Tim left this morning to stop in at a literacy workshop in town and to run some errands. Shortly after he left, I remembered something I needed to tell him before he went to pick the girls up at school.

We got a cell phone this week so I thought I’d give him a call. Three times I got a recorded message from the phone company that the call couldn’t go through. I called the phone company and they told me he must have the phone turned off. Rats!

Then I remembered that one of the errands was a stop at a hardware store for paint. I called the hardware store and asked for the warehouse. When the clerk answered the phone I explained I was looking for my husband. “Have you seen a white skin man, balding, mustache, wearing glasses and buying paint?” I asked.

“No” said the clerk. “There was a guy in here earlier, but he was with a woman.”

“Well” I said, “if you see a man like I described, can you ask him if his name is Timothy? And if he says yes, please ask him to call home.”

Ten minutes later, the phone rang and it was Tim. Even though Honiara is the capital city, it still often feels like a small town.

One of the things that often doesn’t fair well in the tropics is leather. Three weeks after our arrival, Tim’s leather shoes are covered with mold! I wiped the mold off one of the shoes so you can see the contrast. In the closet you can see a pair of leather slippers and sandals. They don’ t have mold on them. Some types of leather seem to grow mold easier than others.

Most of the time we wear rubber flip-flops outside and are barefoot inside.

When we were in the USA, friends introduced us to


“Coldstone Creamery Ice Cream”. We aren’t sure if they did us a favor or not, because we got hooked! At one store we saw a poster that said something like, “Real friends don’t let their friends eat store bought ice cream.” We chuckled at that, because here in the Solomons, friends who eat at our house are never served store bought ice cream!

We have a hand crank ice cream machine and Tim has ice cream making down to a science! Tonight was his first time to make ice cream since we’ve returned to the Solomons.

Tim makes a cooked custard type ice cream which we refrigerates for 24 hours before he starts cranking it. He usually cranks the ice cream at night when the outside temperatures are cooler. When the ice cream is finished, he stores it in our deep freezer until it’s ready to serve. Tim makes the ice cream ahead of time so it has time to firm up before we serve it.

The girls love when Tim makes ice cream and have talked about falling asleep at night to the sound of dad cranking the ice cream in the carport below the house as they dream about the delicious ice cream they will eat the next day.

We are preparing for our Valentine’s Party on Wednesday night which we host each year. This year we are having a scaled down party and only serving dessert instead of preparing a formal sit down dinner for our guests – we have hosted up to 22! Next year we’ll do it up big again, but for this year, our friends will be delighted to savor Tim’s ice cream again after a year’s absence.

This morning you would have found something interesting in my oven. No, we aren’t going to eat it. It’s ‘indicator silica gel’.

In the tropics, it can be a challenge to take care of cameras and binoculars and keep them dry. If they are left in a humid environment, a fungus can start growing on the lenses which ‘eats’ into the protective coating. While the lenses can be cleaned professionally, the lenses are never the same afterward.

We attempt to keep our cameras and binoculars safe by keeping them in an air tight box with the silica gel beads in a sock. When this type of silica gel is dry, it is blue. As it absorbs moisture, it turns to a light pink. Occasionally, we take the silica out of the box and heat it in the oven to dry it out again. That’s what I have in my oven this morning.

Today at church I got to meet my namesake, Martha! Isn’t she cute? Her mother is Priscilla, my friend that taught a number of women to read here in town. We also worked with Priscilla to help her produce a reading book in her language of Baelelea. Martha is a little over one year old. The Pooh bear was one of Sarah’s stuffed animals which we gave to Martha this morning.

It’s 8:30 on Saturday night. I wish I had a way to record the sounds resonating around the valley in which we live. In the distance the beat of a bass drum playing at a hotel disco vibrates through the air.

Across the river a pastor is leading a church service with lots of loud singing and shouting followed by a sermon. Words are lost in the distance, but the intensity is clear in the high volume.

Somewhere across the river, women’s voices can be heard singing in harmony – from the style of song it’s clear that they are Anglicans.

Soon we will retreat to our bed with the ceiling fan humming and rattling at the highest setting, as much for trying to cover the noises of the night as for the cooling affect it has on our bodies.

Note: Sorry there haven’t been any new blogs for a few days. I was ready to write up my market trip Friday morning, but the power was out for a while. Then when I had power Friday night, there were technical glitches and the photos wouldn’t load. I hope you enjoy a trip to the market…

After I dropped the girls off at school, I headed to the market to stock up on fruits and veggies for the weekend. I came home with a loaded market basket and then some more. I thought you might enjoy seeing what I bought.

One woman had lots and lots of ‘bushlimes’ which are a small lemon/lime type fruit. Bushlime juice is very refreshing! I bought 80 bushlimes at a cost of $20 (less than $3.00 USD). When I got home I put them in a bowl and poured boiling water over them. This softens the skin and makes them easier to juice. Later I juiced them with the juicer attachment on my Kitchenaid Mixer. Then I poured the juice into ice cube trays to freeze. Later I put them in a plastic bag or container and keep the bushlime cubes in the freezer for making juice quickly and easily.




