Monday, February 23

We so often get asked, "What does a normal day look like for your family?"  There is no NORMAL for our lives here, but often normal looks like school for me and the kids.  Last night, normal looked like trying a new recipe with my sweet friend Eta.  She had given me a recipe for chicken wings, a much loved delicacy here since the frozen wings have to be shipped in from Honiara.  The recipe wasn't very specific, and as I kept asking her more and more questions, she finally admitted that she had never cooked this particular recipe.  

So, as a one-time treat, I asked one of our amazing SITAG colleagues to send out a 2 kilogram packet of frozen chicken wings on the Kosco.  Before church, I marinated the chicken with some grated ginger from our garden.  After church, I gathered all of my chopped goodies (like onion and greens) and headed down to Josephine's kitchen where I found Eta waiting for me.  Benjamin came down to help me, and while he was there, he earned quite the name for himself as a willing worker and a great chef.

We had so much fun cooking the wings in a big pot on the open fire.  I brought some rice, too, and Josephine got it started on a smaller fire.  We brought some small solar lights down with us, but I discovered that my friends are used to having zero lights.  If they need to see if the food is cooked, they just pull out a burning stick from the fire and hold it up over the pot!  When we were finished, everybody got a taste, even Kiko who had dropped by in the middle of the cooking.

This morning, "normal" looked like Aaron working alongside our community for several hours in the blazing hot sun.  They cleaned up the church grounds in anticipation of St. Matthias Day celebrations tomorrow.  We made a couple of big bowls of popcorn to help replenish the salt lost in all of the sweating that was going on.  After lunch, Aaron went back out into the community with his computer and worked to fill in some gaps in his picture dictionary.  He's trying to fill in as many holes in his vocabulary accumulation as he can.