Journey to West Africa

We stepped away from Eastern African cuisine today and decided to prepare a dish from Liberia in Western Africa. The dish we prepared was sweet potatoes, vegetables, and groundnuts served over rice with a side of cooked cabbage – a dish from Liberia.  
The parents of our friend, Scott Carlson, were called to serve in the Liberia mission earlier this year. Since then Andrew and I have been trying to convince Scott and his wife Mackenzie to travel with us to Western Africa while their parents are serving there. After traveling to Eastern and Southern Africa with think it would be a great experience to compare it with that of Western Africa. We have heard that the cuisine in Western Africa is great, which is enough to make us want to explore it.

Today at work we spent the day going through the data we entered, understanding the implication of the numbers. We can definitely tell that some AEDOS did a better job collecting the data than others, which we are grateful for. We will not know the implications of the data until we receive further survey results from Malingunde and Kasungu, which should be coming in at the end of this week.

Today we learned that the lady in the front office, Elizabeth, is suffering from Malaria. She started feeling sick over the weekend and hasn’t been in the office all week long. While we are very sorry that she is sick and pray that she recovers quickly, this experience reminds us that we need to be extra careful with out health while we are here in Africa.  

All the staff in the CBF office are great. Elizabeth (front desk), Maness (reception), Herold (finance), Ben (activists director), Gibson (technical director), Moses (program director), and Thwango (analyst) have all made our time in Malawi so special. Thank you!

(Below: Andrew’s post)

Most of today was spent cranking away at the office it’s hard to recall the specifics!

The past few days honestly seemed to blend together as we type away in the office. It’s been a good opportunity to research though. While we travel I feel like managing affairs for home, or for the future is always quite challenging, but the chance to chip away at it all is quite satisfying.

My highlight today was either the delicious Namibian food we made this evening… Or the golden state warriors winning the NBA title. Hard to decide.