Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Open House in Marlette

So I said I would fill you in about the open house we had in Marlette. First of all it was really fun! We were in the Marlette train depot and from 1 to 2 we had a family pot-luck and then from 2 to 5 we had an open house for anyone who wanted to come.Jason, Emily, Aunt Doris, Aunt Marilyn, and Aunt Chris chatting during the family time.

We had a great time hanging out with our family and there were quite a few visitors who dropped in. Most of the time we were just mingling, but we also did a few skits in Creole at different times for the audience. First we pretended that I was trying to buy some vegetables from Jason at the market. We had encore requests, so we did a similar market skit later too. We also demonstrated how the people in some of the tribes in Guinea-Bissau traditionally greet each other – not with “hi” or “good morning” but with a more obvious thing like “you are sitting” or “you are eating” to which the person being greeted replies “yes, and you are passing” (or standing or walking, etc.) We stopped every few lines to translate so people could hear the how the language sounds in conversation and still understand what was going on.

The last time we got up to talk Jason decided it would be cool if I pretended to be a Guinean woman telling a story of a time when I was pregnant and went to the hospital to have my baby, since that whole process is so different over there than it is in the States. So I told the story in Creole, stopping every sentence or so for Jason to translate. People were laughing, so we must've been doing something right!

We also had a group question and answer time and people were asking great questions. It gave us an opportunity to talk about the way that the people in Guinea-Bissau live, what they like, what their greatest challenges are, what we want to do when we go back there, why we want to go there at all, and lots of other things like that.


All-in-all it was a great day!


All of the Grandparents who were at our party: Grandma Huggins, Grandpa Huntoon, Grandma Huntoon, me, Jase, Great-Grandma Taylor, Grandma Atkins, Grandpa Atkins.


Monday, September 22, 2008

Flipped Out

Here is a shot of me with my hair flipped out.

That's how I've been wearing the new short locks most days. You might also notice that I am wearing a hoodie. Yes, I am cold and tomorrow is officially only the
first day of fall... I don't know if I'm going to survive in Michigan until January. You might start seeing me in layers of hoodies :-)

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Jobs and Hair

I haven't blogged in so long and many things have been happening lately. Jason and I sent out our first newsletters and we had a fantastic open house in Marlette to talk to people about what we have been and are going to be doing in Guinea-Bissau (pictures and stories in a blog to follow). We both got part-time jobs to pay for gas and other little expenses over the next few months. Jason is working in the shipping department at Champion Bus Factory and I am working at Tim Hortons. For those of you who are not from Michigan or Canada Tim Hortons is a donut / coffee / sandwich chain. It's a little bit like Dunkin Donuts or Shipleys but it has a larger variety of food and the coffees are more like a Starbucks (expect that our cappuccinos do come out of a machine).


The biggest thing that has happened to me is that I donated 10 inches of my hair. I've been talking about doing it for so long that Jason didn't think I ever would, so of course I had to prove him wrong.



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As you can see, the long hair was just too hot. I pulled it up almost everyday.

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This is a picture of me right after the bulk of the hair was chopped off.

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And here's a picture a few days after the cut. Recently I've been flipping it out at the bottom and I like that better, but I don't have a picture of that yet. I'll post one soon and you can tell me which one you like better :-)