Making ends meet...

I know you must be wondering. Has Jeanette disappeared from blog world? Is everything okay?

No, I haven't quite disappeared...not quite! Yes, everything is okay, but it would be my longest post ever if I were to explain why I feel like this rope! So I will give you the bare bones.

New Grace, the quartet Barry and I sing with, traveled to New Jersey in June to provide the special music at our church's annual convention. This required significant practice time prior to going, as we have not really been singing together for the last year, so for quite a while before we left, my stress level was high as I tried to cover work, Coral's normal care, extra practice, working out the details of Coral's supervision and care during our absence, and then actually packing and remembering everything to take with us. Aunt Paula took charge of all Coral's care for the 10 days we were gone, and Andrea arrived from California and was able to help for the last week or so.

The convention went well, and besides that, we were able to see Barry's mother and actually stayed at her house the whole time we were in New Jersey. This was great, as I have not seen her for quite a long time, and it was wonderful to catch up a little bit with extended family and friends. After the convention was over, we (Barry, my brother Gord, and I) drove north from New Jersey to Toronto, Canada, where we spent two days visiting my mother and Carol-Ann and her family (which, as you know, is one of my VERY FAVORITE things to do!)

All in all, the time away was a blessing and refresher for me. But, as with most of my little jaunts away from home, there is a price to pay when I get back, and this time was a doozey. We jumped right into work catch-up, arrangements and funeral services for our friend Warren who passed away just before we left home, and helping with Gord and Paula's departure for a 5-week trip to Liberia.

It seems like each day I get up at the usual time and hope I can get a good start on my work. But then the time gets eaten up by other very important things, and I arrive at the evening with most of my work still to be done. I have been working until 2 or 3 a.m. and getting up again at the usual time each morning with less and less "oomph" for what has to be done.

So I have been a little shadow in blogland, but I hope -- oh, how I hope! -- that things will soon be back to normal! I may never totally catch up, but as soon as I can, I will visit you!
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PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 10/25/2008

The Dining Room

Here is another picture from long ago... the dining room in our home in Liberia.
You can see the splotchy floor I mentioned once before.

Look at the mat ceiling! Even in this old picture, you can see the beautiful woven pattern. I would love to have one of those mats on my ceiling now...

Do you see those two little pictures on the wall? Those are the ones I have searched in the antique stores to find and which my mother does not remember that she had! But I remember them clearly, and here is the proof that they were not in my imagination! I have found some that are sort of like these, and I will show them to you next time.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/21/2008

On my Memories Shelf sits this beautiful wooden container.It was specially made by my father on his lathe. I'm not sure if that lathe could also be used with metal, but I think so, because from somewhere in the back of my mind comes the memory that he also was able to make parts on that lathe for the engines when they broke.

I love this container because it shows off the beautiful hard red wood found in Liberia and also because my father spent so much time making it perfect.
It is not just a solid piece of wood...
It has two separate parts to the lid so that I can drop things in it through the little opening, or I can open up the whole top... if I could think of something worthy of storing in it! Right now, it is beautiful all by itself!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/05/2008

Pebbles and palm kernels

On my shelf I have this little jar of rocks. That might seem odd until I tell you that they were scooped up outside my childhood home in Liberia. As I dumped them out and held them tonight, I was surprised to realize that they are bumpy and rough, but there are no sharp edges on those reddish pebbles, almost as if they have been rubbed together until all the sharp points have worn away. Once in awhile I ran in bare feet on those little pebbles, and I could have sworn they were covered with sharp points all over!

In my jar of pebbles are two dried nuts with some husk still clinging to them. They are palm kernels, the center of the palm fruit. That shape, that color, that size, that texture... it is one of those familiar things forever in my mind. We used the palm fruit for lots of things...a dish to serve with rice, cooking oil, oil for making soap. We called the palm fruit "palm nuts," and as I write I can taste palm nuts fried in a pan with a little salt added...

This jar holds some of my very first memories.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/26/2008

My father relaxing at the end of a hard day

This picture holds quite a few memories for me...

There is the front door of the living room in our home in Liberia. It was a screen door, and the flies outside considered it a nasty contraption contrived by humans to ruin their day. It had a spring on it, so it slammed whenever anyone went in or out. (I can still hear that slam so clearly!) There was also an inside wooden door which we almost never closed in the daytime just to allow a little more flow of air through the house.

