Today, Sunday, is the official day for election campaigns to begin. The presidential elections will be held on March 13 and are a matter of prayer for sure. All afternoon we have been hearing honking, whistling and cajoling as election activities take place in the market place, carrefour, on the other side of the fence from our house.
In other news, Angela just recovered from a yucky week with the flu, made worse by 37 celsius temperatures. I have never had such a nasty and prolonged headache, but tests at the hospital said it wasn't malaria and I am just happy to be well once more. We spent yesterday battling what we like to call tree ants. They wrap up tree leaves into little clusters and make nests inside of them. They are large ants, half a centimetre, and they bite and we have thousands, no exageration, living in the two trees on either side of our house. While Darren tried to prune the trees I deftly cut the nests out of fallen branches and dunked them in a bucket of warm water. The great thing is they drown in seconds, the bad thing is as you are cutting them out of the tree and into the bucket, ants are falling everywhere, including on you and up your legs etc. It takes all of my perserverance to do this for just an hour. We couldn't bear to move all of the mess we made to the burn pile so for today it has been sitting in our yard. Tomorrow we brave up and drag it, ants and all, to the pile.
Our garden is fairly pathetic right now, although the yard long beans are growing great so that makes me happy as I love green beans. In other food news, I bought potatoes from a travelling merchant from Cameroon last week. A bunch had started to get mold on it. I thought I would make a mashed potato casserole which would also use up some of the huge amount of failed yogurt Leonard made the other day. Right, so Leonard made yogurt and it didn't work--kind of looks like really runny, lumpy yogurt. Jan suggested using it like sourcream. Unfortunately, I made the casserole realizing after the yogurt was mixed in that it had gone really sour and smelled a lot like beer. Needless to say the casserole tastes really yeasty and while I did have a bunch for lunch I will not be eating any of the left overs.
In other culinary news, I was heating up leftover spaghetti last night and thought I should add a few more cans of tomato paste, ( since I do have a box of 100 tiny tins). Having not opened one of these tins before, I didn't realize that they explode on opening. The contents are under serious pressure. There is an art to opening them that so far my cook hasn't divulged. So last night the walls had a good spray of tomato paste on it and we prayed extra hard over our meal thinking it may have been subject to botulism. We woke up this morning, whew, and at church I asked Aleta about exploding tins of tomato and she said, with a laugh, yeah, that is normal. There is a trick to opening them. News to me. I guess that is just one more thing I have to learn about Central Africa.
My word for the day is 'flexibility'. I don't know the Sango equivalent, but boy is this an essential quality for peaceful living anywhere. While Darren and I are flexible, I pray to remain so.
You will hear more from me soon,
Ange
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