Always Keeping Us On our Toes

We had another busy weekend! After our kids activity on Saturday we hung out around the house (still no water..) and eventually went to choir practice. Dinner was quick and then we watched Mr. Deeds on tv.

Sunday was church again, only one more church service left! We waited a long time after church while Catherine was talking so by the time we got home Priscilla already had the nshima done. We made a few other things and then sat down for lunch. The afternoon was just filled with relaxation and journaling. Then at 4 we headed off to our youth activity at the Kasompe congregation. We had our bit prepared as usual, and when we got there one of the leaders came and started talking with us. He had this pamphlet entitled "Christian?" and he started reading it. We thought he was just practicing his English because he would pause at certain words and ask us if he was saying them right. Then he handed it to us to finish reading. And THEN he said, so you'll teach this today. I hope our faces didn't show the shock. We hoped he was just translating wrong, and he was saying, he was going to teach this today. Nope. WE were supposed to teach this..so much for our preplanned activities...So we quickly tried to scribble out some notes on this pamphlet, discussion points, questions to ask etc. and then when everyone got there we started. I don't know how we pulled it off..but we did, and the "lesson" even lasted about 30 minutes which I was pretty impressed with. We went into announcements and then did the offering and then they asked us if we had anything else to say. We decided to teach them a song, and then they requested a second one when we were done. That pretty much wrapped up the event and we went outside to wait for the taxi (our original driver is back to work..) to take us home. When we got back Catherine was in bed, she hadn't been feeling well, so we started dinner, and still had no water...so no doing the dishes again. The Sunday night movie was Time Cop, which neither of us had ever seen, but it kept us enthralled trying to figure out who was where when.

Monday we still had no water-but somewhere in the morning it came back on! So Ashley did some laundry (much to her excitement..you'd be surprised at the things we get excited about here..) and I watched Meet the Fockers again for something to do. We again weren't sure how lunch was going to work, Catherine was still in bed not feeling well, so we decided to avoid the issue altogether and go into town for lunch. I had my first Vegetable Sharwama, which consisted of some cream sauce, fries, lettuce, green peppers and pickles wrapped in a tortilla. If you've ever tasted a fried pickle, the taste was similar, and it was another pretty exciting thing for the day. Ashley's meal didn't turn out to be so good, so we stopped by Pie City next so she could get a meat pie. Then we went to the bureau to exchange some more money, for the last time hopefully. And then we went to Nono's Ice Cream Parlor again-they had chocolate which pretty much made my day (up until that point). We sat and ate our cones and these two guys were outside the store with movies they were selling. We really wanted to look at what they had-but wouldn't you know, the one time we actually want to be bothered they ignored us and eventually walked away.

From Nono's we went to the post office, my mom had informed me she had sent a package and I had been anxiously awaiting it's arrival for about a week. And it was there! News magazines, pictures, cards (Thank you Stacie! I love it!!!), Twizzlers, and the glorious second book in the Twilight Saga. It was perfection in an envelope :) I had to force myself not to open it right there and wait until we got home-we still had a couple stops to make. We had to wait a while at the post office and they wanted ID-which luckily I had my school ID with me, and know my passport number by heart or I don't think they would have given it to me. We stopped at the bakery for bread and then moved onto ShopRite. Another mystery unfolded before us ( I think I could write a book about all the unsolved mysteries of this place..)-it was PACKED. More packed than we had ever seen it, and at first we thought it was just a busy time to be there. We went down our list getting our groceries, it was a bit difficult with all the people there, but we finally had everything we needed and went to find a place in the very very long lines. We realized that most people were paying with these vouchers-dozens of them. Worth up to 50,000 Kwacha (about ten US dollars). There was definitley some promotion going on that we didn't know about-but we could not figure out where people had gotten all these vouchers. We tried to ask about it later, but we had no luck, our host family had no idea..or we weren't explaining it so that they could understand..either way..we still have no idea. Add it to the list of unsolved mysteries...

We got home about 4:45 and unpacked all our groceries and then I allowed myself to open my package. I spent the evening lost in my book until dinner time, garlic bread and pasta again and we watched the new episode of Scandal! I don't know what we're going to do when we leave..we'll have to have someone email us updates... :)

Today is another pretty free day, we have to go in to town at some point to get Ashley's passport renewed for the last time, but nothing else too consuming!