Guinea-style Thanksgiving

I'm losing track of what week this is as far as how long I've been here. I do know that in another 10 days, it'll have been 2 months. At times it's hard to believe it's almost been that long, and at other times, I feel like this is home.

We had a Thanksgiving celebration today at the mission center. Since we have some Canadians, some Americans, and some people who don't even have a Thanksgiving (Columbian, Brasilians, etc), we decided to celebrate Thanksgiving somewhere between the Canadian and American versions. It was a fun day starting with a football game in the morning, big meal at 2, dessert at 5, and some ultimate frisbee and volleyball (and/or a movie) to finish it off. Overall, it was a great day, and a good reminder of all the things I have to be thankful for.

This week was a bit of a different schedule due to Thanksgiving today (the school had the day off) and Day of Prayer on Monday. Actually, I'd like to invite you to participate in Day of Prayer next time -- it's the first Monday of every month. On that day, New Tribers all over the world get together and pray for various things going on wherever they are, other missionaries around the world, friends who have needs, or whatever comes up. It's a good time of getting together for some corporate prayer, and I think it's cool that they take some time out of the day to do it, although it meant I didn't have my computer class.

Computer class is going well. As I continue to teach Colton various things in Python, I keep finding that I have to scramble a bit to stay ahead. He catches on pretty quickly! Meanwhile, the Middle School boys are doing well with their typing, but they both seem to really enjoy programming in Scratch. I've been working with them on a game that involves a character at the bottom of the screen catching a character that repeatedly falls from the top of the screen. As the score goes up, the falling character goes faster, and if the one at the bottom doesn't catch him, they lose a life. It's great because there are all kinds of programming concepts that go into it, but at the same time, the students get excited because they're creating a computer game.

On another note, I heard this morning that there's propane in Guinea! So far, we were able to get 21 bottles filled down in Conakry, so now we just have to figure out how to get them back here to our village and how to get the rest filled, but I think everyone's relieved to be able to avoid permanently cooking over fires. That's definitely a praise for a lot of people -- God is good!