We were on our way to Kpamang at 7:15 this morning. We were meeting Divine in Kpamang to look at the pigs he had for sale. Our hope was to make a deal on the pigs and get back to Yendi as quickly as possible but nothing seems to go quickly here in Ghana. Divine’s pigs looked OK but one of them was not very big. We were sort of stuck with the smaller pig because Divine owed us a pig from the money he had borrowed last month. Another member of the church had a couple pigs he wanted to sell but he had gone to the farm. Divine said that he told him we would be there at 8:00. Divine finally got hold of him by phone and he came back to the village. It was almost 9:00 by the time he got back to the village and called up the pigs for us to see. While we were waiting for him to arrive we gave Gladys, Divine’s wife, the onions we brought her for a gift. She gifted us with a bowl of dried red hot peppers, a bowl of peanuts and a bowl of dried black-eyed peas. The peas had not been shelled so she went to the neighbor; borrowed her big mortar and pestle and thrashed the peas for us. Now how sweet is that? We gave her a small monetary gift for thrashing the peas. Gladys had corn that she needed to sell so we bought her corn to use at the seminar.
After a bit of haggling we struck a deal for the 2 pigs he wanted to sell. We are a little bit anxious because we had to pay upfront for the pigs and if they die we will be out the money. We gave both Divine and his neighbor additional money to feed the pigs for the next 2 ½ weeks.
While we were dickering over the price of the pigs I spied a very old stool that had been made out of a very heavy tree. It was carved from a piece of tree trunk. When I saw the stool I stopped worrying about the pigs and started trying to get the guy to sell me the stool. In the end we bought both pigs and a stool.
It was noon before we got back to the mission house. After we unloaded the truck we headed to the market. We bought several non-perishable things for the seminar. We got most of the spices we will need. We also bought some food items for ourselves.
While we were in the market we stopped at the “Cold Store”, sort of like a meat locker to see what they had. We were happy that they had frozen chicken hot dogs. One of the workers was hacking frozen chickens into pieces to sell; he was using a modified machete (cutlass) to hack up the chickens.
Red stopped by the mission house this afternoon; he needed an additional piece of angle iron to finish the remodel on the metal outhouse for the seminar. He said that he had gotten the metal doors for the bathhouse finished and he would spray paint them tomorrow.
Take care, enjoy your weekend!
In HIS Service,
Steve and Kandie