I can see that old uneven cement floor which my mother gazed at ruefully when people were coming to visit. It was poured in two layers. The mixture for the first layer was made with less-than-normal cement and lots of pebbles to save money. On top of that, there was a very thin cement-rich layer. The builder was sure this would provide a beautiful smooth floor for the least amount of money. It did... for awhile... until that smooth top layer wore off in spots leaving rough porous brown patches interspersed with shiny dirty-green spots of the remaining top coat. It was a killer on the knees when scrubbing it, too!

There is the "Big Chair" which matched the Settee and Small Chair and Gray Table. It had wonderful wide arms for resting a book or writing a letter. My father loved to lie down on the settee for a few minutes after lunch and supper. He would take one of the back cushions and prop it against one of the arm rests to make a wedge for his back and head. Then he would lie down, put one leg up on the back of the settee, and there he would snooze. "Fifteen minutes is all I need, Margaret!" he would say, and he would be up and out the door again to get back to work.

On the wall is the paint-by-number picture of horses which Gord painted as a kid. The matching one must be on another wall somewhere! Totally unused to the many toys and such that are everywhere here, we thought that picture set was just amazing and waited anxiously to see the finished product!

And the kerosene lamp... We did not have electricity for more than a few hours at night, and many times not at all, so when the little generator was off, we each had a lamp that we took with us wherever we wanted to go in the house. My dad made two matching lamps like this, one for Carol-Ann and one for me, to sit on the little mantel in our bedroom or be used throughout the house during the evening. He took old metal pressure lanterns and cut the bases off to provide the kerosene reservoirs. Then he soldered on a bracket for holding the chimney and three brass-colored legs on the sides of each lamp. Since we sometimes wanted a light behind a chair for reading, he made wooden holders for the lamps. The wooden stands had 3 legs just the right distance apart to match the legs on the lamps, and in the top of each of those wooden legs was a small beveled hole. The legs on the lamps fit into those holes and held the lamps safe and secure. What a genius!
I am proud to say I have my lamp right now sitting on a shelf in my dining room!

A lot of memories in one little picture!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/24/2008

The boa constrictor that swallowed the deer!

My mother and Isabel, one of her coworkers. This had to have been a REALLY big event for my mother who had not been in Liberia all that long when this picture was taken.
This boa constrictor swallowed a small deer, and it was killed and cut open to show what was inside it! (Some of the other pictures show the deer but aren't very good quality anymore.)

The ladies are posing with this reptile, but at a decent distance!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/23/2008

Getting off the ship!
(About 1955)
(I'm sure we were getting off the ship in Liberia in this picture, not on it, because I was younger than this when we left for our one-year visit to Canada.)

My mother is holding Gord's hand, and Esther Monus (another missionary) is holding me.
(Carol-Ann was not born yet.)

Our family traveled back and forth between Canada and Liberia on freighter ships, a trip that took about 10 days. We did not do this very often. The next time we crossed the ocean, I was 8 years old and ready for the 3rd grade.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 06/27/2008

Gord, Jeanette, and Carol-Ann and friends in front of our house
(Picture taken in Liberia in the late 1950s)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 06/04/2008

The little table by my dining room window

Back in December when I visited family and friends in Canada, my mother said, "Jeanette, I have something that I thought you might like to have." She took me up to her room and took a box out of her closet. It looked like she might have had quite a few things in it at one time, but now it was nearly empty. She took a little roll of fabric out of the bottom and shook it out for me to see. It was a doily!

I love to crochet, and many years ago when I was first married I used to always have my crochet bag nearby so that I could work on my current project. I've made all kinds of things from afghans to potholders to fancy doilies to little animals that fasten over a button on a child's clothing.

This particular doily is one that I made for my mother probably at least 25 years ago and which she had used on her little table when she was living in Liberia.I found it in one of the pictures in my album, and she used it like this with some of those orange lilies that grew around "The Circle." (Picture of the Day from 05/14/2008). Since my mother can no longer use it, I am so pleased that she thought of giving it back to me! It feels like I made my own heirloom!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/17/2008

We just had to have several pictures to finish this week off!

