Saturday, December 29, 2007

Weekend Beach Cabana

Looking out from inside our cabana on our little island that we rent here in Port-Gentil. The voices are those of friends over for a BBQ last weekend, and the first person in the shot is Cecilia jumping around in the water.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Santa made it to Gabon!

Here's our tree as it stood on Christmas morning, guarded by a bronze pygmy king and queen pair. We sure were glad to see Santa made it all the way down here to our house. Seems his bag was too heavy to bring every wooden Thomas train Jourdain had asked for, but we've been told a few more will be on their way via Canada, when Todd (apparently a good friend of Santa) brings them over in January.

We added our very own little pygmy to the scene and we were set to open the presents!


In an effort to ensure the kids don't grow up ignorant of their American heritage, I managed to make some gingerbread men and women last week using the jar of mollases from our shipment last year. OK, so no one liked the taste, but that just means I get to eat them all. I'm hoping it's a taste that'll grow on them, but we'll have to wait and see next year!

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

School Dance

The end of the year dance at an elementary school here in town. This is where Ines' kids go to school, so a it's tad more traditional than the type of dances Jourdain and Cecilia perform at their schools!!

Monday, December 24, 2007

An African Christmas

While real Christmas trees are flown in from France and sold at the high-end supermarket in town, Olivier is strongly against the idea of killing trees for our own pleasure, and I myself enjoy working with local plants each year to get a similar, yet slightly African effect. When looking for ideas this year though I kept wishing I could just decorate the very odd pine-looking tropical tree in our back yard (still must look it up to see what the heck it is). Unfortunately though we've had such terrific rain storms over the past few weeks that I just didn't dare.

The idea I got then was to just use the top of the tree as our own indoor Christmas tree. This, of course, involved having it cut off, which Amadou proudly told me he could do with his machete.

With the help of handyman Abdoulaye and a very taaaaaaaall ladder, Amadou shimmied right up to the spot I had been eyeing for a few days. As you can see, Cecilia was right there with them to give them her advice:




Here's Amadou in his handy orange coveralls, and if you look carefully you'll see his machete aiming straight up in mid-chop:

I guess he keeps the darned thing sharp, 'cause in no time our Christmas tree came crashing down!
Some of the branches on the left broke off during the fall (landed halfway in neighbors' yard, much to their curiosity)...
but when I potted the whole thing I managed to stuff one of the broken branches in to fill the tree out...
And with a bit of decorations we've got ourselves a truly African Christmas tree!! I've since added tinsel and put Christmas hats on two bronze Pigmy statues guarding it. Will post the final "look" later tonight with the presents under it!

Friday, December 21, 2007

When it rains...

it definitely pours. Here's the road out in front of our house at the tail end of a good rainfall the other day. Strangely the camera kept trying to focus in and out on the raindrops, so it's a bit painful on the eyes. Sorry!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Gone Fishin'

While fishing is a brand new sport for him, Olivier comes home once in a while with a whopper. This fella was his very first catch, which has definitely proven to be beginner's luck! This one's a barracuda, which we've since learned is absolutely juicy-licious on the BBQ!!!! I won't go into the details of how Olivier actually got it out of the water into his boat, but his story involved a huge stick (presumably to club the poor thing) that the fish grabbed and chewed in half . All I know is Ol's enjoying learning a new sport, and while I'm happy to have fresh fish from the African Atlantic coast, I also prefer to remain ignorant about how it gets on my plate!

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Fulla

Every morning Cecilia adds her pink, furry Hello Kitty bag to the neat row of bags outside her little preschool classroom here in Port-Gentil. With the majority of expats in town working in the oil industry, her classmates include many Gabonese children as well as kids from every corner of the globe. No one blinks an eye at names such as Pelenatita (a girl), Keziah (a boy) or even MacArthur (used as boy's first name and pronounced as if it were traditionally French).

When it comes to children's tastes in school bags, however, international marketing seems to win out, and there is much less variety. The majority of girls at the school carry pink bags, usually with a smiling Dora the Explorer (or l'Exploratice in these parts) looking out at you, while many others seem to prefer Barbie -- an American classic.
Of course Barbie seems to meet all the aesthetic requirements necessary to please most 4-year-old girls world-wide, but I stopped dead in my tracks the other morning when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of someone I'd never met before.....
Religious requirements aside, it seems tastes really don't differ much do they?

Friday, December 07, 2007

The Fire

Amadou, our guard, friend and dedicated playmate to Cecilia lost his every belonging two days ago when his house burned to the ground here in town. He's an immigrant worker from Mali working in Port-Gentil to send money back to his family each month. We've given him clothes and a place to stay for now, but he's most upset over losing all ID papers as well as his entire additional cash stash from his two years of employment with us. He's very religious, praying 5 times a day, and tells us that Allah not only gives but takes away, so clearly this was Allah's choice for his life to take this turn. It's amazing to see that through all of his troubles, someone who had very little to start out with keeps on smiling even though he now has even less.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Images in Town

This is a brother-sister team I see every day in their school uniforms waiting in the same spot for their mom to pick them up for lunch. Kids of all ages at all Gabonese state schools wear these uniforms.


