As many of you know, our 3 little fair-haired kiddos are the only white people under the age of 20 in this town (and probably for quite some surrounding distance as well). There are a few other families usually here, who are currently in the US, leaving my mzungu (foreign) kids for this year. So… whenever we go out we attract attention, which is putting it mildly. I could hide in a burka and people would still know I’m the white lady with twin boys (that’s what they keep saying anyway).

This morning started out with the boys normal morning walk. Only today they came across a family with a line of Value Village cast-off sheets for sale. Since I love to buy these for sewing things around the house (cheap, sometimes cute cotton? yes!) Kent stopped and looked. He deemed it worth bringing me back later. Well, the kids didn’t want to be left home with nothing else to do on a Saturday morning, so all five of us ventured down the road on foot smiling, waving and trying not to be annoyed at so many pairs of curious eyes. We wound our way down into a residential area just 1/2 mile from our house and started ‘shopping’. The more we stay in one place, the more the crowd has time to gather, and soon there were around 20 children hanging around looking at our 3.

James has become accustomed to this. It no longer scares him. The kids mean no harm. They’re just curious. After all, we are aliens. And inevitably, there is some kind of game that begins whether children have a common language and culture or not. But as aliens, we don’t know the right games (at least not yet), so new games are invented. For the next little while I will describe one of these unique alien games in separate posts, so you can get a feel for life here.

Game I: Space Bubble
The Space Bubble game involves the alien trying to get the non-alien into his space bubble. He wins by tagging (much like traditional ‘tag’), but the alien is always ‘it’. This is the game James was soon playing with most of the children in the road (between moments of dodging motorcycles) this morning. And lest you Eeyore-types out there think the kids are secretly terrorizing each other in this game, stand corrected. I assure you both aliens and non-aliens are having a blast playing this Space Bubble game. It’s only the mortified mother-ship who doesn’t enjoy it…

I didn’t have my camera to show you the game in action, but I do have a previous example of the Space Bubble game recorded from a few months back when we visited the one and only playground in town at a nearby orphanage school. Here Joel swings inside his Space Bubble. He’s not trying very hard to win the game…

In a really active game of Space Bubble, all players are in constant motion around/within the invisible bubble, which looks much like a kindergarten soccer game with 12 players mobbed around the ball roving down the field and back again.

Don’t you just love toddlers? They are into everything and trying every new button they can reach to push. Fortunately, they are small enough to fit almost anywhere! Everyone has a picture of themselves as a toddler fitting somewhere strange, right? They look so cute sitting in the dryer, inside a truck tire, etc. Well, James fit into one of our packing boxes once. Joel fit into a laundry basket of warm laundry (who wouldn’t like that?). And Anna chose a shopping basket.

Local artisans weave these baskets for common shopping. I think these are wonderful, but more recently plastic versions in bright colors offer a much more water-proof shopping experience. Anyway, here’s my Anna-in-a-basket! So little, but not for so long…

I’m out of here. That’s enough of that. (As you can see it was purple day.)

In true European style houses here are traditionally built without closets. How else could those 4 kids get into the land of Narnia?? They needed a wardrobe! (or armoire if you will) Well, we have 3 bedrooms and no armoires built yet, so everything was folded and put back in certain boxes. I have nothing but admiration for the simplicity of an organized life without closets, but I just have to have somewhere to put those Christmas decorations and clothes that will fit the kid next year!

Life in boxes leaves something to be desired, because the item you need right away is inevitably at the bottom of the box! Some friends let us babysit 3 of their bookshelves, which in a matter of minutes were converted into a sort of ‘closet’ with stacks of shirts and pants for each bedroom.

Meanwhile Kent installed in our bedroom built-in shelving (currently housing my growing collection of cookbooks). With concrete walls it’s not too complicated to drill in small supports, measure your boards, finish them and voila! shelving. It’s far easier to line something up on the wall than to build a stand-alone piece that can never be exactly square (and may not look square against a slightly crooked wall even if it really is, in fact, square!)

Anna’s room is by far the smallest at about 7 ft x 10 ft, and one day a design for built-in shelving across the short side came to me. Kent made it happen. I painted it white… a few times, and ta-da! Anna’s closet:

Someday we may put a curtain or door on the front, but we’re going for function first and I kind of like this look anyway. There was something really wonderful about hanging her dresses up instead of mashing them into another box! The hanging rod is fashioned of cheap PVC pipe leftover from our plumbing expedition and painted black instead of chalk blue/gray. Kent wondered, “So does getting the FIRST closet make up for getting the LAST bed?”

Yes, Anna is still in her PackNPlay. We’ve been working with the carpenters every few days for almost 2 months. My design was not as simple as it could have been. We were supposed to pick it up yesterday, but Kent found the unfinished pieces still laying around. We ordered it from one of the most talented woodworkers in town, and he does beautiful work, but he sets his own schedule… because he can.

The bed will happen.

Someday.

Now I just need to paint her walls…

But I’ll save my saga with “blue lagoon” local paint for another post on another day!

Aside from music and the strength of relationships, one of my favorite things about life in Congo is the incredible fabrics! Local fabrics are brought from all over West Africa (I’ve heard it said that Dakar is the ‘Paris’ of African fashion…), and sold in 6 meter lengths (or 6 yards sometimes). With 6 meters, there is are endless possibilities for clothes. Combinations we’ve used: 2 boys shirts + 4 boys pants, long women’s dress + men’s dress shirt to match, or 2 women’s skirts +headscarf + fancy shirt. Endless. I’m serious.
So here are the kitenge the boys picked out for my birthday:

And then they took me out to a new Indian restaurant in town. I’m usually not too thrilled about foreign spicy foods, but we have been there a couple times already and I was drooling over the possibility of yet another order of coconut curry chicken. It’s slightly sweet, very creamy with a tiny kick to make it interesting. But it would already be interesting just for the fact that there are huge chunks of chicken breast, which you cannot buy here. So we hung out, drinking cold sodas and waiting for the creamy goodness to arrive…

It’s here! The pictures may not do it justice, but I assure you it was delicious! (just ignore the guy with beer in the background) And I prefer posed pictures, while Kent, who obviously had the camera, prefers to catch people off guard.

…and as a tribute to his tenacity I post an action shot just for Kent. Anna and I enjoying hot cheese naan with our coconut curry:

One side benefit to Kent snapping pictures a mile a minute, is that we sometimes get some incredible shots. Anna was in the mood for posing, and this one is my favorite! Who needs presents?

Some friends came with us, Joey and Kathleen, and all the pictures we got with these wonderful friends look much less than wonderful. But they came, ate and had fun with us! (it’s almost a good shot of our car sadly enough…)

Then we relaxed at home, enjoyed the day, and ended a light dinner with an indulgent ‘Tres Leches’ cake (inspired by thepioneerwoman.com). It’s essentially a sponge cake soaked in sweet cream and topped with whipped cream, so it’s not for anyone on a diet or anyone with a heart problem for that matter! But Kent went out of his way to make a fantastic cake just like I wanted – what a guy! After her first bite, our British friend called it ‘gorgeous’! I agree.

The butterfat at its best:

Here’s what Anna thinks:

Won’t my mouth open a bit wider?