Today we gave mangoes to 2 of the widow ladies that live in our area; they are members of the church. Both of the ladies are raising their grandchildren and their own children live with them. Here in Ghana the married children continue to live with their parents sometimes forever. There is no sense of urgency for grown married children to make a home of their own. This causes many problems for the family, especially the new bride, if she is living with her husband’s family. She is the low man (woman) on the totem pole and is basically a servant to all the women that are older than her. I said all that to say that the widow ladies were very appreciative of the mangoes.
Yesterday we raked the yard and took the leaves along with old mangoes outside the fence to the burn pile. We lose a lot of mangoes to the bats; they just eat a bite or two out of the mango, drop it to the ground and move to the next mango. While we were raking Steve started the debris on fire; the middle school students from a nearby school came to the burn pile with sticks and were digging through the fire to find the mangoes we had thrown away. They did not care that the mangos had been partially eaten by the bats and were warm from the fire. We have never been hungry. We felt sorry for the kids so we brought them out the good mangos that we had picked up as we were raking. They fell on the mangoes like a swarm of locust!
We spent the bulk of the morning working in the storeroom. Shortly before noon Red came by with the new and improved corn roaster. He had gotten the gas burning system made and he wanted to try it out. The regulator we bought leaked so they had to go to town and buy a new one. He connected 3 burners together with copper pipe but one burner was too far away from the fuel to burn very well. He is going to do a little reworking on it but it got hot and the whole roaster was well heated. He also did not make a way to control the heat coming out of the burners so he is going to try to address that problem. It will be nice when he gets all the kinks worked out.
Divine, the evangelist /farmer/ teacher stopped by this afternoon. He had come to a nearby village to attend a funeral. He dropped off the church accounts he has been working on and he picked up the new ones that have come in. We have all the accounts except one. Hopefully that one will come in soon. Divine wants to take them to Tamale on Thursday. He brought a friend with him and they picked up a bunch of mangoes and we gave them the ones we had picked up this morning.
This afternoon we went to town to buy rice and oil to give to the evangelists when they come to class on Friday. We also bought enough to share with the compound workers.
Thank you for all you do.
In HIS Service,
Steve and Kandie
