Fun Friends

These are our neighbors.  They came to our house to play.  It started with 2 kids and then it was like 15 kids in 1 family.  1+ 9 = 10.

Some of the kids have not seen lots of toys so they had fun.  They also had never seen so many pencils and markers and pieces of paper.  Even though they don't have hot wheels at home, they gave  all of them back to us.

This is me and Mike.  He is my best friend here.  He is so cool because he can do back handsprings, flips, and walk on his hands.  He is so nice.  He helped me to walk on my hands.  He speaks some good English because he can understand me when I say, "How are you?"  He asked me things in English and I answered him in Kinyarwanda with "Yego" which means "yes" like 8000 million times.  I also said "ni meza" which means "I'm fine."  "How are you" is "amakuru".  He is also really good at soccer and he has a soccer jersey on!  I hope he comes over again.

This is Dioni (the little one) and Umanse.  Dioni is 4 and she is the daughter our Celeste, our gate guy.  She is 4.  She has an ouchie on her left thumb with a different-looking bandaid which was just tied on her thumb and you could see her blood.  Wesley says that Umanse has a cute voice.

Stop Lights

The stoplights have timers and it looked a little bit weird but it is a little bit cool too because I've never seen one of those.  The stop lights tell you how many seconds before it will change color instead of just having a circle.  They also pay people to paint the curbs black and white to make it look cleaner and to give people jobs.  They paint pretty fast.

Ants

Guess what this is?  Ants on a piece of bread.  The ants here must be hungry because so many ants come almost as soon as stuff gets on the ground!  They got there in a half an hour!  The ants in Redding take 12, 000 hours.

Pet Chicken

Our friend upstairs, Connor, got a pet chicken and we are having a vote for his name.  What are your ideas for names?  These are the ideas that we have:  Bubba, Feathers, Chicken Little, Bock Bock, Chicken Lyle, Toothless, the Deadly Gnatter, Messy, Clothes Pin, Buffalo and Turkey.  There, that's all of them.

Today my dad pulled off a gecko's tail.

Today we met the granddaughter of our gate guy, Celeste.  She was cute.  I have no idea what she said.  I said "yego" to her, which means yes.

The Coffee Machine

Yesterday we went to a coffee machine (mill) and saw a friend of my dad's.  It was really fun by the way, too much fun you know.  First we saw a coffee tree that had coffee berries on it where the coffee comes from but you have to squeeze it out like edamame, do you know what edamame is?  I never knew that coffee was so slimy!

Then the beans go to a washing station to get the slimy stuff off and then they go to a giant holding room.  It was so much fun fun fun fun fun!  I was climbing up the coffee bags so high that I almost went to the top of one of them.  We thought the first room was huge but it was nothing, but the third room was a giant!  I climbed up bean bag stairs...get it?  They were beans in bags.

Then the beans get sorted into good beans and bad beans.  They sit and sit and sort all day long.

The beans are covered by shells called parchment.  It makes you really dirty and it got in my shoes.  I know this because I saw a guy with dark brown skin and no shirt on who was almost totally whitish!  You have to take the parchment off with this machine, or a bigger one.

They get sorted by a really loud machine and then they are put in bags to send around the world.  The good beans and bad beans both get sold but to different kinds of coffee companies.  This coffee place sells green beans, get it?  green beans?  (green beans means that they haven't yet been roasted).  The bean bags are all tested by being roasted and then added to hot water.  I got to hold the timer for 4 minutes to make the coffee in the water.  Then my dad's friend did a really loud slurp and said it tasted good.  My dad got some free coffee and I got to staple the bag.

Simon's Blog!

I am in Africa right now.  It is a lot of fun because Connor and Brody's mom brought fun things like plastic swords and other things like a big box of Legos with lots of guys.  My mom brought fun things too like MagnaTiles and Kepla blocks.  It is so much fun because last night we went to pizza in Rwanda with Connor and Brody.  I still have something made out of legos from yesterday.

After I built that lego ship, I made another boat that did not work so well, but I still did not give up and it worked 2 times but all the other times it did not work.  I wanted it to float.  It was so much fun because Wes Wes, me and the gate guy were outside with the ship and a bucket of water and all the guys had capes, except 1 guy.  Finished!