This morning a truck loaded down with supplies for our new kitchen arrived in front of our bridge. This event evoked an immediate response from our enthusiastic students. Everyone rushed to help, including our wonderful Karen teacher, Pearl. The first thing to be unloaded was the steel for the roof structure. Kentegee went to grab a piece of metal, and finding it too heavy for her, she asked Pearl to help her with it. Pearl replied that it was too heavy, and she would carry the bags of cement instead! ( the metal weighs maybe 50 pounds, but the cement weights 110 pounds!) Pearl found out real fast that things were just a bit heavy for her! Kentegee thought that it was really funny. She told her that she would sit and watch her carry the heavy cement! Travis told me that this is what we do with God sometimes. We tell God that if he will just throw us the money, we will take care of the missionary work ourselves! Utterly ridiculous!

We started preparing the ground for the new kitchen earlier this week, leveling and digging with great glee. When we get this kitchen finished, we will turn the current kitchen into more bedrooms so that my male students don’t have to sleep in the living room any more. Speaking of students, the 17 year olds name is Seh Doe. Back to the kitchen, we are also going to build storage space into the back of the kitchen, which is the entire reason that we are starting by building a kitchen! We need storage space really bad. Our next shipment is going to arrive by boat in a couple of weeks, and we have no place to put things. Since the rainy season has not really gotten under way like it was supposed to, we are able to build in between the showers.

And, since I mentioned rainy season, I might mention that if we do not get rain, we cannot grow rice. In this area of the world, rice means life. The people in the mountains where Ben is are looking very seriously at starvation if the rains do not get serious soon. Already, they are in trouble. For American standards, we would be very pleased with the rainy season so far. A nice heavy shower once in a while, but I guess it is supposed to rain like crazy most of the time, and that makes for good rice crops.  It has only flooded under the house twice so far, and I guess that is a big problem. The water is supposed to come up to the floor of the house quite often I am told. I have been worried about not having life jackets, but then like I said, so far we have not had to swim once. We need to pray for rain so that the people here do not starve. I could handle a few floods in my house if it saves lives.