Puzzled!

Puzzled, or should I say finishing a puzzle that was started many weeks ago. My neighbor Deb and I sometimes put together jigsaw puzzles on my dining room table. When (not if) I have company over for a meal I first put a plastic table cloth on the table, then a cloth one. My company do not even know that I have a puzzle hiding underneath. This past week of my vacation we finished this puzzle that had been "in hiding". Putting together puzzles is supposed to be good for the brain. :-)

Shopping at the local food Market!

Saturday I went grocery shopping "in town". Here is the main intersection in our town of about 10,000 people.



Here I am in the market which sells mostly fresh veggies.



A few of the veggies that are grown here: cooking bananas, peanuts, taro, winter squash and sweet potatoes.









Dried fish is also sold in the market.



There are many small stores in town too but the market is the only place where local veggies are sold.

My African TWIN!

 

I met Louise over 30 years ago in a distant village where I went once a month to encourage those in her Church. She was in my Bible Study for those years I visited there. As our hospital grew, Louise would come periodically to us to have a baby or get other care.

One time I had a piece of material that I took to a tailor for a dress. When I went to pick it up he proudly handed me Two DRESSES of different models. Since there had been more material than he needed for the dress that I  ordered, the tailor decided that I could get two for the price of one! Well, I really did not want two dresses with the same material so I gave the second one to my friend Louise. We had our photos taken. Since then she has referred to us as TWINS.

Louise knows that I will be leaving the country at the end of November for eventual retirement. She ordered nice quality material from a neighboring country and had it with her this time she came to visit the hospital. She paid for the material and I paid for the tailor. Today we had a number of photos taken in our TWIN dresses!! This was Louise's goodbye gift for me. I'll print up several of the photos so she can have our photo as a "souvenir" as they say in French.

Weighing with a Meat Scale?

Yesterday I accompanied the Student Nurses to a village for their Public Health class. There are 16 students and I drove eight of them to the far end of the village. They were divided in groups of two. It was my turn to observe Larissa and Albert and their teaching for the day was that of weighing babies and preschoolers and then giving a nutrition lesson to the adults who were there. They had prepared food which they used to demonstrate how to make a nutritious puree for babies then gave out samples for the babies to eat. The babies loved it.

Here are a few photos from our trip and NO, they did NOT use a MEAT SCALE for weighing the little ones. It was a REAL BABY scale developed for being able to weigh babies in the village, by hanging it to a beam or tree. The babies are put into the pants sling feet first and then they "hang" there until the weight is read. The scale goes up to about 12 kilograms which takes care of the babies who can not yet stand on a regular scale.

Here are some photos from this week's outing.

Nursing Students

I teach in a Nursing School on the equator in Africa. Here are a few recent photos of some of my 16 Nursing Students.









For the Public Health class we go each Thursday afternoon to teach in a small village.





I am enjoying driving the Nursing Students to a village each Thursday afternoon so they can do health teaching.

New Restaurant in Town!

Although I am in a town of about 10,000 people, there are hardly any restaurants and definitely no familiar chain restaurants. The ones that are here are usually run by one or two people. About a week ago, I got invited to a new restaurant in town. It is run by a woman from the local church plus another woman who she hired to help. Although the menu did mention chicken, when asked what was available, it was fish done about three ways. I had a whole fish cooked with a tomato sauce and on top of a mound of rice that had been prepared in the tomato sauce. Here's a photo:



By whole fish, I mean that the head and tail were still on it. I did not notice the eyes so perhaps they had been taken out. :-)