Woah! Here's a ton of pictures! We'll see how this goes... I'm hoping to have captions above each one, but if the layout doesn't let me... then well, it'll probably be a bit confusing for you to figure out... These are pretty random pictures from all over. My house, work, surprise dress up parties... (but we'll get to that later). Enjoy!

A bit of an update first: I'll be travelling most of May. Monday to Thursday/Friday next week, several days the week after and most of the week after that as well. I'll be visiting some of the promoters (people who teach HIV/AIDS awareness in their respective church/youth groups) and seeing how the program is running. That way I'll be better able to see where improvements can be made... I hope to have another post up every weekend I'm home. We'll see. No promises!

Now for the pictures...

This is what I found in my freezer one day. It confused me. I can't figure out how it would have happened. How does an icicle grow upside down?? Is it an ice stalagmite? *shrug*
Every year, the CRC mission has a spiritual conference. Everyone who can in the mission from Nigeria (some came from Niger as well) spends 3 days at a place called Miango. It's a resort (in African standards) and we have sessions by a speaker almost every day. This year it was the week before Easter and was very interesting. The speaker (Dan Walcott, a teacher at Holland Christian in Michigan) spoke. He was very interesting. Taught a lot about context. Pretty interesting stuff. This was during one of our worship moments.
This is Kyle Apts, missionary here with his family (wife Ann and kids Zion and Gabbie). Kyle's practising guitar for another worship moment. He sometimes also plays at the church I usually attend.This is a random picture of the fireplace cover at Miango. Jos Plateau (plateau that the city of Jos is on) is apparently the only place in Nigeria with a temperate climate. It can go below 20! Therefore fireplaces are actually in some homes. Like mine. But you'll see that later... *suspense*
Not all bees in Africa are African killer bees...
We went on a hike one day at Miango to see a water system that brings water to a couple turbines from a dam. Very interesting and apparently took about 5 years to make. All dug by hand, the turbines brought in by hand... pretty crazy. And the turbines were made in 1908! And still going strong! Pumping out power to nearby places. Not to Jos though... anyway, this was a neat flower I saw on our hike.This is the view we saw along our hike. There's a trench beside us on our left that we were following that's about 6 feet across and probably more than 6 feet deep as well that brings the water all the way from the dam, through these hills to the edge of a very large hill, down a giant pipe and into the turbines. It still being rainy season (the first rain of the year is about to pelt us in a half an hour) the dust is still in the air, making seeing long distances a bit tough.A couple times there are some 'bridges' to carry the water across some valleys. This is one of them.Near the end of the trench/aqueduct, there's an overflow. If there's too much water in the trench, it flows over into here all the way down. It would also make an AWESOME water slide...
Not sure what this flag is for, but this is the end of the trench, where the water flows into a pipe down to the turbines. You can see the pipe here. We walked down this part of the pipe (ON the pipe, to be exact). At the edge (you can kinda see it here) it gets SUPER steep and carries down even farther and steeper to the turbines.Looking down the pipe.The view from the edge. Down there are the turbines and the house for the controls or something.
Me looking cross-eyed and creepy at the edge. Selfie!Walking back along the trench.
We had a 'Family fun night' at Miango. Lisa and Rachel, a couple of nurses from Canada, held a Jeopardy game (with Nigerian trivia). I helped them out by being 'Vanna White'
This is my office. I'm pretty sure I'm one of a very select few people who've moved to Africa from Canada to work an office job. I've moved the desk since I took the picture, but you get the idea.
