Home, Sweet Home...

This is just a short post about various things--I have a lot of miscellaneous photos that are begging to be put on here, but not enough to do a whole post about.  I hope you all don't mind this conglomeration of things; I will have a more thought-out post later this week, I promise!

Some of you may have been curious about where I'm living.  What do you get up to each morning?  Where do you eat and hang out?  Those types of questions.  So, first of all, I'm going to give you a brief, incomplete tour of the Civales house so that you can picture us there as you read later updates.

This is the living room, the nerve center of the entire house.  I'm sitting on the comfy couch you see in the photo above as I type!  The papers on the table are school papers, waiting to be graded.  As you can see from the size of the stack, this is no 15 minute job!

This is the same room, just a different angle.  Notice all the books--they're all commentaries or Bible-based books!  The bottom shelf contains school documents, and the rest are picture frames.

A lot of you have said, "Tell us everything!  No detail is too small!"  Well, I'm taking you at your word! :)  This is the shower; yes, the 'cold water' shower that everyone was talking about as if it was the shower of death.  Not surprisingly, this has proved not to be the case, and I am alive and well after taking many, many cold showers in here.  There is no shower-head, by the way--the water comes out of the pipe in the ceiling.

This is the kitchen.  We just finished eating and cleaning up, so it's nice and clean!  There's no toaster, automatic can-opener, or working oven.  Oh, and no hot water!  So, as you do dishes today, just be glad you don't have to heat the water on the stove first!  The stove doesn't come on automatically, either--you have to light it with a match.  Every time I do, I worry that my fingers may not survive this trip!  The microwave works--sometimes.  There aren't any windows, just screens covered with plastic.

This is my room.  Very yellow!  Pastor Jim joked that I had become a missionary to the Canary islands!  It's so warm at night that there's no need for actual covers--a sheet works well.  The fan is indispensable.

Here's a picture I took just tonight of Hannah arranging some flowers she gathered.  Aren't they lovely?!?!

That concludes the brief house tour--onto other matters.  Here's a good picture of the school.  The very last room, on the far right, is where I teach my health class and where Hannah teaches her classes.  Miss Emi's class is right next to it.  The room furthest to the left is the lunch room. 

Here are the kids lining up to practice in the church.  As I've said before, an American team of teenagers is coming tomorrow to see the school and sing and preach, so the kids have gotten up a little presentation of their own. They're singing the Samoan national anthem, and then "The Star-Spangled Banner", "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", and "America the Beautiful".  Some kids have an easier time getting the words than others!

Can anyone spot a Tanya look-alike here?  This little girl in K-5, Jodie, looks a lot like Tanya, Hannah says.  Anyone agree?

Here's Pastor Jim preaching this past Sunday morning.  Yes, that's a bottle of perfume he's holding, and yes, it's his wife's!  He was preaching on the passage from Ecclesiastes about dead flies causing the ointment to stink.  The little boys are sitting right in front of Miss Emi so that she can keep an eye on them!

Anyway, sorry this post is so helter-skelter.  I hope to post about the American team, but we'll see if I get enough pictures and enough time to organize them!