I bought a few small tomatoes. In the market, they are placed in little piles worth $1.00

($.20 USD).

This is a small pumpkin. It cost $10 ($1.40 USD). We enjoy baked pumpkin.

Emily requested some guavas. This is a pretty good sized one. I hope she likes them – I tend to buy them ripe and the girls like them a bit green.




This bundle of greens is called “Chinese broccoli” and it does taste a bit like broccoli. It takes 3 bundles to feed our family and each one cost $6 (almost $3.00 US). Usually we chop it up and cook it in a little water with chopped onion. Yum.

Sometimes we can find green beans, but more commonly we find these ‘long beans’ in the market. I don’t like them as well as regular green beans, but they are OK. You may notice that the bundles of vegetables are wrapped in a leaf to keep them together. What a great bio-degradable way to package!




This unusual looking vegetable is actually the flower of a type of grass! The outside of the rough husk is covered with tiny hairs that can stick in your skin. The part that you eat is the white flower inside the husk.

When it is steamed and served with a cheese sauce on it, it almost tastes like cauliflower. This bundle cost me $8 (a little over $1.00 US)

There were lots of pineapples in the market and the one I bought cost $12.00 ($1.70 US) and it is sure to taste much better than ones you can buy in a grocery store in the USA!




I bought this chicken from a woman I know who was selling chickens in the market. It weighs a little over 2 pounds and cost $50 ($7.15 USD). Chicken is expensive here because all of the feed is imported since there isn’t any grain grown in country to feed chickens.

My just for fun purchase was the flowers. Saturday is the best day for finding flowers at the market, but I lucked out with these two bundles (which included some orchids) for $10 each ($1.40 USD).

My last purchase was a watermelon. I’m terrible about picking out good ones, so I enlisted the help of some local women in the market to help me choose a nice one. It worked because it is a nice red color inside and tasty, too!

It’s 4:00 Wednesday afternoon. It’s been overcast all day and it finally started raining. This should be rainy season in the Solomons, but this year there hasn’t been much rain.

We’ve had some light showers over the past few weeks but today it was a heavier rain. After the rain fell for 5-10 minutes, I went outside and connected the downspout to our fiberglass rainwater tank. We usually wait to connect the downspout to the tank until after the rain has washed the leaves and debris off the roof and out of the gutter. That way we get much cleaner water that we don’t need to filter.

This water tank supplies our drinking water which we carry up to the house in containers. There is town supplied water with pressure in the house, but we never drink that as it can’t be trusted to be potable. The tank has screens over the openings in order to keep the tank from becoming a mosquito breeding ground. (Finding mosquito larvae swimming in your drinking water is NOT nice!)

We are thankful to be drinking the rainwater again because it is so clean tasting. We could taste the chemicals in the treated tap water we drank in the USA.

We had some wonderful meals in the USA and especially enjoyed Mexican food. However, Emily and Sarah have been looking forward to eating our homemade Mexican meals that we enjoy here in the Solomons. Eating Mexican food here takes quite a bit more work than in the USA.

First we start with pinto beans. We buy them at the bulk store in town. They have been in the freezer for about a week to kill off the extra ‘protein’. (weevils)


The beans are washed and then put in a pot of water that is brought to a boil. Then the heat is turned off and the beans left to soak for a while. If I plan ahead, I do this the night before I want to cook them.

After the beans have soaked and swollen a bit, the water is drained off and changed with fresh water. (This is supposed to make the beans less ‘gassy’.)


The beans are put on to cook again with lots of onions, garlic and some beef boullion. They cook and cook and cook all day and occasionally water is added to keep them from boiling dry. A pressure cooker speeds up this process, but mine isn’t working. However when our crate arrives at the end of February, I will have a new one.

When the beans are soft, we mash them with a potato masher in a cast iron skillet with a bit of oil and fry them.

Meanwhile the flour tortillas are in process. The flour is sifted for weevils. Then I mix flour, baking powder, salt, oil and water together in my Kitchenaid mixer. The dough is formed into balls and left to sit for 15 minutes.




Then the dough is rolled out into tortillas that are cooked on a cast aluminum griddle on our stove. This process works best with a couple of people working together. Tonight everyone was helping and it all went much faster. I forgot to take a picture of us eating our bean burritos, but they were tastier then Taco Bell!

The girls are enjoying being back at Woodford International School. Last Friday during assembly, Sarah’s class sang a song about hats. Since returning to the school this year, there is a new ‘no hats, no play, no fun for you today’ policy. The kids are required to wear the school hats during recess and when playing outdoors for PE class. Many Australian schools have this policy since skin cancer is such a problem there. (Emily and Sarah are NOT impressed with having to wear hats!) As you can see, there is a school uniform as well.

The school is made up of children from many different nationalitites. In this photo of Sarah and her class, you can see Sarah, her Australian friend, Ela, a Korean classmate and a Solomon Islander.