A little more patience

Hi everybody! I'm off today to a retreat center just outside of Brazza for a weeklong seminar. It's called "Sharpening Your Interpersonal Skills" and is offered by the CMA missionaries here. I'm excited because the group is a mix of Congolese and white people, so should be some interesting dynamics, although I don't feel recovered from my village stint, like I'm still walking around in a fog, so we'll see how it goes. Anyway, the point is I won't have Internet again until Friday.

Here are a few photos to sate your curiosity about my trip until I can post more next weekend. BTW, MY MOM IS COMING TO CONGO!!! She gets here the 21st, and I'm sure we'll have lots of interesting things to post during her 3 week stay.

This is at the house where I stayed. This is Ella making "cakes." She's forming dough balls which will then be fried. It was interesting learning about all the little home industries, ways of making money, which all seemed to be way more work than was worth it for whatever measly profit they took home. But the cake was pretty good. Ella is my age, 25, but she has 4 kids ages 6 months to 8 years. Here are some of the kids that lived in the house with me. The 3 girls Nypsia, Gipsy, and baby Bertille are Ella's and the little boy, Ariel, is their cousin. Three married couples live in the house: Pastor Bom and his wife and two of their children, Ella and Alban, with their spouses and their children. It was about 10 people total, although at one point some other semi-distantly related children were also living in the house and Ella's husband was never actually there because he works in a different town.