yellow-tailed, horn-toed, three-clawed, woop-woop-bird.

choose your own adventure. to be friends with Peter, turn to page two. to be roommates with gillian and krista, turn to pages 3 through 19

Page 2.
Hello Friends. Peter here, with as you might have guessed, yet another riveting weekly update. you may want to go ahead and glue your eyeballs - in advance - to your monitor, just to save yourself the trouble later. now where did we leave off friends...
oh right, Victoria Falls. Krista had pulled up lame (pun intended and currently true) and Gillian was wandering aimlessly, soaked with water and squinting through her wet eyeballs. unfortunately for the purposes of metaphor she is only metaphorically lame.
Well, we stayed at the dealie for a bit longer and then began our arduous trek from the falls through Botswana down to Maun, its tourist capital. pronounced ma-uuun. Gill, quit reading everything i'm typing. you to krista. I'm trying to concentrate on being witty.
So we crossed the border on a sort of ramshackle pontoon type whatnot, with a lady - whatwhat - who delivered the amazing line, "My baby was pointing at you. Whenever she sees a white man she points and says, 'look mama look' because once a white man gave her ten dollars. he said, 'it's not for you, it's for the baby." so I made sure to buy food and clothing for her with it." She actually seemed subtle and funny, but I laughed with her and then gave neither her nor her baby any money at all. She was making money transporting stuff across the border because she was less likely to get held up being searched.. I don't really understand how that works, but she was quite open about it, and there seemed to be a few people doing it. The line-up of trucks waiting to cross from botswana into zambia stretched for up to seven days wait. amazing. After we crossed we hitched a ride in the back of some government workers truck to a safari place and rented a tent for the night. the arrival into botswana also brought the arival of many new african novelties including, herds of elephants on the road, 3 million wild donkeys, toilet paper in the bathrooms, toilets in the bathrooms, people with money, swimming pools everywhere, etc. We were told that busses left for Maun in the morning at 6, 7, 8, and 9am, and so we figured schedules would be similar to how they were in Zambia and showed up at the bus station promptly at 10 o'clock. Alarmingly the busses had all gotten away somehow on time, and there were to be no more until the morning. On the advice on of a stranger we wandered to the gas station and parked ourselves in front of the store to wait for a ride. the attendants were eager to help and before long had found us a ride halfway to Nata with a used car saleswoman and her pentacostal/baptist pastor friend. they gave us a lovely ride and we even stoped to see the wild elephants wandering over the highway. We arrived in Nata just in time to catch the last bus to maun - standing room only, and when the driver saw us get on he said, "no room, sorry!" I replied with, "your helper has already thrown our bags in the luggage compartment." to which he retorted, "well you must pull them out again because there is no room!" granted, the aisle was already crammed with so many people that we couldn't even reach the bar that you were supposed to hold if you had to stand, and the lady who seemed to be in charge of the bus told me, "there's no room, you can't come on!" I simply looked at the ramjam of extra people who had already squeezed on and shrugged my shoulders saying, "we have to go to Maun." I seemed to be speaking the language she understood because she stopped objecting as i pushed my way past her. the girls followed and the bus driver yelled, "i want everyone to be able to hold that yellow bar!" unfortunately this was impossible because there were too many people and i could barely reach the yellow bar let alone find a place on it to squeeze my hand, but the bus driver lost interest in enforcing this rule as he became impatient to get underway. We made friend among the passengers even though we didn't know any jokes, and even managed to find a seat now and then as passengers got on and off over the four-hour journey. We arrived just in time to call our missionary firends Sid and Karen to let them know we'd managed to barely make it on time to hear Sid say into the phone, "but Peter, didn't you say you were coming tomorrow? we're not back in maun until tomorrow." ahhahahahaha. anyways, their son picked us up and we ended up spending 2 days alone in the missionaries house since their car broke down on the way anyways. We had a lovely time exploring the village, but I guess I'll let someone else tell the rest of the stories. Right now we are ramjamming away at finishing the church, and despite minor mishaps are continuing progress, as always, slightly slower than expected.
Don't worry africa fans, i'll be back to post again soon. in the meantime don't forget to drive with both hands on the wheel and with the steering wheel on the right side and crashing into expensive things with expensive things as little as possible.
until then,
Peter out.

