Things break a lot

This is the main river that runs through Dili. During the dry season it is completely dry. The rainy season started out slow this year but now it's back to normal. This spillway is important because it keeps the riverbed at the right height to support the main Bridge which is at the top of the picture.
Two days ago the spillway gave away. Now as you can see behind it the riverbed is quite a bit lower. Almost all of the infrastructure here is very old with no maintenance or improvements. When things break they usually stay broken and when things start to deteriorate they don't get repaired and they continue to fall apart. A portion of the sidewalk that goes along the beach has recently been reclaimed by the ocean.
This is in front of the US Embassy. Even though we arrived here with most of the pages in our passport empty are passports are almost full. This is because we only get 30 day visas. Fortunately we can get new passports from the US Embassy, which is only a block away from our house. The whole process only takes about 10 days.
Our English classes continue to remain overly large. Usually by this time in the semester they've shrunk down to the the correct size of about 20 students. In this picture the students are doing what's called a fluency line. Each side engages in a pre-assigned conversation. After they finish we blow a whistle and the student on the end goes around to the very start of the line and everyone moves down one to a new partner
We bring the bread for the sacrament. We're always worried about forgetting it because there are no stores nearby to pick up a replacement. We bought what we thought was some nice dark wheat bread. We didn't realize until after church that it was actually chocolate flavored bread.

Comments

  1. DeniseFebruary 24, 2019 at 12:00 PM

    Love reading about your mission!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hutchings FamilyMarch 13, 2019 at 10:09 PM

    Greal idea. Bishop will pass that idea to the Teachers Quorum
    But it might not make it to the Sacrament table!
    We miss you and are always so proud of your sacrifice and service.
    Steve went to Ghana last month with the water group here helping to start up training the people there to treat their water. Great experience but hard to handle the heat +humidity. You must have mastered that by now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Trapani's in LiberiaMarch 14, 2019 at 7:27 AM

      We have gotten used to the weather. It seems normal now. We do notice that when we're out for an entire day we still get real tired. The hardest part seems to be that there's no seasons. It's just hot everyday. We probably won't be getting back to Cameron Park until October so we will probably freeze.

      We miss everyone. It's great to serve here but just challenging to be away for so long.

      Delete

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