Vacation time...................................

Now on to something not quite so somber!  Every year, as missionaries, we were allowed one month of vacation, this was to include travel.  We hoarded those days carefully and planned ahead.  Once you kids started boarding school, we had to plan days to be with you at ICA.  Dad and I went as far away as Paris, France, and as close as the Guinguette, which was in Bobo country. Some of those vacations were memorable for us and you but we always had fun together when Dad and I were not giving our time to preaching and teaching and helping the sick and translating the Bible. Each year there was a time to put aside our work and concentrate on family. And we had some fun and funny times.

When we knew you were going away to Mamou to school, Cheryl, we decided to take vacation down at Dalaba, in Guinea. We did not want you to go on such a long trip (three days!) without having any idea of where you were going when you attended Mamou later that year..  You three girls were all pre-school.  Because my folks had owned a very small cottage on the top terrace of the Dalaba Alliance Hillside, we were assigned there.  There was no running water, but a spring with clean water near our house. Dad called it running water - you filled your bucket and ran with it to the house! There was one large bedroom, a sitting-dining room and a little front porch. No refrigeration - a garde-manger where we kept food away from the flies. There was no inside toilet, but an outhouse for daytime and a "chamber pot" for nighttime!  All the comforts of home!! 

Fruit and vegetables were abundant at that time of year in Guinea. That was before they learned to grow strawberries in Burkina, and we ate berries frequently at Dalaba.  There was a nice picnic grove down at the foot of the mountain where we were staying, and the whole vacation crowd would go down there for at least one day for an all day picnic. With three children to cook and clean for, we took along Yusufu to help out with the cleaning and cooking and he enjoyed travelling with us and seeing the sights so far from his little village.  He didn't mind just eating what we ate.

We went in to Mamou one day so you girls could see the school, and we tried to be as positive as possible as we talked to you about going there.  About the second week, you girls developed the measles - one after the other, and all very sick with the disease. Which did not make vacation much fun for any of us.  There was one particularly low point - it was during the night. We always kept a low kerosene light on at night in case we had to get up with you girls.  (Did I mention there was no electricity, no gas stove - strictly camping!)  Debbi and Elin, you were so sick that night and kept getting up to use the covered chamber potty in the bedroom - we were all five in one room.  It had been raining for days, and continued on through the night. Dad got a flashlight to see better to get you girls up for the potty, and made a wrong move and the half full potty turned upside down on the floor!  We were grabbing rags to mop up and you girls were crying and the rain was pouring down.  Was this vaacation, I wondered, as I longed for my dry Santidougou house with an indoor bathroom!  But we did see Dalaba - and Mamou. And we did have some good days there as well.  Before taking the three day trek back to Santidougou in Burkina............

I wrote about our unfortunate pressure cooker incident in Monrovia, Liberia, during one vacation. We did go there again one time and that vacation was fun and uneventul.  When you kids were little, we also went to Ghana for vacation sometimes.  In those days we did not have a lot of American type food items in our stores in Burkina, and we were able to stock up on various grocery articles in Ghana.  It was also fun to be talking English to everyone there. (Once we got used to their accent.) Dad had to learn to drive on the left side of the road as well, and this was especially fun going around the big roundabouts in the city of Accra - seemingly going the wrong way!  He did a great job.  One year we got back to Bobo - after our long trip to Ghana and back - and they stopped us on the road outside the city of Bobo, asked where we were going. When we told them Santidougou, they said we would have to remain in Bobo for a while as there were severe cases of smallpox in the villages outside the city.  So we camped out in the Bobo guest house until it was safe to go to our village!

In Ghana we visited Tamale, Axim (on the CI border) Accra and Kumasi.  We found people very friendly and there were good accomodations everywhere and lower prices than we paid in French country.  We loved going to the shore there - at Accra and Axim.  I don't know if you remember this, Debbi, as you were very young, when Elin was just a baby.  We had met some American embassy people in the north of Ghana and when they heard we were going to be in Accra they wanted us to visit them for a meal.  So we accepted and arranged an evening to go to their home.  They lived in a very lovely embassy house and had all kinds of beautiful china and crystal goblets, etc, so the table looked beautiful.  That is, the adults' part of the table looked lovely - but you two girls and their daughter were seated at a table beside ours, and there was a ragged tablecloth and tin plates and plastic glasses.  You were used to using the same china as we did in our home and knew how to act at the table.  Debbi, you were most insistent that you wanted one of those pretty glasses (goblets) and I had to try to hush you up as you drank and ate out of your inferior tableware!!   What an evening. 

The Assemblies and SIM had mission stations all over Ghana and so we got to know some of their people as we stayed in their guest houses.  The Ghana government also had furnished government houses which you could rent for a pittance and we stayed in those also, especially at the ocean.  We always felt like we had had a real change when we spent a month in Ghana.  There was one government home outside of Kumasi where we spent a week one year. Elin, you were a baby and the man who came to do the laundry for us each day would bring it back in the afternoon all clean and ironed - he even ironed the diapers!  They fed you kids early and then you went to a playroom while we had our dinner more leisurely.  It was a restful spot and several of us missionaries went there together one year.  But as Ghana lost most of the British in their country, the conditions were not as good there, and so we had to find a new vacation spot.

We did find one - right near home: the Guinguette!  (more about that later)

One year Grandma and Grandpa Kennedy flew to Bamako to spend a vaction time with all three of our families - Albrights, Kennedys and us. It was a fun time being all together, and we filled the GMU guest house in Bamako for ten days.  Another year - when you were in Paris, Bubnas, for language study - Dad and I bought air tickets to spend Christmas with you in Paris, and see Josiah for the first time.  You had invited African friends for Christmas dinner, some of whom we knew too. And then we rented a car and took Fernand Sanou back to Normandy where he was in the university - and we got to see some of the north of France as well as Paris-ville. I remember we had saved some gift money and Dad sold my electric sewing machine - which I never used - in order to afford the tickets for the plane trip!

It took ingenuity and planning ahead to plan a family vacation each year.  But we did it and had fun.  Vacations at the Guinguette are now history, but we had years of good times there too.