Good Lebanese food

 The contractor we are using to install the solar system at the Redemption hospital is Lebanese. during a meeting at their office they shared lunch with us. It was some pretty unknown food. I'm eating some sort of meat. I made sure not to ask what it was. It actually tasted pretty good. The stuff in the closest bowl was called "fool". Some sort of beam dip.

These are the North's. They are a new couple that will be working in the mission office and taking over for us visiting the Harbel and Dolo's Town branches on Sunday. I felt sorry for them. At Harbel this week, for the first time, the generator went out so there were no fans. They sweat quite a bit. They were good sports though and seem to be in good spirits afterwards. They are from Alpine Utah. This is their second mission. Their 1st mission was at BYU Hawaii. They've noticed that Liberia is a little bit different than Hawaii. They are looking forward to us leaving because they get our pickup truck. 

There is still no replacement for us for our humanitarian duties.

We've been working on a special project from the mission president to figure out why seven of the baptismal fonts in the mission do not work properly. The first two we visited this week had no problems at all but were not working because of operator error. It's pretty complicated to fill the fonts because there are water pumps, generators and water tanks that all need to be synchronized. The missionaries unfortunately haven't been getting a hold of the person who knows how all this works at each branch. Once we can train them to make the proper connections everything should be just fine. We are now on to the next five to see what the problem is there.

We've been assigned to visit a few past humanitarian projects to see if they're still in operation and if not what we can learn from the problems that are encountered. This is a hand dug well and water pump that is about three years old. The pump is not in operation and so the community has to manually lower a bucket down to the water and pull it up. The problem with this, other than being inefficient, is that the water in the well can become polluted if things fall into it or if the bucket is dirty. The community has already fixed the well a couple times but it seems to break down quickly. The installing contractor who accompanied us said that he understood what the problem was and that he will come and fix it at his own expense.

Here is what it looks like inside of the well. The contractor always puts a concrete lining on the well to keep it from caving in. The pipe going down the well is for the water pump.

Our project at JFK Hospital has been delayed because the hospital was not able to provide the funds for their 1/3 of the project. The contractor completed the first two-thirds with our funds but has had to wait as the transition in government, which happened back in January, has delayed all of the funding for projects like these. Fortunately the funding has come in and the contractor is just about done. These are the aluminum and glass walls that he's put in the neonatal intensive care room. They are quite a nice improvement over the old dirty wood walls that were in place before.

Check out the condition of this spare tire.