After the final version of the translation was done, my mother typed all the stencils. Then began a tussle with the mimeograph. It had a mind of its own, and added to that was the fact that in the very humid weather, the ink did not dry quickly, and she often had the ink from one sheet bleed onto the next sheet that landed on top of it. Finally, though, piles of each sheet were stacked everywhere waiting for the assembly line.

Here are my sister-in-law Paula (right), Sharon who was a co-worker with my parents (center), and a girl who was part of a group visiting from Prairie Bible Institute (left). Long tables were lined up, and someone began by taking the last page of the book and laying down as many as possible. The next person put the second-to-last page on top of it, and so on, and so on, and so on...until page 1 was on the top. These piles were all stacked on top of each other, alternating them the short way on top of the long way of the paper so they were kept as separate books. Then the process began all over again until all the sheets were gone!





Then it was time to put the covers on! Here are my brother Gord, Paula, and my mother putting one pink sheet on the back and one on the front. It looks like they are enjoying it, too!











Sharon is tightening the staples with pliers.









My mother, carefully covering the staples with tape to bind the edge of the book.









All that hard work, and she is so pleased! A little bit more of God's Word that people can read in their own language!


This is the end of the Mother's Day week in pictures! I hope you have enjoyed this little glimpse into the life of my mom and what I remember her doing when I was growing up. If everyone's mom was like mine, how much better this world would be!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/16/2008

The checking conference

They are checking one of the little sections of mimeographed sheets that I talked about with yesterday's picture. Robert (or his wife Edna) and my mom had written a few chapters down, she had carefully typed it on stencils, the stencils had been duplicated on the mimeograph, and the sheets were assembled and stapled into booklets. These booklets had been distributed to some of the Christians in the area who had agreed to read them over and then gather together to discuss and improve on or clarify the translation so that the final version could be decided on and published.

It was sometimes very obvious that an expression or word needed to be changed after hearing the possible understandings people got from the first draft. And sometimes there were other better words or phrases that could be used that my mother and Robert had not thought of. This pooling of knowledge and ideas was a very important part of the process.

I think they all looked forward to these get-togethers! They usually met in a large open room in a building not too far from our house, and sometimes we would hear a roar of laughter coming from that room as they all enjoyed a joke together!

(You can see my mom's made-to-order book turntable in use sitting beside her!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/15/2008

My mother in "The Alcove," a little open area off the livingroom where she did a lot of her Bible translation work.

There was no such thing as a computer then to make any of the job easy. She spent long hours working with Robert (the father of Amy in yesterday's picture) writing down the first draft of a few chapters at a time of the Old Testament. It took them a long time sometimes to figure out how to express things properly so the meaning would not be changed somehow in the translation. They checked concordances, various English translations, and other resources to try to come up with the best wording. To help make that easier for my mom, my father made this turntable to hold all her heavy books at just the right angle for easy reading.

After that first handwritten draft, she would use the typewriter you see on the left to type it all onto stencils to use for printing on the mimeograph. The typewriter basically cut the stencils in the shape of each letter so that the thick gooey ink from the mimeograph could seep through those cuts and onto the paper as it was hand-cranked through the mimeograph.

Many were the times when we children would hear her being interrupted in her typing over and over by many other aspects of everyday life. This was very tedious work, because the language is a tonal one, and there had to be additional tones -- up, down, and other ways, too -- added to many of the letters. With each interruption, her frustration would grow as she would lose her place in what she was copying onto the stencil. Then we would hear, "Oh no! Now look what I did!" Next we would smell the pungent odor of the stencil correction fluid which fixed the error by sealing the letter that had been cut into the stencil, giving her one last chance at another letter in that spot. But soon there would be another interruption and another.... and then... RRIIIPP!! She would yank the stencil by the top and pull it right out of the typewriter, scrumple it up, and put it in the trash! An unfixable error, and now she had to start all over again! (I am so spoiled by my computer! If I had to be sure to do it right the first time, I don't know where I would be!)

These mimeographed pages, when finally printed, were assembled into booklets and given to people who had agreed to read this first draft, then gather together for a "checking conference" to discuss it and give their input.

