Family

Father and Son serving lunch.

Family is great! At least most of the families I took photos of this week are. Some aren’t, so I waged war on them. But we’ll leave that topic for the last paragraph.

Pictured above: Fernando (left) the mission school cook, and his son, Matthew (right), the mission office administrator. For the last few weeks Matthew and Glenn (our short termer, below) have been working on updating school files and doing vision screening with the school children. At lunch-time, they pitch in and help Fernando dish up food for +/- 200 kids!

Mom and daughter

This is Tendai and Heather. They are in the process of becoming family (they along with Heather’s husband, Rick, of course). Isn’t she cute?

Here are some of the other families who came our way recently.

These widowed moms and grannies (and the children in their care) are facing hungry times as they’ve run out of their year’s food supply and are still months away from a new crop. They have received some help from their local churches and now also receive mission help to feed their families.

This new family came for help this week. Here, Dwight, Rick and Charles (and Heather and I—not in photo) find out more about the family’s situation.

The kids pose for a shot.

Cute! The little boy showed us his scar from a crocodile bite that apparently happened earlier this year.

What a brave little soul!

And last but not least in the “Great Family” category, is my own family. This week we happily welcomed my cousin, Murray, from Canada. According to local culture, cousins are considered sisters and brothers, so here he’s referred to as my “mano” or brother. I can live with that ☺

He’s come to spend some time with us and get stuck into any work we send his way. Here, he and Dwight move a bathroom cupboard (that Dwight built) into the house. Yayyy!



So, now for the week’s family that was "not-great”. Big, yes, but not great at all!

These are stink bugs.

This is huge family of stink bugs figured they’d just move into my house. At first they clustered in doorway corners, 30-50 of them at a time. I lost no time at all with my handy can of RAID but they just kept coming back from goodness knows where. So I did a thorough search outside our house and discovered, to my immense displeasure, that hundreds of them had taken up residence (or hatched) in our rafters and between the mud bricks of our home!

(They would be the light dots all over the place.)

So I panicked and went crazy alternating spraying them with that trusty can of RAID, followed by a dousing them to wash them away with the water hose.

When stink bugs feel threatened, they…stink. So it was quite the smelly, drawn-out battle indeed as I kept spraying and they kept pouring out through the cracks of our house. At one point I decided I should do a Google search about the problem to see if I could get some ideas.

You know, any unpleasant experience in life can be a lesson of some sort. And even though this one didn’t have any kind of profound element (maybe one will occur to me yet...), I did learn something new. I had always thought that we had two types of stink bugs (and I think other people have also thought the same): big ones like this:


And small round ones like this:


But apparently they are one in the same, just adult and juvenile (nymph) forms. Aha. I felt both stupid and enlightened at the same time. And I'm now more diligent about killing the big ones whenever I see them.

Stink bugs (again, the dots) dropping onto the front step.

I’m not quite rid of this family yet, but I’m workin’ on it!

I’ll close with a few bug/frog shots for those of you who enjoy this kind of stuff. It is bug season, after all, so they present the best photo ops right now.

Praying mantises in the house:

By the kitchen window

And on top of the cupboard.

They eat bugs but I'm guessing probably not stink bugs.

A tree frog who hangs out on our veranda catching bugs, here on top of the dart board. #2 brave soul of this blog post! He's just lucky I wasn't throwing darts.

And, later, “window shopping”.

It's also cicada time again.

Cicadas are noisy, rather ugly, and clumsy in flight, but they're a rather likable “bug” in our family’s opinion.

Well, maybe not in ALL the family’s opinion. Here, Murray smiles wide as he catches one in the house with the full intent to turf him out the door.

Good job! Now let's see if those stink bugs are gone too.