Hiring of help..

Time to harvest a few avocados from our tree.  It gets pretty thin up top, so this is a job for Elisa the small and light!  She bravely climbed the tree, right up until she was stopped by a spider web.  Amelie to the rescue!!  She taught Elisa to break off a small stick, wrap up the web, then toss the stick which is exactly what she did.  Now we have some avocados waiting to ripen.


The amount of work to maintain the yard is exhausting, so after discussing for some time, we decided to hire the yard-meri (lady) who used to maintain the yard before we bought the house.  Yesterday they showed up for the third time looking for work, so we hired them.  She and her husband worked from 8-noon for 26 kina.  That is about 10 dollars for the two for the entire morning!  This is the approved wage per hour per person for work done on the center.  They walk for about 2 hours to get here, then work very hard to earn that wage.  That is more than they were paid by the last owners, but not as much as I feel they deserve.  To pay them more would make others who work on center and earn the approved rate upset, so we are told not to pay more.  What would YOU do?  We have decided to provide their snack and lunch meal too.

Today Jenny and I put our names on the waiting list to have electric solar panels installed on our roof.  Our neighbor across the road just had a system installed on his roof and now even on cloudy days makes double the electricity he actually uses.  The center buys back the excess electricity produced and gives them a check.  Though the initial investment is quite high and will use up virtually all our remaining money, after 4-5 years, the savings will have paid for the system.  From then on, we will no longer have to pay for the expensive electricity, but will also get a check monthly for the excess we produce and pour back into the grid.  Providing we stay for at least 5 years this is a very smart decision.  There are 20 families ahead of us on the waiting list so we are not sure exactly when we will get the solar panels installed.

Jenny keeps busy working mornings in the clinic and managing our house in the afternoons.  Today she is taking the girls to play with a friend, then going over to help a single lady missionary pack up for her time doing translation work at the village.  Tomorrow night, she has invited to dinner (yum, home-made lasagna and mint ice-cream) a couple returning from their 1 year furlough. And, she just came back from doing the shopping for the week from the local store.

That's it for now.  God bless.