This Weekend in Trinidad

On Friday I walked to the fruit stand near our house. There are not many places we can walk from our house and with the heat and humidity what they are, I find I walk much less here than I do in Manhattan. But the fruit stand and minimart run by Null and his family are the most frequent trip I make. It is nice to have a farmers' market everyday. The neighborhood fruit stand is small, but when we want to buy more produce than we can carry, we go to the large open air market in Chaguanas. Anyway, on Friday I bought fresh lemons among other things and made lemon bars to take for a snack for the girls when we went to WITC. We placed the hot pan on two glasses turned upsidedown in two bowls of water. This is the local trick to keep the ants out of food while it is cooling. It works too. Since the buildings do not have screens and are rarely built for air conditioning, there are many places for creatures from outdoors to enter and depart.
We packed up the snack and other supper items and headed out around 2:00 to pick up the girls from school as we do every Friday. On our way we realized that our AC wasn't working in the car. Then the car started to sound funny followed shortly by steam coming out of the engine and the smell of something running very hot. We pulled over. The radiater was pretty much empty. Fortunately we had a thermos of water we had brought along to drink. We poured that and some other water we found in the trunk into the radiater. That got us on the road again and to the girls' school. When we got there we found a spigot and added more to the radiater. We also found a sizable leak in a hose. The car freshly watered, we drove up the mountain to the school. I taught my Marriage and Family class while Richard and the girls spent the evening hanging out. This week I will have to write a midterm exam for the class. It's hard to believe it is time for midterms.
On Saturday we got the radiator hose fixed. It cost TT$80 for the part and TT$20 for the labor. That's about US$13 for the hose and US$3.50 for the labor.
~Barb

Now that we have had the chance to visit and worship in each of the Mennonite churches here, we are starting to go back to several of them to preach and bring special music. This morning, we were at Carlsen Field, the newest of the churches in Trinidad. I preached, and we all sang a couple of songs with Roxy playing violin on one and Olivia playing a keyboard that was brought in for the occasion on the other. The church is only about a 15-minute drive south from where we live in Charlieville, and has been officially organized only within the past year. It started when an older man in the neighborhood of Carlsen Field (so named for the American air base that was there in WWII) wanted to have a church close by for his family to attend. Since there wasn't any other space available at the time, he simply added on to his house, and that's where the church is meeting now until they are able to find a place to build on their own. The photo above shows the outside of the house/church building. On the left is a picture of the interior, with Pastor Ramesh Jaimani preparing for communion.
~Richard

We've been here for almost 2 months. It's weird to think that it's already October and it's still so hot. Today seemed especially hot. We were at Carlsen Field Mennonite Church this morning and Daddy preached. The church isn't very well ventilated and the fans didn't seem to help much. Then this afternoon, for lunch we walked over to the mosque because one of our neighbours had sold us tickets for a meal there. The problem, though, is that even though the mosque is right across from us, there's a highway in between us and it and we had to walk over to the walkover (a bridge for walkers over the highway, there are also bridges like that for cars called flyovers). It's still not a long walk, but it does take longer than if we could walk "as the crow flies".
Last night we went to Carlsen Field youth group and started practicing for the Christmas program. We'll probably be in at least 2 Christmas plays, but they try to schedule all the Christmas programs on different Sundays.
On Friday, Roxy and I had KFC in Trinidad for the first time. In case you didn't know, Trinidad has more KFCs per square mile than any other country. They are very proud of their KFC too. My teacher ordered it for our whole form and a few other people, one of whom was Roxy, too. She was bragging to me about how their KFC actually had some flavour to it. Mostly I thought it was just more spicy, but then I did get the spicy kind.
~Olivia