another day down

Today I began my work on the ship. On Friday mornings the Cafe sells waffles, so I got to help with the waffle serving. The Cafe is really relaxed because in the morning because most everyone on the ship is working and all of the children are in school. At 10 o'clock most everyone gets a coffee break for half an hour so that is really the only time the Cafe is busy. The rest of the time we just got to stand around and talk. There are only 6 people that work in the Cafe, so we always work together and will get to know each other very well. After the morning rush died down we cleaned things up and were free for 2 hours. When I came back in the afternoon I learned how to work the computers so I stood in the snack bar and helped check people out when buying their candies and sodas. The snack bar has lots of treats from different countries, trying to please everyone, so I'm pretty excited to try some of the things they have there.

This evening I joined a group to go out and play ultimate frisbee. A group goes to the police academy to play every friday, but today there was a big group of guys already on the field. We tried to talk with them and explain that we always get these fields on Friday and tried to arrange a way to split the fields, but they would not listen and kept yelling and yelling. They are a very physical culture, so whenever men are talking, they always hold each others hands or arms. At one point during the argument one of the African men put his hands on one of our men's forearms. He tried to shake that African man's hands off of his arms, then apparently the African men thought we were trying to fight! A bigger group came up and surrounded our person and yelled even louder. At that we agreed to just go and find another field somewhere else. We drove to a different field that was close by, but because of the terrible traffic here it took a long time to get there. Once there we attracted quite a lot of attention -- everyone wanted to see this strange sport and so many white people. Then we began to slowly see water bottles and keys disappearing from where we had put them. Thankfully we caught on to this pretty quickly and moved the rest into the cars before they got taken. We played for about an hour, until it got too dark to play anymore. It felt so nice to be able to get off the ship and run around. It was also nice to actually be in Cotonou, sometimes on the ship it can begin to feel like America so it is nice to go out and remember where you really are. I also got to meet lots of people this way which was really nice. Alot of them go play soccer two nights a week and volleyball once a week so there is plenty of opportunity to get off the ship and play games.

There are also alot of ministry opportunities off of the ship, but I havent been able to participate in any of them yet. Hopefully I will get to do that soon, but just getting oriented here has kept me pretty busy so far.