Sunday, May 16, 1976, 5:00 pm - Day 110

I'll probably have spagetti for dinner (mostly because that's all there is), but I'm not sure what I'll do for sauce. This morning I had the urge to make cinnamum rolls but we were out of flour. I don't have a recipe but I thought I could fake it. One thing I miss here is hopping into the neighborhood supermarket and getting everything you want, Most things are available here in Sierra Leone but you have to look harder and travel farther to find them. I look back on my bicycle trip last summer and remember how I got by for 6 weeks buying food and cooking it for myself and how there was always a store around where I could drop into to get what I need. I don't think I could do that here in Sierra Leone because the stores in the smaller towns and villages don't stock the ready to serve imported foods that I enjoy.

Watermelon plants here are coming along. I got out this morning and pulled all of the weeds out from among them. Vine stringers are up to about 5 feet long now with small yellow blossoms. I even have about a half dozen watermelons started now, each about a half inch long. Also today in another part of our backyard I discovered another watermelon plant growing and it looks to be about the same age as mine. I think it sprouted up from seeds tossed out from the time we had a watermelon at the house. It has one little watermelon started but it is longer and narrower than the ones which are growing where I planted. About 2/3 of the plants that I transplanted pulled through, but have lost a couple of weeks time of growth to the ones that I didn't move. Stringers on the transplanted ones are only about 6 inches long.

I used up my 5 boxes of cold cereal in only 6 days. I calculated that they should last me 3 weeks when I bought them but I guess I was wrong. Last Thursday i again went to Kenema and picked up 8 boxes this time. I figure they should last me about 3.5 weeks because my eating habits have slowed down now that I've gotten over the novelty of it. I still think its just what I need to start my day off right. I eat what Ali fixes for us and then afterwards I start in on my cereal to fill myself up.

I don't think that I will ever really enjoy the rice dishes that they eat over here. A few nights ago Ali made one and so I took a small amount of rice and put some of the sauce on it. It was all I could do to finish it. I don't know what it is but no matter how little I take, it always seems to be more than enough. It also attempts to kill my appetite for other food also. This is probably the reason that most volunteers lose weight over here. I hope to combat that with my supply of cold cereal. After I finally forced myself to finish the rice dish, I took my plate and heaped it full of rice again, but this time I added butter and sugar and cinnimum and left off Ali's sauce. I was able to eat the whole platefull and thought it was good, so it's not the rice that I hate but the sauce.

A little over a week ago I caught a nail with my back tire of my Honda, which quickly produced a flat. It was my first flat, but luckily I got it out on Biawala Rd as I was passing the road supervisor, FM Koroma. FM proceeded to demonstrate to me the fine art of taking off the back wheel of a motorcycle and of removing the tube from the wheel. I just sat back and watched while he did all of the work, and after an hour I was on the road again.

Last Thursday as I was returning from Kenema with my supply of cold cereal, I had my second flat. This time it was from a tear at the place where the nipple joins the tube. I had it fixed in an hour and a half. this was a bad time to have a flat. I left Daru at 8:00 am and was supposed to be back at 10:00 am because we 4 new volunteers were to have a meeting with our boss, Les Galagher. Since the trip to Kenema takes an hour, I was on a tight schedule. I finally arrived back in Daru at 11:50 am and found that the others had waited for an hour and a half before Les finally postponed it for next week.

The next day, on Friday, we had another meeting, this one being our weekly engineers meeting. I was out in Biawala and as it became time to go I proceeded to travel along, thinking about how I missed the meeting yesterday and what might happen to make me miss this one today. Just then my back tire went wishy-washy and I knew instantly that I had just aquired another flat, and that no one would ever believe me when I told them, as I could hardly believe it myself. I was greatly relieved when I found that I had picked up another nail, because I was a bit afraid that it might have had something to do with how I patched the other one, even though I was especially careful to do everything right. This time I got the flat near the grader and so the grader operator and his fitter helped me fix the flat. Together, it only took us a half hour, mostly because we didn't have to spend a lot of time finding the hole as we usually do.

Yesterday, on Saturday, lo and behold, I got my fourth flat, and my third in 3 days. This one was again a tear at where the nipple joins the tube. I fixed it, but it was a messy job because it had just finished raining and everything was still a bit muddy. My second and fourth flats have both looked like inside jobs, caused by the tube pulling on the nipple and the nipple not being allowed to move. My first and third flats have both been caused by nails and were repaired by the workers out in Biawala. I was super-careful in repairing this last flat and putting the wheel back together. Hopefully I won't get any more inside-job flats because if i do, then I won't know how to solve it except by trying a whole new tube or tire. I didn't get a flat tire today, but then, I also didn't ride my Honda today either.

