Saturday, November 2

Late yesterday afternoon, Edi and I were walking around the village meeting people when Hensi asked if Aaron would be attending the celebrations at the school for All Saints' Day.  None of us had planned to attend, but evidently the school's headmaster had wanted Aaron to come so he could do the official handover for the rain tanks from us to the school. 

After talking it over, Aaron and I decided it would be a very culturally appropriate thing for him to do.  So, for the second morning in a row, Aaron left the house while it was still a little dark outside and walked to the school to participate in the festivities.  The rest of us stayed home to teach Edi how to cut open coconuts, harvest cassava, and make cassava pudding.

She was a champ at trying new things, and our kids were fabulous teachers.  Edi got to use Aaron's bush knife since he was on the other end of the island.  She hacked open coconuts.  She pulled up cassava and chopped it off the stalk. 

Edi got dirty and sweaty with the rest of us and made everybody in the village love her because she was willing to jump into their lifestyle.

She even learned to peel cassava and scrape it without scraping her fingers in the process (something I still don't do well!).  We decided that she had a little more time to learn how to scrape coconut.

Aaron got home early in the afternoon and finished squeezing the scraped coconut for us.  The kids whisked Edi away to learn how to play village games while Aaron and I finished getting things ready to cook the cassava pudding.  We're really enjoying having an extra member of the family!