We Miss You So Much!!

Dear Daddy


Ze qre so sqd zithough you::: which means on the English keyboard: we are so sad without you!


Come home soon...don't drive through anymore teargas! We love you lots and lots! Be safe!

Rammed Earth

Here are two pictures of the new addition project for our house. Nathan is using a method called "rammed earth" for building our new guest room/tutor room. He's been reading about how to do it effectively, testing the dirt, building his forms and laying the foundation over the past month...and now the "ramming" part of the construction is underway. While Nathan was pouring the foundation, he had workers breaking rocks, washing rocks, carrying water from the river, mixing cement, pouring cement...etc. There were LOTS of people around taking advantage of having a job for a day. We have it whittled down to just a few workers a day now, it seems more efficient that way and MORE actually gets done with fewer workers. Here's the quote of the week from the crew chief (Nathan), "I see alot of people looking at each other but I don't see people working!"

In the first picture, the guys are setting up the form. In the second picture Nathan is pouring a mixture of 50-60% dirt to 40-50% sand and one of our Bantu neighbors is using a really heavy ramming bar to pack the mixture into the form. Next, they'll remove the form and place it somewhere else and pack some more dirt. So far, the guys are excited about it and I've heard the comment from a young Baka fellow, "this is how I'm going to make MY house".

What do you want to do today?

This week, during my language study time, I reviewed one of my first language learning notebooks, in which I had made notes and categorized things that I was learning. There is one section that I set aside for recording vocabulary and phrases that I wanted to learn. In this section, I broke it down into categories like words about the forest, cooking, family, time & seasons, animals…etc. I had to laugh when I came across one of these categories that I labeled “doing nothing”. Well, this is a common thing for the Baka to do during the day if they aren’t in the forest checking traps, hunting or gathering edible leaves, yams, fruit, nuts and honey. Here are some of the vocab words I have under the doing nothing category: tobacco, marijuana, smoking, nail polish, braiding hair, and refusing to do something (ie – I refuse to go to school today).

I was complaining how it bothered me to just go and sit under the cooking shelter with the women during the day when they weren’t doing anything, because I always feel like I need to be doing something and it drives me crazy that they are just sitting there. Yesterday I found a good solution and figured out how to be with the women and DO something (besides paint our fingernails -- I supply the polish – they supply the razor blades to scrape their nails clean enough so that the polish will stick! It’s all from digging up wild yams in the dirt, it just gets caked on). Nathan has hired some Baka men and women to help him with our addition project on the house. So, yesterday, he hired some women to break rocks apart into small pieces that he can use to mix with the cement and sand for the foundation. I got a hammer and sat down in the middle and broke rocks all morning with them. It was not the most efficient language learning session, but it was fun. Pounding rocks apart really is a stress reliever too!

Drumroll please....

On Saturday morning, my last day of being in my 20's, Desma and I ran a 5K. We've been slowly working our way up to it since this fall. Nathan had me fooled too...I didn't know they had planned such a grand finishline party for us. I told him before hand, "well, if the kids are doing ok and you feel like it, maybe you could come and take a picture of us?" Well, Nathan, Barry and all the kids were there cheering us on when we came around the bend for the last tenth of a kilometer. The toilet paper finishline was a cute effect.

5K equals 3.1 miles

Since it was Saturday morning, we didn't have our normal entourage of village kids returning from school and joining us. We usually run in the afternoons. It is kind of embarassing that the village kids can keep up with us, even as they are runing with their bookbags and wearing flipflops!

Can you guess???

??? - Tomorrow, the 9th of February, is the last day that I, Laurel Beth Crane Conrod, am going to be in my 20's. And, this 9th of February, 2008, my last day before turning 30 (on the 10th of Feb of course) I'm going to attempt something that I've never done before in my life...can you guess what it is? (You can be funny if you want...but please don't be too mean...I am turning thirty and that is kind of weird for me in itself...does it make you feel weird too, Mom?) Oh, and if you talked to Nathan on the phone today and he mentioned what it was...please don't guess!

I'll try to post a picture of it on the 10th or 11th.

Here's me when I was wasn't turning 30...maybe Kindergarten or 1rst grade.

Tanks, alot!

Here's the project of the day...moving the water tower. We actually weren't going to do this this week, but the oportunity presented itself. Our waterlevel was low for some reason and there were lots of Baka guys around looking for work. It's re-hooked up and the tank is filling back up with water from the solar powered pump system that is pumping it up from a nearby spring...I'm so thankful that I've never had to carry buckets of water on my head from the river to our house, I just don't have the neck and back muscles to support it.

PS - Thanks so much Agape team for putting in the concrete posts for us!