Internet...FINALLY!!

I know, I’m a loser for not keeping everyone in the loop! By the time I plow through 130+ emails, my hour is up and the blog gets put on the back-burner. Starting today, I’m planning on changing that…blog first! Well, actually, I’ve decided to blog ahead of time and just show up at the internet café prepared…pictures and all.

So, today I’m giving you some basics about my house & neighborhood. Once we get past the basics, then I can start with the stories.

The focal point of our ‘dining room’ is a huge chalkboard, which serves as our to-do list. Notice the time measurements are in African time (Now, Soon and Later).

My bedroom, also called the Princess Palace, is the girl’s room in the house. Mariel and I share the room and the attached bathroom. And yes, we sleep under our nets every night! I will provide a picture of the Princess Palace another time.

We have a front porch and a back porch…both provide for great hangouts. The back porch is great place to cool off in the afternoon, and we usually sit out on the front porch and watch the sun go down at the end of a long day. Below is home...the windows on the right corner is my room.

Now, I’ll branch out. Onto the neighbors! To the left, we have a house that turns into a music-blaring night club of a thing around 6:30pm every night. They have a small playlist, and we have names for a lot of the songs (they’re so distorted that we have no idea what the real words are). Music usually goes until 9-9:30pm. The good news is that there’s no music on Mondays, so we get once night of peace and quiet! In front of the house is the road. Across the street are 2 houses packed full of kids. Randolph & Rudolph usually dance for us (sometimes in the rain w/o clothing), or like tonight, they sometime shoot at us or show off their karate moves. The other house of kids isn’t as pleasant. The most common sound from that house is children screaming. The kids are frequently beaten with a stick, and there have been some instances of punishment by way of hot peppers in the eyes. The guys have had to go over a few times to check on things. To the right is another compound, but it’s the offices for the Tropical Resource Company…aka a logging company. There are always big trucks full of workers going to and from. On the other side of that is a small house where about 7 of the cutest kids in Liberia live. They come over almost daily and hang out. Behind us is a small school, so usually when we’re making breakfast we hear the children singing ‘Hail Liberia’. There’s also an orphanage there, and I’ve briefly met some of those kids when I went with the kids to the right of us to draw water from their pump. Also behind is…somewhere…is the praying lady. So far, she’s only disturbed my sleep 3 times. She wakes up at about 4am and viciously prayers for about an hour…for the entire neighborhood to hear. She prayed the first night I was here, and if Mariel wouldn’t have warned me, I would have thought someone was very angry…or someone was passionately preaching. So yea, that’s my exciting little living bubble. I’m sure more stories will come from the ‘hood.