Finally, a Few Photos

Well, I'll try again to put a few photos of our house on here. So far the internet hasn't been good enough. We'll see.


This is a view from outside our gate. Notice the pretty Traveler's Palm.






This is a view of our garden. Taken before the rains started in earnest. Now it looks much greener.

4th of July (in June)

Yesterday, the US Embassy here in Lomé held a 4th of July celebration. Now I--Kathy--have lived in countries where there are American embassies (as opposed to the US where they aren't needed) for a long time, but have never gone to any 4th of July celebrations. It was really fun. God gave us lovely weather. It had rained up until shortly before we went there and even sprinkled a tiny bit while there. The clouds kept the temperature down and there was just enough of a breeze that it was pleasant. (It may actually be one of the most pleasant days we've had here in Togo--weather -wise.) There was lots of great fun for the kids and they ran around until they nearly dropped. The major highlights were the weather, the games and drinking real Root Beer! We missed out on the hamburgers as they were all gone by the time we got there. We ate Togolese type food instead--which is all that was left!

It was a lovely afternoon and we'll remember it for a long time to come. God keeps providing these little excitements to help us along here and we're very grateful.

As you may have guessed, we have no photos of this outing as it's forbidden to take them at the Embassy, or even around it. Oh well, we have our own "photos" in our minds.

According to Sydney

We have a little bit of potting soil at our house and we have used some of it to start some seeds (they didn’t work because of our over-eager waterers). I needed the rest of our soil so we could mix it all together again and start over.

Now, at our house, if we can’t find something, we ask Elena. This is because she has taken on the duty of knowing what’s in every box, cupboard, drawer, bag or empty milk tin we own. This has its good points and bad points. She often knows about things we’d rather she didn’t know about—like Christmas presents! However, she often knows where things are when the rest of us are totally clueless. I was just sitting on the floor surrounded by linens, trying to put them away when Sydney came in wanting to plant some seeds. Since I had told them earlier that we would do that today, I said we’d get started. Her job was to go and ask Elena where the potting soil was. She went off, only to come back about 2 minutes later to ask me again what “that stuff” was she was to ask Elena for. I said, “Potting soil.” (pronouncing the “t’s” nicely). She went off to ask Elena saying over and over to herself, “pott-ing soil, pott-ing soil, pott-ing soil”.

She just came running back to tell me that Elena didn’t have any idea where the “pot-in-soil” was and that we’d have to look for it ourselves.

I’m really not surprised Elena didn’t know where the “pot-in-soil” was, neither do I.

Moving...Togo Style

So, it’s finally happened—we’ve moved. There were times we weren’t sure we would when delays came up.

The actual day (delayed by 3 days) dawned beautiful…and wet. It had rained all night and was still raining when we got round to meet the truck at 7am. Roger went to the meeting point (a well known landmark not too far from our old house). He waited about half an hour and finally came home. The truck and “muscle” ended up coming at 8:30 and by 10am, we were on our way to the new house.

By 1pm, the truck was unloaded and we were looking for something to eat. We ended up going to a lady who cooks local food on the corner of the road. You have to understand that this is a different sort of “take-away”. One comes with their own bowl and asks for their “fufu” (a paste sort of stuff made of yams) and sauce. You pay according to the number of pieces of meat and hot peppers they put in. Since we hadn’t unpacked much of anything, we each ate out of a cooking pot. Roger, of course, had the biggest one.

We’re here, now and have enjoyed the air-conditioning, especially at night. The dogs bark and it echoes all over off the high walls, but I believe they don’t bark as much as they did at the other place—not yet anyhow. There are still problems with leaking pipes and we have a mountain to unpack but it’s good to be here—finally. Unpacking is almost as unenjoyable a task as packing and is made even less pleasant this time by the fact that there is NO storage in this house and we have very little of it ourselves. We have to have wardrobes made as well as shelves and cupboards. However, we have a/c so are happy. Now we just need to find everything!

Photos to follow.