We were so busy this morning that we only made it down to the Child Center for a few minutes. Papa Zachariah; our old watchman is in line to contest for the Balogu chieftaincy. Papa’s family has held the chieftaincy for the past 2 times and naturally they would like to keep it in their family one more time. Contesting is sort of like campaigning. Before you can contest you have to meet the qualifications. The main qualification is that you are in the inheritance line for the skin. The chiefs here sit on animal skins instead of stools or thrones so they speak of it as enskinment or sitting on the skin. Another qualification is that you have no obvious disability like being crippled or blind or mentally ill. We found out today that the man should have more than one wife because without plenty of wives the man will not leave a large enough family to keep the bloodline alive. The whole process is very interesting to us. We got so busy talking about the rites and practices that we forgot to ask Papa what we were supposed to do to help with the funeral. The final funeral will begin on Friday. We know we have to do something but we are not sure what.
Nana Bekum, one of the evangelists came this morning with the paperwork from the churches he works with. He works with 6 churches and after he got here he could not find one of the sets of papers. He is going to take a picture of the paperwork and send it to us over the telephone. We still have to make copies of all the documents; I guess that will be what we do tomorrow.
Zorash and I were planning on grinding the weaning mix this morning when the Child Center closed but we ran out of time.
Dawda, the mason, stopped by to see when we were going to start working on the large assembly room that we plan to build on the back of the property. We told him that we were not going to start any project until after our children’s visit. We will start it in April.
Thank you for all you do for us and for the work.
In HIS Service,
Steve and Kandie
