Road Trips, Recipe and Rambunctious Kids

The past couple weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind here. Adam made a 16-hour road trip to Bangui with our friend André to get medical attention for his broken jaw. Two days later, Adam and our branch director Larry drove back to Berberati, making record time—they left Bangui at 5:00 a.m. and arrived in Berberati at 4:00 p.m.

Larry, and another of our branch members Will, have been meeting with us for a number of days, and we are covering a lot of ground and having fun in the process. It has also been a blessing to have two wonderful ladies helping us cook some of the weekday meals so that we can give more time to our meetings.

Esther’s wood stove is pretty impressive, and you can keep a lot of pots going at once above its blazing heat.

Next door on our own back porch, I continue to experiment with my more humbly-sized free standing charcoal grill. I’m finding that one simple and effective way of baking is to steam breads or cakes in a lidded pot over the hot coals. I have altered a recipe for Boston brown bread to use ingredients available here:

3 ½ cups flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
2 ¼ cups milk
½ cup molasses or honey
½ cup raisins

I pour the batter into two lightly oiled and floured milk cans and place them in the boiling water. After a couple hours of cooking, we have two delicious loaves of bread (they slide very easily out of the milk cans!)

Here are a few photos of the kids, who spend much of the day playing in our yard and on the big front porch…

Cute baby Elliot, who loves to eat dirt and is learning to walk...

Sam, Louisa and Elliot...

Louisa, John and Tishik on their "motorbike"...

Elliot, Louisa and Sam...

And two of the ever-present onlookers who find us fascinating to watch...