The building is finished! It is such a relief to have that behind us! It looks very nice. The guys will still have to water the floors everyday for the next week so that they will cure slowly.
We hired Amina, Nazo’s wife, to help wash the bowls, plates and other things that we will need for the seminar. They have been stored for 2 years so they are very dusty! Amina has been working with the masons hauling blocks and cement so I think that today’s work was a nice reprieve from the heavy work. Amina is not a spring chicken; she married late and has a married daughter with several grandchildren. Nazo and Amina’s story is rather strange. Amina was married to another man before she married Nazo. While she was with the other man she was not having children so the man got fed up with her and sent her back to her father, rejected and insulted! In this area everyone believes that if there are no children it is the woman’s fault! Nazo needed a wife and he had no means of buying a wife so he decided to marry Amina. Everyone told him that it was a mistake because she could not have children. He said he did not care because he needed a wife. Not only did they have a child, they had 6 children but the set of twins died. I guess there was nothing wrong with Amina. Her youngest daughter Fati came to the mission house after school today to help wash the dishes; she was excited that we gave her a little money for helping out.
We made several trips to Kulkpeni today. We took Red out to measure the floor of the metal portable outhouse that he built for us several years ago. The floor was rusting and we wanted to replace it before the seminar; wouldn’t it be terrible to have the floor give way on one of our guests and they fall into the toilet pit! Another problem that the outhouse had was that someone broke the hasp off of the door. The church keeps the outhouse locked except during worship time because the community will use it and the pit will fill very quickly. The main reason that it fills so quickly is because the people use sticks, corn cobs, plastic bags and anything else they can get their hands on to wipe with. Whoever has been using it from the community had piled a bunch of sticks and corncobs inside the outhouse. It was pretty disgusting when we had to clean it out so that we could measure the floor! I told Steve that we had to burn all the sticks and corncobs because if they were left laying there the people at the seminar would use and reuse them. We provide paper for them to us at the seminar but we also provide a box for them to put the paper in so it can be burned every day. Steve got the door fixed so it would lock and Red is in the process of making another floor. The men at Kulkpeni are busy painting the buildings. They told us that they needed more masking tape but they forgot to tell us that they needed more paint until we took the tape to them.
Thank you for all you do!
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
