Oh! My, this morning the mothers descended upon the Child Center like a herd of locust. I believe we broke our record this morning. We saw 144 children in a 3 ½ hours. There is no way to describe the amount of noise 144 mothers, children and crying babies can make! And on top of that the electricity was off! The Child Center is not connected to the generator; it is not big enough to run both the mission house and the Child Center. Mr. Iddrisu was keeping records with the aid of the battery in his cell phone. Fortunately it rained heavily last night so it was a little cooler today.
We knew that we were going to have lots of mothers this morning so we changed up the way we normally do things. The Child Center has 2 doors we normally only let the mothers come through one of the doors but today we sat up a station for Mr. Iddrisu at the back door; we funneled all the new babies through his station which freed Zorash to find the charts and weigh the old babies. It worked very well.
This afternoon we went to the grinding mill and ground the peanuts into paste for the malnourished children. After we grind, the mill has to be dismantled and cleaned. There is quite a lot of peanut butter left in the machine. After we get the bulk of the peanut butter out they invite the neighborhood children to come in and clean the machine with their hands and fingers; it is sort of like licking the bowl after Mom makes a cake. Of course Mom washes the bowl afterwards; the grinding mill is not washed; the next lady just dumps whatever she has to grind into the machine and the grinding begins again. The grinding mill gets really hot when it is working so I don’t think that germs can live in it but it is just the thought of it.
The electricity men finally came this morning to see why we did not have electricity. A tree had fallen in the neighbor’s yard, broken the lines and it had blown the fuse on the transformer at the end of the lane. It took most of the afternoon to get the power back on. After they left they checked the Child Center. The Child Center is on a pre-paid meter and they said that it had been more than 100 days since we had recharged the meter so the meter cut off and had to be reactivated. We still had lots of credit on the meter but that does not matter it still locks after 100 days of not being recharged. They said that it is programmed that way so the electric company can collect their monthly meter fees. How annoying!
Thank you for all the love, prayers and support.
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
