i sabi

fish dinner

Every meal, twice a day, here in Guinea-Bissau, consists of a large bed of rice topped with fish or meat in sauce. Most commonly we get half a fish, but we have had several meals of gazelle and one day we had chicken that was killed that morning. A good phrase to know is i sabi ‘it is tasty’.

Meals are prepared at ground level rather than on a kitchen counter. That seems to be because cooking is done with charcoal. The traditional charcoal stove here has the same design as the coalpot in Saint Lucia, except here they are made out of metal and in Saint Lucia they are made out of clay.

Caribbean coalpot

This is harvest time for peanuts in Guinea-Bissau; they uproot the plant and pull the peanuts off the roots and put them out in the sun, in the shell, to dry.

harvesting peanuts

peanut sauce over rice

One of the meals we sometimes have is meat in peanut sauce, over rice, of course.

Here is a picture of Lynn’s and my old friend and host Joel enjoying dinner with his younger son, Joelson. (He named his first child David.) 

Finally, I will show a picture of my home away from home here in Lendem, which is not even a spot on the map in the interior of Guinea-Bissau. My room is the one with the light on. I am glad to have screens on the windows and solar electricity.

I have written a number of times before about Joel and about Lendem, where there is a translation center, and about Kriol. We are finishing up the translation of the New Testament into Kriol, the national language of Guinea-Bissau.