Comfort Gives Cooking Lessons

Hello again - hard to know what to emphasize each day! I decided on food for today. We are finding that Ghanaian food is interesting, unique and has a rather narrow variety. The spicey red sauce that they serve us at each meal is called "shito" and we told Comfort, the women who cooks for the men working with us, that she must teach us. So today we went into the kitchen and she was the cooking instructor par excellence! She had all the ingredients out on a tray. She demonstrated mashing the onions, garlic and ginger. Then it all goes into a big pot with about 4 cups of refined palm oil. The rest of the ingredients include ground and whole rosemary, curry powder, shrimp cubes, powdered shripm, powdered fish, a huge amount of cayene, more oil, more onions, curry powder and salt and tomato paste. It is amazing - hot and delicious. We mostly hauled cement today - they laid a long sidewalk behind the center and the cement was all mixed by hand and carried in "head pans" to the building site. We also painted some more. And I swept and swept and swept. I keep things as clean as possible behind everyone - sort of the tidy house fairy. Tomorrow we go back to the refuge camp to deliver school supplies, them to the Kakom (sp?) National Forest for the jungle walk, then to Cape Coast for the slave castles. A long day - we leave at 6 am. I left the group listening to John Yanmbasu talking about Methodist General Conference. He will be on the plane back with us as he is attending as a lobbyist for the Central Conference which includes all of Africa. The Bishop was funny when we met him the first day - we asked how many Methodists there were in Ghana, and he said, "well, you know with apportionments we know that churches are underreporting their membership!" But he said there are at least 3 million people in Ghana who call themselves Methodists! I'm going back so I don't miss too much. Hopefully more tomorrow if it is not too late when we return. We're hanging in there - keeping those prayers coming this way! Cate