Contingency

Life in Ghana involves many contingencies. Tonight, dumsor disrupted preparations for, but did not cancel, the weekly student dinner with seven guests: Dr. Grace, Dr. Glenn, Pearl, Michael, Nana, Cal, and Karen. We lit the stove the old-fashioned way: with a match. Eight cups of rice and twice that of filtered water went to the Institute for African Studies where a generator was providing power for our electric rice cooker. Cal and Karen babysat the rice.

in the end, Plan B worked out pretty well! David and Abby did a great job on Philippino and Pakistani food, cooking by our battery-powered bank of LEDs. As Abby said, “we work well together on our separate dishes.” We started dinner only 30 minutes late.

As usual, Mark enjoyed giving Olivia a hard time (about anything) and vice versa, and Catherine enjoyed the company of the students.

—Matt