Life in a Family after 2 weeks

Front of our house (former storage room)

So we’ve been here 2 weeks now, what can I tell you about it.  We are living with the pastor in the church courtyard, we have our own little apartment around the corner from the pastors house but still in the same building.  Our apartment used to be a storage room with a metal door and window but they built a wooden wall in the middle of the room separating our bedroom from the living room.  Each side is about 6ft by 10ft (whole room is 10ft by 12ft).  They built us a nice awning right outside our door and I believe they are going to make it into a cement porch at some point but it is nice to have a shaded area in front of our house to sit (I’m sitting there right now typing this).  Our shower/peeing room is right next to our room and the pooping hole is around the corner (back side from where the pastor lives). 

Pooping hole

Shower/Peeing room

 
As soon as we got here the young adults in the church took us in and have been showing us around town, taking us to work with them, and just hanging out with us in the church courtyard most days.  The pastor is in charge of 23 other churches in this area and I’m not sure if there are other pastors for those churches or not so he is quite busy with traveling, because of this one of the guys in the church has been our guide. 

Team visiting in courtyard

Our church building

The church courtyard is a pretty busy place, people visit quite often in the evenings after work and sometimes during the morning and day as well.  People are always passing through the courtyard on foot or bike and many women come to our well to get water every day.  We have learned some greetings in one of the local languages and everyone from the church comes up to us and greets us to watch us do our trick and then laugh whether we get it right or not.  

Heating the soldering iron
over a coal fire
(super hardcore)

The president of the young adults group took me to the motorcycle garage where he works and I got to see and assist in a complete dismount, change of the camshaft, and remount of the engine, quite exciting.  I have helped with electronics around the church including repairing two megaphones( one for the sanctuary and the other a portable one for evangelizations in the villages with no power), wiring lights into our shower/peeing room and replacing the florescent light with a normal one in the pastors living room, fixing power strips, rerouting a power outlet, and fixing microphone cables.  All the soldering was done with a soldering iron heated using charcoal, pretty awesome. 

Our family consists of the pastor, his wife, their son Apolos who is about 7, daughter Syntyche around 4 or 5, and three other girls who are probably nieces or something and they are like 15, 10, and 7, Chewa, can’t pronounce her name, and Safoura respectively.  They are quite a lively bunch and Sentyche is a very typical 5 year old who hangs on you and does annoying things when she’s not being fun and cute. 

The town, Niakara, is on the large side of town but still a town where you can walk from one side to the other in 10-15min.  We are on the northern side and it takes about 5 minutes of walking before you are in the middle of the bush.  People don’t even hide the fact that they stare at us for being white, they’ll even take pictures of us walking by and thinking we don’t know, it’s fun to say “photo” to them and let them know we caught them in the act.  Oh, and while our town has 3 or 4 cyber cafes with computers, printers, fax machines and even signs saying prices for the internet, we have absolutely no internet in this town at all which hasn’t been bad, just different.