Coconut Rumble

This is our house! In the upper left you can see a bit of the big mango tree. Just about everything in Ghana is made of concrete and our house is no exception. WE LOVE IT!

We went to Market Day on Thursday in downtown Anloga.  I’m sad to say we don’t have any pictures but it was awesome and insane.  Although Anloga isn’t the largest town in the region, for some reason it houses the regional market and it is quite large.  People come from all over the region to pick over produce, hardware, fuel, tools, and raw materials.  The object of our desire was an avocado.  No dice.  Both the mangos and the avocados are still ripening, and we’ll know when they’re ready because we have a massive tree of the former in our front yard.

We’ve been getting more familiar with the both the community and our microfinance operations here but we still have a lot to learn.  The language is quite a mouthful and uses a bunch of sounds and tones we don’t get down on in the US.  No clicks though, so that’s one less thing to worry about.  We’re working on it and will surely be fluent in minutes.

This picture is unrelated to anything except that no matter what we're doing there are lizards scuttling around. They're to Anloga like squirrels are to Seattle.

Today we had some sort of booze cruise planned but it ended up not happening.  Instead we had our handyman install a sink in our kitchen.  Even better!  Plans for home improvement abound and we’ll be ordering some wood this week to make shelves for some kind of storage.  Mounting anything on the walls is pretty unrealistic.  It is apparently difficult to put a nail into a concrete wall.   I’m also making a meditation bench.  Wahoo!  It’s shop class with Mr. Hanberg all over again.

Papa, our handyman, snagged a couple of coconuts from a nearby tree for our afternoon snack.  He’s quite handy with a knife and popped them open with about as much effort as we use to open a can of soda.  I didn’t realize that coconuts have so much water in them.  We just drank up and then he helped us crack them open more to eat the insides.  I tried to open mine with a machete which was humorous at best and pathetic at worst.  I’ll leave you with a picture of Maggie enjoying some delicious coconut.

Isn't she adorable? I have now vowed to climb a tree and achieve more coconuts, for which she considers me an idiot. We're a good team.