(More on this tomorrow...)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/14/2008

This picture is really a combination of two things my mom did when I was growing up.

One of them I'll post more about tomorrow -- Bible translation. This little girl is holding the newly published book of Genesis, translated by my mom with the help of many other people (more later on that).

What I wanted to post this picture for today, though, is the beautiful flowers. My mom planned out and oversaw the planting and upkeep of flowers on the little mission compound where we lived. This is "The Circle" which had lilies all around the edge and trees inside the circle including gardenia, frangipani, and bougainvillea. When all those lilies were in bloom, it was absolutely gorgeous! As an earlier picture showed, we lived in the middle of the African rain forest, and when I was little, there was no access by car to where we lived. Sometimes we had expatriate visitors who came walking through the forest, and they were always delightfully surprised to find our neat well-kept paths lined with trimmed hedges, The Circle of beautiful flowers, the pineapple patch in straight rows, and the lovely coconut, plum, grapefruit, orange, and lime trees.

(This is definitely making me homesick today!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/13/2008

My mother making toast on the wood stove.

She spent a lot of time in this hot little room with the wood stove, either cooking or supervising the cooking. There were no convenience foods, so she made everything from scratch. She is still the queen of ingenious ways to use leftovers and was a past master at magical substitutions in recipes when the called-for ingredients were not available! She knew how to use sour milk to make something good and was used to sifting grubs and weevils out of the flour. She coexisted with cockroaches because there was no other option. She learned how to protect her sugar from sugar-eating ants by setting the canister in the middle of a dish of water. She made sure our fruit was safe to eat by washing it all in a purple solution of potassium permanganate.

She learned 101 ways to fix rice -- rice porridge in the morning, rice and gravy at noon, leftover rice in fried rice balls or rice pancakes at night, and the best rice pudding ever made. (I think she secretly thanked God every night that she could not get any potatoes, because she never liked them anyway!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/12/2008

This is my dad getting a drink at "The Filter."

When we were growing up, the thing always at the top of my mother's subconscious was making sure we had enough water to drink. All our water had to be boiled to purify it, and that was a HUGE JOB. We had a wood stove, and there were always large pots of water on it being watched so they could be timed boiling for 20 minutes. The boiled water was then dumped into large covered white enamel pails. From there it was used either in cooking or in keeping The Filter full. The Filter had a chalk-like "candle" (that's what my dad always called it, anyway) through which the water we put in the top passed through to get to the bottom of The Filter. This did not purify the water at all but just helped to take out the smoky flavor it had after boiling on the wood stove. I would have to say that keeping up with the boiled water was one of my mother's biggest responsibilities for her family.

(I think every bit of furniture we had was made by my father. Check out that perfect made-to-measure filter stand with the handy-dandy little shelf for the glass!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/11/2008

Our family in the middle years.
This is definitely the most dressed up we got! This picture was taken when our family went to the annual missionary conference in another part of Liberia.

In honor of Mother's Day, each picture this week will be about my mother and the things she did when we were growing up.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/08/2008

One more picture of my Mum and Dad.
A little celebration of 40 years as missionaries in Liberia.

This was taken in the living room/dining room of the house where I grew up. No caterer, no music, no balloons. No rich food, fancy cake, or flowery speeches.
Just a little handmade sign -- "40 YEARS" -- and the love of friends and family.

If you could zoom in on the picture, you would see whitewashed mud walls, a cement floor with the surface long worn off, a ceiling with big watermarks from the tropical downpours, and insects everywhere (no getting rid of them!).

Don't store up your treasures on earth. Instead, store them up in heaven where moth and rust won't destroy them and where thieves can't break in and steal... because your heart will be where your treasure is. (Matt. 6:20-21)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/07/2008

My Mum and Dad many years ago.
They were sitting on a little red bench on the cement front porch of our house. I love this picture because they were enjoying the moment so much and were paying no attention to the camera.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/05/2008

Betty holding the deer while I hold the bottle, taking care of a little orphan African deer.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 04/29/2008

The family sedan!
This is how my brother Gord and his family used to travel when they lived in Liberia. Of course, it only worked as long as the kids were very young. Andrea is between Gord and Paula, and Stephanie and Nathaniel are on the gas tank. (Check out those bird nests in the palm trees!)