We had a surprise party for Dana (also in picture). It was costume party with the theme being "Animal Kingdom". Costumes included zebra, faun, mouse, dog, rabbit, toucan and crocodile. Costumes are a bit hard to come by, so they're all homemade. I went as Tarzan, using a borrowed bean bag chair cover as my costume...Micah, one of my housemates, went as a crocodile. Pretty sweet costume. Here he is eating Dana's head. Note his actual mouth being open. Apparently he thought he could operate the cardboard mouth with his own...Next we had a scavenger hunt. The person who could find the most hidden animals would be the winner! I won!! Woot! The prize ended up being a piece of chocolate cake shoved into my face by Kari. But I got her back... Here I am about to get her again by distracting her as I take a picture...These are the test strips. They require a drop of blood and 15 minutes. Then you have the result. It's very accurate and fairly cheap. We don't charge them for doing tests, but each strip costs about $2. We tested more than 250 youth and had only one positive! Praise God!!Some test strips after they've had blood put on them. Waiting for the result to show.Gideon putting a drop of blood onto a test strip.This is a fly.This is my hammock. It sits behind my house. I spend some time in it almost every day.This is what I see when I'm in it. ahh, hammocks.... You can tell the rains have started as there's green on the ground! It's pretty cool to see everything going from brown to green! Already it's a LOT greener since I've taken this already.This is the leaky shower ceiling I talked about in my last post. Piping doesn't really get hidden much in Africa...What's more fun than a barrel of monkeys?? A barrel full of me!Eggs. Occasionally they come with a free chicken feather.Nasco is a Nigerian food packaging/manufacturing place just a few minutes away. They make cheap stuff (some of it's actually good!). They make a ton of stuff, soaps, cookies, cereals... Here's their regular Corn Flakes and the brand new FrostyZ! They're basically Frosted Flakes and not bad. Real name-brand cereal is pretty pricey. Like 10 bucks for some Rice Crispies. So we stick to the Nasco stuff.We don't have a paper towel holder OR a banana holder. So I made both in one. Out of a clothes hanger.As a nice snack every now and then, we make trail mix. Delicious!This is what I make coffee in. It's actually not bad. Coffee makers are a rarity, as well as real coffee. Most is instant. gross... So I stick to this guy. Makes about 2 big mug fulls of coffee. And cream's another 'not-gonna-happen' kinda thing, so I took powdered Coffeemate. Almost like having a Timmies in my kitchen! Ok, not even close, but it'll do. I get to take one of these guys every week for malaria. There's no cure for malaria (mainly transmitted via mosquitoes) but medication lessens the effect if you were to get it. Malaria is a HUGE killer of Africans. More than AIDS, statistically, but many people who have AIDS end up killed from malaria because their immune system is shot from AIDS and can't fight it off anymore.This is my bedroom. Pretty classy, I know. The mosquito net is pretty awesome. In a non-awesome kinda way. Quite the pain in the butt to sleep under. The bed is 6 feet long. I am 6 feet. This means my feet hang over the edge, tangling in the net.Grass is growing!! Woo!!Trees are blooming!! Okay, this kind of tree actually blooms in the dry season, but it's still really pretty!My 80GB paperweight...Power here is 220 (110 in Canada) but tends to jump around above 220 sometimes. We use these regulators on things like fridges, TVs and laptops so they don't get fried if the power ever spikes.Our living room. Not too shabby. Could use some decorations, though. If the walls weren't brick, it would make hanging things a lot easier...The fireplace! I thought it was just a wasted space since we won't be using it anytime soon... so I put a lamp in it!Pac-anapple man.Two of the Strydhorst girls, Kristen and Andrea. They had just asked me to take a family picture of them all in the tree... looked pretty neat.A flower on the tree with the sunset in the distance.That's all!

