Letter # 62 - November 21, 1978

Diana and I just got back from Kamiendor yesterday evening. We couldn't send a letter while we were there, so it has been over two weeks now. We just received your letter written Nov 2, and it is good to see that you are all happy about our getting married. Diana received Carolyn's card just before we left town a few weeks ago. We had already written home just the day before, telling you about our getting married. Then we go and receive Carolyn's letter with her asking, "Are we getting married yet?"

In the last letters, our wedding was going to be a small affair. It was going to be just us two and a justice of the peace. Since then our wedding plans have grown quite a bit. It is now going to be a church wedding. There will be two bride's maids, two best men (or whatever) and a flower girl or two. Invitations have gone out to everyone we know, which was about 80 invitations sent. I expect there will be 50 to 60 people to attend the wedding. After the wedding at the church, there will be a reception at the Water Supply / Peace Corps Volunteer resthouse in Freetown. It even looks like we would be having an actual wedding cake and everything. Diana is getting a wedding dress made up and I am having a suit made. We should be buying the rings within the next few days.

While we were last here in Freetown on Nov 5, at precisely 12:45 in the afternoon, we felt a genuine earthquake! Both Diana and I were sitting down at the house along with John Burke, a fellow Californian. We all felt it. I asked Diana, "Did you feel that?" She said "Yes". Then I asked John, "Was that an earthquake?" and he replied "Yes", thereby confirming what I already knew was true. I would estimate it to have been about a 4.0 on the Richter Scale. It started with a rumbling sound, then a few shimmers and then a sharp jolt as it passed by, followed again by a few shimmers and the rumbling sound fading away in the distance.

Around town, the people in general didn't seem to have felt anything. This is probably because they don't have any earthquakes here, and so people don't know what one feels like, so they wouldn't know if they felt one. Jim Olson just told me today that a report of the earthquake was in the paper about a week after it happened. He said that the epicenter was somewhere out in the ocean. A seismograph somewhere listed it as being 4.0, so my own guess was pretty good.

This time, coming down to Freetown, we brought along Bondu, my "small wife" from Kamiendor. This is her first time to travel past Sefadu, so we've been showing her all the sites. First we showed her the main road going to Freetown, straight and wide and no potholes at all in some places. We didn't get to Freetown until after dark the first day, so we didn't show her much then. She was impressed by our house. The next day, I showed her where I work at the Ministry of Energy and Power. It is up on the 6th floor of a building, so she got to go up and down in an elevator.

Yesterday evening we went to visit one of Diana's relatives, and they had a television set in the house. This was the first one that I have seen in this country. They turned it on. There is only one channel here and there wasn't much on. They had a panel discussion of four men speaking Limba, and nobody there understood Limba, but we all watched anyway.

No more space so I guess that I will stop here for now.

Love,
Donny and Diana