Conference week #2

Most days this week have included: school, packing, laundry, dishes, volleyball practice [formal or informal, for Anna], office work, and yard/garden work.

Cory visited the gardens across the river with Yvon on Tuesday while Gener and Djordy mowed and worked on the  clinic yard to have it looking good for conference.

Jack fruit makes very good juice

Most of the new garden trees are doing well but some were starting to suffer a little from the dry weather. The soil in the gardens ranges from excellent to so bad that I have asked myself "is there something toxic here where even the weeds hardly grow even after plenty of mulch has decomposed?" The soil is improving but it takes time.


The local peanuts were mostly harvested but dry weather also hurt thier yields and corn is wilted.

A neighbor was letting his young calf graze in one of the gardens. He has been talked to already and we repaired the fencerow again that he had partly burned and trimmed.

Wall is going up along the road side of campus as well as some field fence on the other sides. This week, after years of rumors and little else, they started working again on the road from Limbe to Port Margot.

Wednesday the leaders started to arrive for the district conference.

So far we've been able to share jackfruit, bananas, starfruit, and tomorrow morning - velvet apple.

The first two fruits had about 75 seeds each so we will soon have hundreds of jackfruit seeds to share with other missions and nurseries.

A Lychee tree that doesn't fruit here due to lack of a cool season is provididing many air-layered trees to plant at Delice.

Anna completed three weeks of her school year and organized her books for next week.

New hospital and clinic entrance

They plan to play a volleyball game at Port Margot next week. She's working hard on her jump serves.

We enjoyed 1.5 inches of rain last night which the plants/trees needed and it cooled the muggy air down nicely for sleeping.

 Thursday we received troubling news about our adoption paperwork but thankfully we mobilized our prayer teams and received more hopeful news late on Friday.

Details here.

As we plan to spend more time after next week up at Délice than here we're packing up most of the house now.  We've managed to fill the house with lots of stuff in the last 10 years.

Note to self - "when putting boxes up in the attic/above the drop ceiling, where you can't see....make a list of what you have stashed up there".

I was surprised when Cory handed down the non-Christmas boxes and counted 15 of them! Not all our stuff...as we have items in storage for Eli, Kris's folks, Cory's mom, and our friend Cathy.

F will be thrilled when he gets home with the 2 BIG boxes of legos.

Potting newly rooted Lychee branches for Delice

Every item is then carefully scrutinized and weighed against the effort to get it up the mountain: go, give, trash, deal with later, or stay in the house.

The 'go' items are then packed and placed on a list so that we can decide trip by trip what moves up when. Books will mostly stay here where they should be dryer until our house is built.

I find along with dealing with physical things I am also dealing with memories, dreams, and mental stuff.

The room we decorated for F that he's never seen..
The plans we came with vs. the things we accomplished. Memories so many good but mixed with the painful ones. The friendships we will always treasure and some rascals that we will continue to pray for.