Made it to Congo!

I am a slacker in the blog world. I know. I apologize.

We have made it to DRC. It was pretty uneventful getting here. We are getting settled in. It is nice to know we will be here for six weeks so we can form some sort of routine and get things settled to live easier. DRC is different from Zambia, that is for sure. We are learning lots about the people and how things work. The last few days have been fairly uneventful. We went to church on Sunday (3 hours long) – it was in a building of sorts. It was bamboo poles with plastic/woven bags for walls. There was also a Hannah Montana sheet hanging for part of the wall. (We took a picture of it and thought of our niece.) The church members served us lunch – it was good Congolese food. Monday we went grocery shopping. Have to do a lot of cooking from scratch here. For instance: Wanted to make chicken casserole that night. Problem: they don’t sell cream of chicken soup OR sour cream OR plain chicken breasts. Solution: make the cream of chicken soup and substitute plain yogurt for sour cream and learn how to cut up a whole chicken. Well it was looking good – the cutting up wasn’t terrible (thanks to Jennifer Eiland), the cream of chicken soup looked better than the canned kind and the yogurt seemed a little thin but not too bad. WRONG!!!! We think it would have been just fine without the yogurt, it made it tooooo sweet. I ate 2 bites and couldn’t do it. Jack ate about 2 spoonfuls and quit. The dog, Mazut, really enjoyed it. He is a pretty cool dog, wouldn’t hurt a thing except if a passing chicken gets too close to the gate. Then it’s a goner! He ate the chicken bones from the chicken I cut up too. I got to sit in on a Bible Study that Jennifer leads. It was really fun even if I didn’t always understand what was going on. Jennifer was talking in Lingala and then translating for me – I think we were both tired when it was over. I am really looking forward to meeting with them again! On Tuesday we started learning Lingala. We met with Webber for 2 hours and learned a lot of words. Hopefully Thursday we will start to make sense of some of them and practice using them. There is a good bit of French mixed in which Jack is doing great with. Unfortunately for me I took Spanish. Today we went to a bible study with Tyler out in Mutiende (not sure of spelling). They are setting up a water filtration factory out there so they have started some of these groups for the people around it. Tyler translated for us. It was fun to see some of the people they are working with.
 (also, the internet is kinda slow so uploading pictures will have to wait till we get home!)