The typical car size here is due to the crater-sized pot holes around town. I would hate to be in a sedan - ouch!
Hey - what's up with the two makeshift stop signs before the intersection and waaay over to the right of the road? I'm not sure I need to take them seriously.
Wood is an important industry in Gabon, and one of the views we have year-round is of the thousands of tree trunks (I'd call them logs, but they seem too big) being floated in and out of the bay each week in the center of town.
We all use bottled gas in our houses for cooking, so this is a common scene.People may not be rich, but everyone has a cellphone, thanks to Celtel.

The temperature inside my car yesterday. I think the AC is broken...
Cigarette vendor on the left, very popular lottery booth on the right, and a typical wall in the background that was most likely painted just a few months ago. Sitting pensively in the back seat of the car one day Jourdain, watching buildings go by out his window, asked me why paint never stays on walls. I tried to explain to him that in life there is something called "quality", and that the amount of time the paint stays on depends on the level of quality. I do think he got the concept in the end, but it sure makes me chuckle that in his little 6-year-old universe no one has yet figured out how to keep the paint on buildings.


Monday, December 03, 2007

Port-Gentil Art

The Grand Village neighborhood of Port-Gentil is filled with fabulous storefronts painted with advertisements, or more exactly, images of what's for sale inside. This is a favorite of mine, with a sportswear store on the right and a barbershop on the left.
Closeup of sportswear store:

And here's the barbershop, with your choice of hairstyle before you enter the establishment:
And this piece of art below is the centerpiece of the town's largest traffic circle (while it's far from being an actual circle -- with roads shooting in and out from every angle and traffic lights flashing on and off simultaneously -- I don't know what else to call it). The man depicted here is Gabon's first president, Leon Mba (last name pronounced "mmmmmm-Ba"). The whole setup here is typically Gabonese, with a streetlight turned directly toward him for nighttime illumination, some random tile formation acting as a base for the painted plywood structure, and my guess is that the antenna-like object above his head was meant to one day be covered with some waterproof material, providing shelter from the rain. You'll also note that some of the city's electric wiring is dangling precariously behind Leon's neck. I'll have to look again next time I drive by, but it's very likely that poor Leon is being used in place of an actual electric pole to hold that up.

There are many more great images out there that I'll try and catch over the next few days!

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Beach Baby

Noah first arrived in Gabon at age 2 weeks and was kept indoors for a solid week before we finally decided to attempt an initial beach outing with him.

It was only once we got to Cap Lopez, the windy Atlantic coast, that I realized how delicate Noah really was and how mad I was at myself for bringing him out to a place where the sand would tarnish his perfect little newborn skin. I quickly wrapped him up from head to toe in a towel and took the following pictures as proof for him later in life that he really was at the beach at 3 weeks of age.

This one I quickly realized proves nothing,

so, trying desparately to keep him from being unnecessarily exposed to the elements out there, I snapped a shot with beach background,
and then one of his dad and siblings playing off in the distance. (Double click for more detail)As time went on though we got more daring. When Noah reached 7 weeks of age, Olivier and I decided he was plenty ready for his first boat outing.
The best safety precaution we could come up with was Baby Bjorning him underneath a lifevest that I would wear while on the boat. And off he was to our weekend island gettaway! (See the below for experienced older siblings waiting patiently in the boat)
By the time we reached the island and our cabana, the rather loud roar of the boat's motor had coaxed Noah into a deep slumber, so he was set up on our dining table in his anti-uv baby beach tent bought back in France with this exact outing in mind.
Unfortunately, at his age he couldn't fully enjoy the view overlooking Jourdain and Cecilia playing in the sea.
We eventually woke him up for a diaper change, but I'm still not convinced he was terribly interested in the new beach setting. Maybe with time he will learn to enjoy life out here in Gabon as much as the rest of the family does! (Not that he's complaining)

Friday, November 16, 2007

Mango Mania

As summer approaches here the mangoes start to drip and droop down from the fabulous tree in our back yard. From late October through to Christmas we tend to collect between 15 and 30 of the things a day. And that's not including the ones the neighbor kids reach through the fence to steal or the few Amadou the guard saves for himself before giving us the day's collection. I've been freezing most of them to use throughout the year in my banana-mango bread.

I'm told that snakes like mangoes a lot too and that we might want to pull the swing set a bit forward so as to avoid an unwanted snake-on-head-while-swinging type of incident, but then there just wouldn't be any shade for the kids. And doesn't the American swing set just look so pleasantly out of place under a mango tree?

Here's a bunch I'm just waiting to grab when they fall:

Every morning Amadou strolls around and picks up the masses of mangoes on the ground. If you're in the vicinity you can hear them fall when they hit. I guess it's just a matter of time before one bonks a swinging kid on the head. Will make for a wonderful childhood memory, though. (The best story I myself have is of a bird pooping on my head while walking to school one day - much less exotic.)

Here he is with a few from the morning's harvest:

And this is what we got this morning. Yummmmm. Definitely worth dodging the mosquitoes for!