Sunday, November 16, 2008

Happy Birthday...African Style!

Today is Sheila's birthday! :)

Two posts in two consecutive days...you're so lucky! haha! Just kidding! Anyways, today was another great day.

I went to church with Alice and the kids this morning, and it was a joy as always. We were more late than usual, so I had a hard time finding a seat. Elizabeth was walking out of the church and saw me. She grabbed my hand and led me to the front to where Marie was sitting. I was so excited just to be sitting by her. This may seem strange to some of you, but my heart is filled with delight and gratitude when I am with these people...especially these two girls. I keep thinking how amazing God is to allow me to be worshiping in the same church that I fell in love with two years ago. It is wonderful! I didn't understand the service at all since I was sitting by Marie and another Burkinabe girl. But Marie would point to the verse in her Bible, and I would find it in mine. The sermon was on Samson, and I'm not sure what about. So, I read all about his story.



This afternoon Sheila and I got some things done in the classroom while John had tennis lessons. We then came home, and John and I decided that we would be the cooks for Sheila's birthday dinner. John wanted to just make eggs, and Sheila wanted to have chicken. I suggested we make chicken fried rice with eggs (one of my family's favorites!). They liked that idea, so John and I got busy and two hours later "well ah!" This was my first experience cooking in Africa. The rice was a lot drier than normal but still pretty good. If it were up to John we would have had a million other things in it because he kept trying to add things like tomatos, mayonaise, some spice that I've never heard of, etc. For those of you who know my food selections, you may know how I felt about these ideas (cough, cough, DK!). :) Anyways, we added some soy sauce and overall...a success! Sheila was happy not to cook, and John and I had fun. For dessert we decided to have the Snickers bars that I bought the other day. I unwrapped the three bars and carved "Happy B-day" into them. Then, John found a candle from the freezer, so we lit that. We went into the room with the snickers and candle singing "Happy Birthday" to Sheila. It was mainly me singing, but John was a good sport. We wanted Sheila to blow out the candle, but it had already gone out. So, I ran to the kitchen as I held out, "Shhheeeeiiiilllllaaaa......" and grabbed another match to relight the candle. She then blew it out.



Well, time to finish up lesson plans for tomorrow!

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