Hello! I apologize for not blogging the last couple days.  I have wonderful news though!!!! our frozen container arrived!!!!! Thank you to all the people who were praying about it! Everyone is very excited.  The galley staff has had some frustrations though.  It takes a while to thaw out 200+ KG of meat and some people don't understand that, so there have been some complaints that we didn't have meat today at lunch (the container came yesterday). But the good thing is that the container came and soon we will have meat!
On Tuesday we had a big luncheon for the Norwegian vision team.  We have vision teams come from different countries where MercyShips has offices to visit us and get a 'vision' of what we are doing and how they can support us.  I was asked to make the dessert. yay! here are some pictures:

Chocolate pecan tort with a honey chocolate frosting.

We had a mandatory safety training that we had to go to today.  Part of the training was about cross cultural communication.  We watched a video of a lady named Mary (She was the first west African crew member to serve with mercyships) giving a talk about cross cultural communication.  It was a wonderful talk! One of the things that i was struck with is that the West African culture is very rooted in tradition.  Their culture is very focused on respect and politeness.  One of the things that she said was that if someone came over to visit and they happened to still be there at meal time you had to invite them to eat even if you hated them.  You would never ever not invite them to eat with you because that would be so impolite.  Another interesting fact: if you are talking to someone older than you or someone with authority it is very impolite to cross your legs (that went for men and women).  I thought that was kind of strange.  In the West African mindset, if you dress nicely you obviously have enough resources to help someone else.  That is why they are always dressed up in lovely clothes.  Dressing nicely shows that you are in a position of fortune.  If you dress casually you are non verbally saying that you don't have enough money to dress yourself nicely so how can you help anyone else? that was a new piece of information to me.

On another note, today i sewed the worst seam of my life! I borrowed a sewing machine from the ship, had to find a south African adapter(it can be so frustrating have all these different types of plugs), and then proceeded to get extremely frustrated.  For anyone who knows sewing read on, for anyone who doesn't this might just confuse you :) basically there was no weight between the pressing foot and the little things under it that move the fabric.  So when you stopped to adjust the fabric or smooth out the wrinkles the fabric would slide all over the place and you'd have an extremely crooked seam.  When i was actually sewing i had to be extremely careful to pull the fabric in a straight line because if i let go for even a millisecond the fabric would slide way out of place.  it was a miserable experience...but this is Africa so what can i say? At least my fabric won't fray now :)

wow this is a pretty long post!  My final words are Jeff and Greta left today.  I'm very sad to see them go.  They were such a huge blessing.  I will miss them greatly.