They think about food differently than I do

The average family runs out of food every day. If you get money you buy more food for the next day. On a good day you have two meals. Most everyone has at least one meal a day. The menu for each meal is usually rice. If you're low on money it's just plain rice. If things are going a little better you have some sort of sauce over the rice such as a Cassava leaf sauce.  

If you're a family the mother will cook the meal. If you're single then you usually go out and buy a bowl of rice at the corner restaurant. A restaurant usually means a makeshift metal roof with a couple chairs a little charcoal fire stove and a pot of rice in some sauce. Only one item. They don't use silverware to eat.


 What a contrast our Thanksgiving dinner was. We had it at the mission president's house. There were 4 young missionaries, 4 senior missionaries and the mission president and his wife. We had a pretty traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The missionary leaning on the chair in this picture had never had a Thanksgiving dinner before. He was quite surprised that it tasted so good.


In Liberia cloudy skies have the opposite psychological effect on you.  You feel so much better not having the hot sun beat down upon you. When you wake up in the morning and see a clear sunny sky it's depressing. It was cloudy this morning.

This is the Sunday women's Relief society meeting.  In America the women's church classes are usually much better organized and the quality of teaching superior to the men's classes. Here it is the opposite. The men's assigned teacher usually has at least basic teaching skills. The women's classes are a lot more casual.  Women seem to be hesitant to participate in class discussions.  Sometimes when the class starts they will ask Cheryl to teach without any advanced warning. I'm not quite sure what the two women in the background are doing, but they are not fighting.

In last week's blog I showed this picture of a truck that had run off the road. Last week it had a shipping container on its bed. The container has now been removed but the truck remains. This will probably be its final resting place until it will rusts away. People will slowly strip the reusable parts off.

We contracted with a wood shop to produce desks for a couple of schools we have projects with. They showed us their sample desk and it looked to be very good quality. After they had gotten started thieves came in and stole all the electrical wiring and other electrical components in their shop. Not wanting to lose their contract they moved their manufacturing to this outdoor shop and have to do a lot more of the process with hand tools rather than larger stationary equipment. I hope the quality remains the same.

We have a second wood shop we also deal with. There problem is that the government electricity has been very intermittent. They went for three days last week without power.  Everything is harder to do in Liberia.

Even though most of the items in this blog have been negative the Liberians seem to deal pretty well with it. They smile way more than Americans. They generally seem to be much happier. They seem to always be outside and socializing with other people.

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