Sunday, February 13, 2011

Another Day, Another Strike

I know there are some people in the world who love the snow, but I am not one of them! I love being back in the land of perpetual summer! Second only to the wonderful warmth are the piles of fresh fruits and veggies. Yesterday we had deep red tomatoes that had just been picked off of someone's vine that morning. We got a whole bag of them for 50 cents and I think we ate half of the bag for lunch :-)

We went to a birthday party this weekend for the little girl of some other missionaries here. Her dad, Jens, is from Germany and her mom, Anna, is from Ivory Coast. While we were eating my friend Anna took Savannah in the other room for a minute. When she walked back in she turned around and this is what I saw:
Savannah looked so cute peeking out and I laughed so hard!!!!!

Cooking is always a challenge the first week back. It always takes a few days to get the dishes and the cooking stuff unpacked, washed, and put away; and it takes several trips to the market to get my kitchen stocked with all of the different ingredients I need to cook from scratch. This time I thought I had a great plan – I bought peanut butter, jelly, and tuna in Dakar on our way down. The only thing that I was missing was bread. Since there are little huts that bake bread everyday on every street, my plan was to have sandwiches for a few days until I could get the house in order. Great plan right? The only problem was when we got here all of the bread bakers in the city were on strike!

The government fixes the price of a lot of different things here and bread is one of them. A loaf of french bread is 20 cents anywhere you go in the city. The problem with that is the price of flour has risen and the bread makers haven't been making any money. The bread makers decided that they had to raise the price to 30 cents. The people refused to pay 30 cents and the bread workers went on strike. I've seen the taxi drivers strike, the rice sellers strike, the postal workers strike, and the teachers strike, but I did not anticipate a bread worker strike right when we got back! After about 4 days they did get it resolved. They bread makers decided to make slightly smaller loaves and sell them for 20 cents :-)

In the Kitchen with my darling little girl in her dress from Aunt Rachel


Savannah can sleep anywhere but she especially likes her monkey bed :-)

3 comments:

Paul Atkins said...

Cute, cute, cute!

Paul Atkins said...

Cute, cute, cute!

Rachel Dawn said...

Your little girl is so way cute! Funny about the bread strike...you just never know in these lands. :) Blessings! --Rachel