Apple Crisp Banana Bread

Hazel's favorite past-time.  She knows all the Brazilian hand-clapping games.  She's told me that I need to practice on the wall to keep up with her....

We get water from the street every morning between 6:30 and 9:30.  Those hours are very approximate.  Sometimes it comes as early as 4:30 am and sometimes as late as noon.  That means we have to turn on a pump in this concrete box when the water arrives, which pumps water to a large 12,000 litre reservoir in the ground at the back of the property.  From there we have to turn on another pump to fill up our 1000 litre water tank high above the ground.  If it is a holiday weekend, we try to fill up our large reservoir as much as possible in advance, because we've had up to five days in a row without water coming from the street at all.  We also make sure our holding tank is full, particularly before we go to bed at night, because if the electricity goes out we can't turn up our pump.  We've been losing our electricity one to two times a week for the past month.  This is due to our house being on a power line that never has enough electricity.  I've heard this is called a brown-out.  Our fan spins oh-so slightly, the light on the a.c. will work but nothing else, and some of the lights will have a little dim light coming from them.  This is very frustrating because most of Peroba has power, but our power line doesn't.  Anyways, we had a different problem this past week with the concrete box pictured above, which generally is a dry empty box in the ground except for a pump.  It flooded due to torrential downpours last week, and apparently there are cracks in the concrete.  We were worried it would wreck the pump, as it is not a submersible pump, and Shaun spent many hours bailing the water out, with it being filled up very shortly after.  Finally the last three days it has been low enough to run the pump, but once it is dried out the box needs to be reinforced or else we can add that to our problems with acquiring water.

Items sent to us from family via Mission Board members who are visiting!  So exciting to open up suitcases full of goodies.

Somehow it feels really good to be so full of dropjes that you feel sick.

I'm working on teaching the neighbour girl how to French braid.  I thought I'd take a picture to prove that I do know how :)

Lyla riding Seth's bike.

The tortoise sisters fighting over a piece of tomato.... even though there are four more pieces under one of them and she had to go over top of them to get to this one.