Mixed bag

Today, we're at N'Zao, where there's an American mission hospital with wireless internet access (youpi!), about 7kms from the N'Zérékoré, the capital of the Forest Region, around one and half hours from home. We're taking a break from Macenta for a couple of nights, staying at the Catholic Mission in town. Here's a mixed bag of stories of life in Macenta.

Snake killed

Ascension Day was a day off for us, and despite it being August, the heaviest month for rain, there was a dry moment which allowed us to take chairs and table out into the back garden to eat with our young footballer friend. After putting chairs and the table back in, he mentioned in passing that he saw a snake in a bush not far from the house. We asked Moriba, our day guard to kill it and he did so by lunging at it with a long pole. Not enough meat on it for a meal for two, unfortunately.  

Fête des Nations

As we make up part of a multicultural expatriate team (British, Congolese, Swiss and Ivorian), we celebrated our various nationalities with a ‘Fête des Nations’ or international party, where each family/person brought a meal (as the ackee and saltfish brought over from the UK last year had already been eaten, Sarah plumped for a beef curry with naan breads) complete with meat and fish for barbecuing. Our Ivorian colleagues brought achéké (grated, fermented cassava served with hot pepper sauce and fish). All very tasty, or as the Guineans say C’est doux dey! (It tastes good, doesn’t it?) The PROEspoir or 'Project Hope' team is the biggest team in the country, consisting of three families with 10 children, two couples and a single lady, Martha, who has been here for 21 years. We played a number of games and Sarah representing Great Britian, did a quiz on the Queen. Our Ivorian colleagues were surprised to know that, according to an official website one can actually shake the hand of the Queen ("That's not possible in our country, your hand would be chopped off"). For the Swiss contribution, we did a spot of yodelling and leaping around the BBQ and continued the dancing led by our Ivorian colleagues. You can check out Eric’s contribution in these photos. What a scream!

We wanted to post more photos but the server is very slow here!


Your help needed

We're planning to be in the UK next year for our home assignment but we need somewhere to live from the start of September until early November. Ideally, we would like to be in the West Midlands area, preferably in Birmingham or not far from Birmingham, so we can participate in activities at our home church, Bearwood Baptist and be within a reasonable distance of our churches in Wales and West Midlands regions. Unfortunately, the International Mission Centre for BMS is likely to be booked up as it's the start of the new training year. If you can help us with this, please let us know by email. We encourage you to publicise this request in your churches. Thanks!

Blessings and have a great weekend, until next time!

Small cat diaries

Warning: for those of you who don’t like cats, don’t read any further. We’re sure that we’ll post other things that will interest you in the weeks to come. I (Sarah) have been a cat lover since childhood. After arriving in Guinea four years ago, I had the pleasure to discover that one of my colleagues was as dotty as me about cats and I quickly inherited Ash (who we had to put down after giving birth to her first litter) and her sister Rowan (below), a maladroit, extraordinarily timid kitty-cat of seven months who quickly adapted to Eric’s permanent presence in 2009.

We’ve forgotten how many litters Rowan’s had but she’s given birth to all at home apart from the last two (probably over 20 kittens). She was born in the car maintenance workshop on the mission compound and this shelter has become her favourite place to hang out, peaceful during the evenings and weekends – but also being a place to give birth and stay hidden. She gave birth to what we originally thought were three kittens in May and had moved and hidden them in several locations around the car workshop so by the time we got our hands on them, they were already wild. Trapping them has been a slow process! We usually used Mama and food as bait and then if they were extraordinarily hungry and couldn’t wait for Mama to bring the food to them, they came to eat alongside her and – wham – a perfect opportunity to grab them by the scruff of the neck. After locking Miss Tabby in the bathroom whilst deciding whom we could give her to, my neighbour Agnes mentioned that our pastor’s wife was looking for one. Miss Tabby was swiftly dispatched an hour later.

Toulouse (above, in our sink) was caught a few days later and we gave her to Mariam, our house help. She was petrified but calmed down after a day. Was hard to let her go! People here are usually on the lookout for kittens to help them kill the mice entering their homes and eating their stash of rice, usually stored above the ceiling.

Next came the last two...hang on, you thought I’d written that Rowan had given birth to three??? To my surprise, I discovered that in fact there was another lurking in the workshop. However, Rowan helped us out in catching them. By this time, she had lost so much weight running to our house looking for her food and running back to the workshop to give it to her babies (even when we’d left other fish for them) she was tired of this process. The clever cat decided it was time they came home to us! She convinced them, although with rather a lot of hesitation from their side, to make it all the way to our front door. Tuesday night, ‘little Tremmy’ (named after my sister’s cat that’s also jet black) showed willing and...one down, one to go. A gentle soul, he adapted to our presence and touch very quickly. Mariam’s neighbour Elisabeth got the cutie.

Now we come to Miss Horror, the last one to make it into our household. Wednesday night, Rowan tried the convincing act again with her, but instead of simply following her mother into the house, Rowan was forced to feed her right in front of the front door to reassure her that everything was going to be alright. I in the meantime, snuck into the kitchen to get some dried fish to put in front of the door. Rowan squeezed her way past the mosquito net door, leaving a little crack for Horror to follow her. Wasn’t too easy, but she took the bait. After taking a little bit from the fish, Rowan padded past Eric and I who were seated like statues on the sofa and into the kitchen. Horror started off but then sensed something wasn’t quite right. She looked at each of us, dead in the eyes, we moved a little to make her a little bit more comfortable. She started backing towards the door, turned, ran towards the mosquito net door and...bang! She bounced right off it, couldn’t find the exit! I leaped up ran to the door and shut it tight before yelling a triumphant “YES!” Mission accomplished! Rowan ran back into the lounge, panicking for her enfant. After spending a noisy long weekend with Horror trying to escape every hour, we gave her to my friend Susanne, who left with her on a motorbike. Readjusting to life without kittens has been a little bit difficult for Rowan who was still crying for her baby and taking fish to Horror’s hangouts. Happily for her, she has gained weight and is getting a lot of affection from us again.

Busy week!

Hello, this is the first time this week that Sarah's been able to get herself to the offices of the extremely kind non-governmental organisation (NGO) in town to log on to the net! It's either a bike ride of 15 minutes or 10 minutes door-to-door. This has been a particularly busy week, which culminates in a 'Fete de Nations' (All-Nations party) tonight, with all the members of the mission team coming together for an Agape meal, games, singing and who knows what else. We'll try and upload some photos next week if we remember to take the camera with us! Take care of yourselves.

New Bloggers!

Hello friends, its Eric and Sarah Harris-Bafende live and more direct from the Forest Region of Guinea, West Africa! We hope you’re keeping well where you are! It’s not that we’re technophobes, on the contrary, but for one reason or another, we have been extremely reluctant to join in the blogging fever. But as some of you have desired to have more on our life here, we thought this would be a better way to communicate with you. We’ve called it Venez et Voyez (Come and See), so that you do just that, come and see what God is doing in our lives here in Macenta and the lives of our Guinean, Swiss, Ivorian, Liberian, Sierra Leonean... brothers and sisters with whom we live among. For those of you who are new to us, we'll give you a short biography of our time here in Guinea another time.

Have a great weekend!

Sarah and Eric