A different kind of week August 7, 2008

It feels quite strange not to have a myriad happenings to report on right now – but very nice to be out of the beehive of activity! After a lovely weekend, Monday was pretty hectic. The workers needed to be paid, and most of them needed to be paid on a different payscale for the hours they worked for Fiel at the conference than for the hours they worked for Grace Missions the rest of the month. We also had to reimburse them for the months of April and May, when the labour department had already changed the new minimum salaries, but we only started paying them differently in June. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to do these calculations, and yet I believe I’ve mentioned how terrible I am at numbers…. Dr Woodrow also kept asking me questions about Conference and bookstore finances, making me feel very indolent for not having already sorted all of that out.  I left just before 17h00, quite discouraged about how overwhelmed I was once again feeling, and not looking forward to Tuesday very much. By the time I got there, the next day however, Dr Woodrow was already paying the guys, and aside from some bits and pieces of work and getting the social security documents ready, I suddenly didn’t have that much pressing work to do, and left at 12h00, feeling like a schoolkid on the day school comes out for the holidays!

I did have a reason for leaving earlier: Angie and I have been trying to find time to go to town together to look for a small countertop oven. We don’t have space, money or the desire for a big gas oven, we get along fine with our two gas burners, but we do get exasperated with never being able to bake anything or make a oven-baked main dish. Anyway, we had talked about going this Tuesday, because she gets back from the school earlier. We ended up going to one store, finding what we wanted, and carrying it home with us, all in about an hour! We knew this store well by sight, but had never gone there – what a world of technological advancement right here in the backwater fo Nampula! For a pretty high price, you can get anything from stereos to treadmills to perfume in this store, and it’s all very shiny and new and impressive. We felt a bit silly walking home with this big box, but it really didn’t weigh very much and arranging for delivery seemed unnecessary. After laughing until the tears streamed down my face over the instruction booklet’s English, we found a space for it and I went to borrow some pans to make banana bread the next day…

Yesterday was my birthday (belated congratulations welcome… ) and though we had often been apart on the day itself, it was a bit weird and depressing to think that for the first time in 27 years I would not be able to celebrate with my sister this year. It was a lovely day, though, quite domestic. I went shopping, suddenly remembering about a lot of things I’ve been wanting or needing, as well as wanting something nice for the little birthday dinner we had planned, and ended up spending a rather big sum on “luxuries” such as olive oil, a Pyrex dish (for the new oven), tealight candles and frozen veggies. Happy birthday to me! I did indeed inaugarate the oven with 2 banana loaves, which took a very long time to bake and turned out looking a bit sad and flat because I kept peeking to see whether anything was happening – but they taste superb. Angie and I had our friend Cornelia over for dinner and an old Agatha Christie movie – as one of my friends said, a lovely Most Eligible Bacholerettes-evening! I’ve been so blessed with wonderful friends that share my new life, the Lord is so good to me.

I had wanted to get at least some work done yesterday, but the hours just flew by. Hopefully I will be slightly more productive today, though not feeling fantastic and greatly tempted to go back to bed and pretend the world doesn’t exist for just a bit longer…