Beginning a New Life in a New Place

Well we are here in Sierra Leone. We are having difficulties with getting pictures to download. The internet service here is rather sporadic. We will try to add pictures when we can, but still want to let you know what is going on here.

We left Provo on Saturday, March 14, at 5:45 a.m. We flew to JFK in New York. We had a short layover there which enabled us to see our daughter and our niece. It was great to see Kim and Brittany. We only had about 30 minutes with them, but were glad to at least be able to talk for a little and give hugs and kisses before heading off. We left New York about 4:40 p.m. and arrived in Ghana at 7:00 a.m. We had a 6 hour layover their then continued on to Sierra Leone--arriving at about 3:30. We were met there by the Assistants to the Mission President. They helped us collect our luggage and get us abroad the hovercraft (spelling ?) which we took over to Freetown. The airport in Sierra Leone is across a large harbor (about 6 miles across) to Freetown. When you come into Sierra Leone, you either take the hovercraft, a ferry, a helicopter, a pelican (speedboat) or drive. Once we got across the harbor, we were met by President and Sister Squires. They are a great couple and are working so hard to help the people here in Sierra Leone.

They took us home and the other mission couple had fixed dinner so we ate dinner with the other 2 couples and then settled in for the night.

Mondays are preparation days (or our days to wash clothes, shop, etc.). We went to the grocery store and were shocked at the prices of the food. We spent over $100 and came out with a small box of groceries--these were not exotic food choices (cereal, bread, cans of corn beef, a jar of jam, etc.)

To let you in on some of the interesting things around here. Our apartment electricity is furnished by a generator. When we are at the office, the generator is turned off. Our water during the dry season (probably until July) is furnished by hauling water in a watertank. We have already hauled two loads of water--that is our job since our vehicle has the water tank. The water pressure is provided by elevating the storage tank so you can imagine the water pressure is not very much.

Most of the roads around the city are dirt roads, although they are named. The streets are very crowded. Cars will stop anywhere in order to let people in and out. You will have to learn how to be a defensive driver here. It is alot like Cambodia--and probably lots of other cities in the world.

Street vendors are everywhere selling whatever they can. The native people have very little and live in corrigated tin homes. The younger children are sent to get water in 5 gallon jugs, which they then carry back on their heads.

When the rainy season started we are told it will get up to 200 inches of rain. We are also told the rain storms are amazing here. We will have to report on that later.

When you think of Africa, you think of lots of animals. We have monkeys and lizards down at the mission office, but other than the dogs on the street that is all the wild animals we have seen.

We do sleep under a mosquito net which is rather cool. The first one we had didn't have a support in the middle so we felt that the netting was always in our faces. But now that we have replaced it, it works great. Hopefully we can get a picture of it so that you can see how good it looks.

The money system here is very interesting as well. There are $3,000 leones to the dollor. Everything is done in cash. Since the highest bill they generally give you is 5,000 leones, it is common for to carry around 500,000 to 1,000,000 leones. We were told to put our credit cards away as we won't be able to use them here.

We are learning lots and enjoying the experience. Our first big challenge will be learning to get around without a very good map of the city--they don't have street names on the map. Blaine's sense of direction is very turned around here. He is hoping to rectify that soon. That very rarely happens to him, so he is trying to get his head around it all.

That about catches you up with our life so far. We will try to add pictures as we can, but until then hopefully a thousand words paints a picture.