What a trip…

6.25.2006

We went to the capital for a couple days and the plan was to rest up and do some shopping for food and other items for our village….

Here’s what was suppose to happen…
And what really happened…

Sunday:
- Drive from Town to Capital: Since it’s been raining the roads have gotten worse – expected the drive to take maybe 5 hrs
Got to the capital in 3hrs: Hurray!! This was better than expected =)

- Get plenty of rest with plenty of AC
Around midnight power went out – no AC, not even a breeze from the outside and eaten up by mosquitoes… yup not much sleep until finally when it was almost 3am some of the power came back in the living room so we slept out there

Monday:
- Go to the office early
On the way to the office got a flat tire – hung out at the side of the road while it was getting fixed - it took over an hr… oh and the car almost fell over while they were fixing it coz we have a bad jack. But they were able to change the tire and we dropped it off to get fixed while we went to the office to take care of some business.

-Buy a 50kg bag of rice
Through some miscommunication we somehow ended up buying two 50kg bags of rice… we gave 1 bag to the chief of our village which was the plan, and we kept the other for ourselves and gave some of it out to our friends in town. But we still have a lot left - I think enough to last us the rest of the year. So at least we won’t be hungry… once we learn how to clean it first=)

- Get most shopping done before lunch
While at the office we found out our car was due for its yearly inspection, and we had to take care of that before we could do anything else. So we went to control technique, by this time it was around 1pm and we had to wait till 2 when they open back up again, and then waited some more for them to finish inspecting it and give us our sticker – but we found out they couldn’t give us our sticker coz we didn’t have our spare tire (coz it was getting fixed). So we had to leave and pick up the tire and come back only to wait in line again and then pay the fine for not having our tire until we finally got our sticker. And we still haven’t gone shopping, except for the 2 HUGE bags of rice

-Lunch at noon
After we left the inspection place it was pass 3pm and that’s when we finally had lunch. – Was too tired so we just went home – we finally went shopping for some food around 7pm – and we found soft serve ICE CREAM, which we SO deserved.

Tuesday:
- Go home
We got the rest of our shopping done by the morning and so we were able to go home by the afternoon and again the drive took less the 3hrs. =)

I guess some would say we had our 1st “West Africa” day. I’ll admit it was frustrating and I was exhausted in the end even though it seemed I did nothing, at least nothing we had planned, but there were still times throughout the day that Kacy and I were able to laugh about. Plus in the end we got most of what we needed and things worked out and it was pretty good that I didn’t have to experience all this by myself. It definitely makes it at little easier to handle almost anything with someone else – but I’ll be more than grateful and happy if it doesn’t happen again anytime soon =D