Life.

Today's blog is about life for an expat in Liberia.  You saw our dorm room.  Here is the dorm kitchen.

In the center is some of the fruit various people have bought to supplement the meals.  This was our best meal so far.

I am not kidding.  90% of the meals have been white rice in the big compartment, in the upper left is a quarter cup of beans like refried beans or cooked greens in oil and spiced chemical burn hot.  In the upper right is typically the boiled egg usually with a dab of ketsup and a dab of mayo.  We did get one small slice of pineapple yesterday and we have gotten a tiny slice of watermelon twice.  Twice we had a type of oatmeal for breakfast.  The bread in the upper right of this meal is a sweet shortbread.  There is some oil or spice or something that makes all these meals smell the same.  It is a smell that I find repelling so for the first time in my life I have had to force myself to eat.  

Here is me doing laundry in the sink before I knew we only had to set it out in a bucket and they'd do it for us.  It dried outside in the sun lickety split.

You can't really see in this disappointing photo but Cuttungton University's mascot is the scorpion.  That implies to me that they exist here.  Shaking my shoes before donning every morning!

Tons of birds here.  Not a clue what they all are.  I should have brought binoculars.  Rookie mistake.  Trees are flowering some.  Looking up here you see many very large trees with gorgeous flowers pointing to the sky as if their purpose were for something other than beautifying the earth for us vertically challenged humans.  Can you imagine?

Emmanuel Chapel on campus. Some of the women staying here went to chapel here yesterday.  They sang My Country 'Tis of Thee all four verses.  Apparently they sing it every Service.  One of our Liberian teammates said the flag was designed in the US and the constitution is practically a duplicate of the American Constitution.  Liberia was first settled by freed American slaves.  White wisdom thought they'd be happier here than in North America.  They didn't go to the trouble, of course, to take the people back to their native lands.  They just unloaded them here.  So these American people displaced the western African indigenous people just like the Europeans did in North America.  I haven't seen it but apparently there were some homes built in the southern US antebellum style like the settlers were used to from whence they came.  I think that might be true in Harper, a southern coastal city we may get to see.  It is about four hours south of Fish Town and the city from where we will get our supplies.