Fun times and treats

It is always fun to visit a mom with a new baby and it is no different here in Zambia. Becky especially enjoyed this visit, because the mom is Auntie Beene, one of Becky's junior church teachers. The baby, Anna, was about 3 weeks old when we visited.

With the rains come flying termites. They emerge from the ground and fly around with their wings that are twice as long as their bodies. Then their wings fall off and they crawl around until they die. Up until last week, we have only seen the smaller ones. Last week, the large variety - called inswa in Bemba - invaded our yard one evening. One of them even made it into our bedroom! Our night guard evidently collected the inswa that were attracted to the light in the carport and outside the kitchen, but the large wings were still everywhere. The next morning, Caleb excitedly made the discovery that there were many that were crawling around in the grass under the light which is mounted in a tree in our back yard.

The rest of the kids and Mom helped collect quite a few of the creepy, but not harmful critters. Our daytime workers were excited, because the inswa are a special treat here and are evidently fairly expensive to buy in the market.

The termites are simply fried in a dry pot (they supply their own oil) and salted.

A crunchy and salty snack - more protein than popcorn! The kids were more excited about collecting them than eating them, however. We made them eat two each. Mom and Dad ate most of the rest, but we were able to share with another missionary family too. The boys in that family really liked them.

Joshua especially wasn't too keen on eating a bug. He looked at it for a while.

Then looked at it for a while more.

Then finally ate it. MMMMMM! They really didn't taste bad, or at least that's what Mom and Dad thought.

Water Slide!!!!!

We found a simple, though wet waterslide in the store here and got it to help cool the kids off on hot afternoons. We were pleasantly surprised that it worked the way the packaging showed!