Headed up-country

Me and the mixer

The mixer with 25 kg of peanut butter supplement

All 65 kg in jars and ready to go

The CHASL building

Chelsea and I are headed back up-country to Tiama again. I am excited to see the normal Tiama instead of how crowded and crazy it was while we were there. We're leaving in a few hours and we should be there until Saturday afternoon. This week has been good. I've gotten to go walking by teh ocean a few times. I finally got my lapa and I get to wear it on Friday. I never thought I'd be excited to wear a skirt, but I borrowed Chelsea's the other day and its nice (plus I'm running out of clean pants so I'm just excited to have something to wear). Yesterday, Chelsea and I did a lot of work on getting the peanut butter supplement ready for our trip. I got to go with her to get the groundnut paste (AKA peanut butter in the US). Wow, everything here is so difficult. To get peanut butter, you have to shell the groundnuts, which was already done when we got to the market then roast them, which had already been done too. When we got there, they had a 50 pound bag of nuts that we helped them sort through getting off most of the red peanut skin and picking out the bad nuts. Then the sorted nuts were run through a hand cranked grinder to turn into groundnut paste. That whole process took hours. It is just amazing how much work goes into everything here. EVERYTHING takes such an effort. Even just doing a load of laundry takes hours. And the people here are so underpaid. To get 4 or 5 guys to do the groundnut paste cost under $20. Several hours of work for several people and they make so little for such hard work.
After that Chels and I came back to CHASL ate some groundnut paste sandwiches and started making the supplement. We made 274 jars! That is 65 kg or more than 130 lbs. It went really fast. Chlesea said that we would be lucky if we even had enough for all the children she needs to give it to. I'm excited to get to help with the clinic. The Chelsea quote of the day yesterday was "I work so hard for all of this that I get attached and I kind of don't want to give it to the kids!" That was when we were staring at our stacks of bottles. And I kind of understand. I can't beleive that all that will be gone in a couple of days and we'll have to start all over again!
Another thing I can't beleive that in a little over a week I have to come home. Not that I don't love all of you there, but if I knew how to change all of my tickets over to a few weeks later I would be seriously considering staying a longer.
I won't be seing a computer again until next Monday, so I'll be able to write about Tiama then.