Thanks for checkin' out some of my life in Africa!

Feel free to come by anytime!

About time... sheesh.

So, it's been brought to my attention that I'm a lousy Blogger. (Thanks Carol-Lee and Nadine for the reminder).

Sorry to you all... :)

To make it up to all of you, I will write two blogs in the near future. The one which you are reading now, and the second one stuffed full of pictures! woot! You non-Facebookers will be in for a treat, these are pictures that have not graced the internet up to this point! Finally, you'll have one up on Facebook!

Where to begin?

I'm sitting here, waiting for a plumber to show up. He was supposed to be here within half an hour, but this is Africa, so that means anywhere between an hour to two days. We had our leaky shower repaired a little while ago, but when he fixed it, something else leaks, so now we've got a nice water stain in our ceiling...

The power has been on since before 6:30 this morning (it's about 11:15am now) so that's pretty sweet. Power doesn't usually stay on that long. Quite rare, actually. Lot easier to get things done when there's power on! Like charge some batteries... turns out most of mine are dead. Actually, I think a whack of them are goners. They're just mixed in with all my other batteries. Kinda annoying. I don't have anything that just takes ONE battery, so I can't test them. My camera takes 4 so it's really hard to narrow it down.

Rainy season has started here. It's quite an exciting time of year! Harmattan (the only other 'season') is very dry and even more so dusty. I've probably mentioned it in a blog before, last year maybe, but I'll refresh your memories. During Harmattan, the wind blows from the North, where the Sahara Desert is. So during this time of year, dust/sand is in the air. It settles EVERYwhere. If I insisted on keeping things dust-free, I would have to clean everything at least twice a day. Everything gets visibly dusty within hours. Pretty annoying. Especially since you're also breathing in all the dust too. My nose and throat hate Harmattan... This, along with the heat during that time of year (no cloud cover either) makes rainy season a much looked forward to event. It cools down, the dust is gone, and things start getting green... entire fields that looked like nothing but brown-red dirt suddenly transform into lush green! Grass is growing, plants are showing up, farmers are ecstatic!

Water can be quite scarce, so rains are looked upon as a blessing. Gathering water is a long, hard (and heavy) task. Every morning you'll see dozens of Nigerians with jerry cans (aka, the bucket brigade) searching for a place to fill up so they can have drinking, cooking and bathing water. When it rains, there's safe, clean, easy and available water is everywhere. One of the first times it rained this year, a Nigerian came into the one office with a HUGE grin. Asked why he was so happy, he said "I don't have to collect water for THREE days!!"

Coming from a society obsessed with buying water in plastic bottles rather than 'risk' perfectly fine tap water, it's quite the difference.

Out here, the tap water (when there is any, but don't count on it...) actually ISN'T safe to drink. We have to run it through a filter first. People who don't have a filter, have to boil it. Those who don't have gas stoves or can't afford to buy wood, are stuck drinking not-so-safe water. Recently, a tree had to be felled on our compound. It was a healthy tree, but it was growing too close to one of the retaining walls. Had the rains come before the tree was cut out and the wall repaired, the Hogerterps would've had to wade through their house. One of the guards must've been told he could keep the wood if he chopped it up, so for days all we would hear was Daniel grunting as he hacked up this big tree with an axe. He'd knocked it down then started chopping up the large trunk (about 2.5 feet in diameter). At one particular time I heard him grunting loudly, so I came out to see what what happening. After another couple swings, he chopped the trunk in two. He proudly put his foot on it and told me "It gave me wahalla, so I gave IT wahalla!" Wahalla is a Hausa word that means trouble, difficulty, pain in the butt... that kinda thing. It's also just a really fun word to say. Waaa-HALLA!!

Anyway. I'm kinda jumping around all over the place in this blog. meh. You asked for a blog, you got one! Stop being so picky...

I had pretty lousy day a few days ago. Just wasn't too much fun. I've got to do a lot of data stuff at work (pretty dull) and it's all from surveys collected in the past few years. STACKS of this stuff. And it's not organized. Well, they're in piles, which apparently counts as organization. I said to a staff member there that we NEED to have these in folders, if they get mixed up, NO one will be able to tell what's what! Years worth of work and VERY important data would be useless. A month and a half later, (on my lousy day) I was again struggling with some of this data because of the lack of organization. I explained again how we need folders to keep this info organized. The reason I was given why there still were still no folders after a month and a half? The secretary "isn't in today."

arg.

Then, the one thing that keeps me sane while I do mundane data work, my iPod, decided it hates me. Deleted all my music AND refuses to cooperate with my laptop. Meaning I have an 80Gig paperweight. Pretty sucky.

So, the plumber showed up. It's around 2 now (I took a lunch break). He barely looked at the water stained ceiling before saying something along the lines of "it's not wet..." and "I can't see any water leaking..." Meaning he doesn't think he needs to do anything about it. Even at my insistence that the giant brown mark and saggy (not to mention falling apart) ceiling was not like that before one of his guys worked on it. He did not seem at all interested in fixing it. He said he'd come back tomorrow to see if it was leaking then.

Not a whole lot else to say. It's about 3 in the afternoon now. Lo and behold, we still have power! I don't think I've EVER known it to be on this long before! It's been on since around 6 (that I know of, could've been on before that) until now! 9 whole hours already! MAN. Things in my freezer are actually frozen! I'm pretty excited.

hmm, I think I'll be taking a crack at that giant photo-filled blog post now. Don't want to have promised a post and then deny my hardcore readers!

I'd love to hear from you! Feel free to leave a comment, write an email (trevormalda@yahoo.ca) or look me up on Facebook!