We're in the process of putting in a double 4 foot culvert at the moment. We had the D7 bulldozer start the excavation for us, which it did, but it alsoi took out and covered over an old bridge which I was planning to use as a water diversion. When we started hand excavating there was no running water through the stream, but some water was getting into the hole by seeping up through the ground. The next night it rained and since then the water has been flowing. The next day we went out and cut a trench around the excavation to divert the stream. This took all day and is about 125 feet long, 18 inches wide, and 4 feet deep. Now water is flowing 8 inches deep in the trench and is going 2 feet per second, which all works out to a flow of 2 cfs (cubic feet per second). The next few days were spent in enlarging the excavation to get it to the size needed and we have been using a water pump to remove the water that seeps in. Today my crew should have put in the stone, then the sand, then cement base, which will support the culvert pipe and keep them from settling in the mud. Tomorrow we should lay the pipes and the next few days we will be working on the headwalls.

Sunday, May 30, 1976 - Day 124

Today I made cookies for the first time in Sierra Leone. I was in Bo for the weekend and while there I stocked up on all of the cooking ingredients and was even able to find chocolate chips, which I didn't think I could find in this country. The Bo rest house has an oven, and so after first checking that it worked and that I knew how to work it, I proceeded to mix up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. When it was ready, Skep went back to heat up the oven and to everyone's amazement, the compressed gas cylinder which supplied the oven, took this opportunity and went empty, so there I was with a batch of cookie dough and no where to cook it. I put it in the frig for the rest of the weekend and today I brought it up to Daru with me.

I found that our borrowed oven had been returned, so I decided to try using our frying pan. I ended up burning the first set but after that I got all of the bugs out and it worked fine. I cut the top off of an empty can to get a metal ring about 5 inches in diameter and a half inch thick. This I put in the frying pan to use as a spacer. On this I placed a cookie tray which was one of our metal plates. Each plate could hold 7 cookies about 2 inches in diameter. For the top of this oven I used the lid of our big pot which we use to boil water.

The cookies baked just like in a real oven and after the first batch I knew how long each tray took to bake. After that I just sat down with my clock facing me and read my book. Every 11 minutes I would get up and take out the plate in the frying pan and replace it with another. I worked with 3 plates in rotation. After the one plate would come out, I would put in another that I had previously placed the cookie dough on. Next I would take the third plate which had been cooling down from the last batch, and put the cookie dough on it. I would then remove the cookies from the first plate and put them on the cooling screen, which was a shelf from our refrigerator. All of this would take about 4 minutes so I would then be left with about 7 minutes for which to go back and read. For the first time in my life I made more cookies than the recipe said I should make. Usually I only get about a half to two-thirds as much.

Saturday I finished with my book, "The Stranger Prince", which I had picked up in Freetown last Easter. It was about Prince Rupert and how he had fought for his uncle, King Charles I of England, in the war against Parliament. It made me realize that there was alot of history that I didn't know but really should. At the Bo resthouse there is a one-volume encyclopedia about 4 inches thick, which surprisingly tells quite a bit about everything. I spent several hours last night looking up things in it. I started with some of the names from the book, "The Stranger Prince", to see what it had. It just about condensed the whole book down to just a couple very comprehensive paragraphs.

I next started looking up all of the kings and queens of England and made up a list, giving their dates in power, their name, and their relationship to the previous king. This list is something that I should have learned before, but if I did it must have been in primary school, and all but forgotten by now. I next started looking up the names of some of the countries, past and present, of Europe, and again learned a few things that I should have known before. England, Great Britian, and the United Kingdom are not all one and the same. If you take England and then add Scotland and Wales you get Great Britian, and if you then add Northern Ireland you get the United Kingdom. Ireland itself is not included but used to be. If you try to look up Holland in the atlas you won't find it, because its official name is The Netherlands. I also found that pineapples are native to America and peaches to China. There was a picture of how peanuts grow, which is different than what I had always imagined. Everyone knows that peanuts grow in the ground, so I had always thought that it was the roots that grew the peanuts. Now I see that the peanut plant is a vine and little stringers come off every so often and enter the ground. It is these stringers that grow from the vine, which grow the peanuts.