Beer and Ice Cream

Today we arose early for Dale's preaching class. I had the opportunity to sit in for while and take a picture of the class for Dale. I hope you are reading http://stilessabbatical.blogspot.com along with my ramblings. Dale has been challenged by some very probing questions from his students "Can we give communion to known sinners?" and such. I also had a networking informal class this morning and discussed the Domain Name Service. This is really exciting stuff for us geeks and they are always asking questions which make me think about the best way to present this material.

Following that we had to make a run to the Catholic Cooking School (don't ask me how to cook a Catholic). They make a wide assortment of food there: noodles, mini-pizzas, ravioli, spaghetti sauce and samosas, just to name a few. Then off to the beverage store and then the "super market" to get juice and rice and TP. Our little Mama Eta's store was closed so we had to load the truck with the ice cream and send Dale home with that precious cargo. Caleb and I walked home to get more juice and rice along the way.

We still marvel at the most interesting things that happen. When we return a case of beer the fellow at the beer store takes our plastic case of 20 empties and gets a perfectly good full case (1/2 Tusker and 1/2 Serengheti). He then carefully moves all of the empty bottles out of our case and into the full bottle case and the full bottles back into the case we brought. Why? Just asking. Additionally, when we shop at the little super market it is laid out just like Cub. The staples (cooking oil, etc.) are in the far corner and the candy is right up front. A typical candy bar costs $2 but now that we have all run out of our stashes of treats, the highway robbery is worth it.

Caleb and I love walking down the main market street and looking at all there is. One shop is 8 or so manual sewing machines lined up along the sidewalk with each seamstress and seamster (I can't find a word for a male seam person) working away and watching the parade of shoppers. We even found a video game arcade. The arcade has poker as well so children are not allowed. Anyway, after a few blocks we came to the farmer's market, found more Pineapple Juice and two kilos (mbili kilo) of rice. I pick the stand based on the smile of the merchant. With our final shopping items in hand we headed back to help get things back up stairs and into the refrigerator. A successful day.

For entertainment tonight we played a game and then Sharon and I watched "Hotel Rwanda" -- the story of the ethnic genocide in 1994. Nearly 800,000 were killed by rebel forces. Considering that Rwanda is a small country of 7 million wedged between Tanzania and Congo it is rather frightening to watch what went on so close by. After one watches a movie like that we always ask "where was I when this was going on?". Anyway watch it if you can and you will get a good idea of what this part of the world looks like. On that not-so-bright note I will say good night.