Pages 3 through 11: Narrated by Krista Lee Takkinen.
Thanks for being my roommate, or friend, or family, or for reading my portion of the blog even though you actually only know Pete and/or Gil. I'm sure you're all very special to someone.

Sometimes Peter doesn't capitalize the beginnings of his sentences or the names of people or places, but I'm learning to let that go. There are even some spelling errors that I didn't say anything about (or fix behind Peter's back). I know you're all very proud of me.
After pointing out all of the problems with Pete's post, I'd also like to commend him for doing such a great job of telling you about our hilarious lives here in Botswana. He's a very good story teller. I have a tendency to be quite verbose and a little dull - so I'll show you all how much I care by keeping my entry short.

My favourite things are watching the sawdust dance across the plane of the door as the skill-saw vibrates the wood, and the familiar smell of freshly cut lumber.
The best time of the day is breakfast. I'm thoroughly enjoying my orange juice, granola, yoghurt, and non-instant-coffee that come from a press.
I like to tread water.
Maun is the hottest inhabited place on the earth. (Although, at times this fact is contested with one other place -somewhere else on the earth.) It's a good thing it's "rainy season".
I don't read as much since being reunited with Pete's computer, so facebook's being cut back to once a week.
The house we're staying in right now is like being in Canada. There's maple syrup in the fridge and all sorts of Canadian snacks in the cupboards -not to mention all of the Canadian people wandering around. It's a bizarre little island. I'm not sure how much of Botswana I'll feel like I've experienced when we leave on Friday.
Time doesn't haunt me anymore. It's even growing difficult to keep track of what day it is.

I hope you know I love you.
Krista out.

Pages 12 through 19: Ms. Higgins.

* First day - waterproofing the steeple with Pete, high-high in the lovely sun feeling like a monkey.. barefoot on tin. (sorry, sorry broken-toe Krista)

* Second day - hunch, hunched too close to the sun, all alone on the roof top to paint over the mess of waterproofing sealant we dripped Everywhere. Nice black cons not so nice, slip, slip, balance the paint can. Did I mention all alone? I guess clean-up is for the unimportant labourers, (read female) Peter got sent to do some more 'important things.' Ah yes, continuing on, head downstairs to spend hours scraping sealent off the floor by the pulpit... somehow (?) managed to drip down from the steeple.
Did you know that in the Military you don't say sorry and always accept responsibility for whatever goes wrong, even if it isn't your fault? Wierd. So, when duder got annoyed at me for using the wrong paint I tried not to say sorry and to just say I'd do it again with the right paint. Bit back the "but that was the paint they gave me to use" (upward lilt on "gave" to communicate my complete lack of responsibility for the mistake)... Remembered. Military. Shut up. Used the right paint. I think it was a good lesson.

* Third day - hunting for old tires in a junk yard, rolling them around trying to avoid nasty water, flat spiders, thistles and snakes. Continue to be impressed by Peter as he does what he is asked despite being used to asking others to do things. Think this must be something learned as a new framer, or in the military. Thinking about doing both those things as they seem to be good for the soul.

* Tomorrow - trying to look important and busy. Two things that are hard to do at this job site. First of all because I'm a woman, second of all because I don't know what I'm doing. Perhaps the order should be reversed but it is hard to tell around here. I seem to be extraordinarily sensitive towards sexist, or apparently sexist, things. Don't know when that happened... I must have always joked about being really mad and somehow, over the years, it's become true. I don't want to assume before trying something that I can't do it, sexist attitudes seem to contribute to that mentality.

It is really nice to be here and I'm happy to be working, learning how to measure things and what it is like to fetch and carry. I would like to applaud all who have passed through the rigours of newbie at Monarch Framing... you must all be humble, willing to serve and generous from dealing with not knowing how to do things. It is difficult to not know what objects words refer to.. particularly when you are meant to be fetching that object very efficiently. I'm learning about humility, how to accept hospitality without trying to make up for it, how to blend in, and how important it is to try to respect people.

Thank you Leah. You are lovely and I miss seeing you baking treats for other people.

Happy Birthday Stevey-weavey. I'd make you a treasure if I was home.

Love Gillian

Candy-bandy... see you soon.