French class. We were very thankful the thrashing floor was in the shade.

New photos on my (Steve’s) facebook: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.595976517230.2068838.110900143&type=1&l=e83a9bbea9