it ruined our pizza party

on our last night in idaci missionary jim planned to have a pizza party. we had been making arrangements for days. we invited an english teacher friend and his family that lived up the road, we made sure we had enough of the essential ingredients to even MAKE a pizza, and on the day of the party we warmed up the ovens a couple hours in advance, one oven in our house, one over in jim's. trust me, a pizza party in the bush of Nigeria is a big deal. it is definitely somethin' special and nothing to mess around with.

about the time that my drool started to collect in the corners of my mouth was about the same time that this nasty grey cloud decided to form. rain had defeated us before out there in the bush. i started to worry (thus the face i'm pulling in that picture). i quickly ran to jim's house to pick up the pizza that was to be cooked in my oven. it looked perfect. it had pieces of ham and bits of pineapple that jim so graciously pulled from his precious stock of food. i was careful walking back to my house so that none of the ingredients would drop to the ground.

twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, thirty minutes...would the pizza ever be done? just as brett and i were asking ourselves this question we heard the first drops of rain begin to fall on our tin roof. we went outside to survey the scene. it didn't look good. streaks of lightning were stretching towards the earth in every direction. the sky was black, became even more black, and then ripped open. you haven't experienced rain until you've experienced a "shower" during the nigerian rainy season.

within ten minutes it had rained hard enough that we could not walk the twenty metres to jim's house carrying a piping hot pizza (see picture of the distance b/w our two houses below). the water in the field reached mid-shin and the mud dared to creep even higher. we saw jim's flashlight bouncing around his house. we went outside and called to him, "jim!" we said. "i don't think we can make it over!" he agreed it was pretty messy. we ate in our seperate houses that last night in idaci. the english teacher never made it. what a pizza party...i will never forgive that cloud.

**the pizza was fantastic. thank you jim!