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Monday, January 09, 2012

Catch Up

At the moment we are playing catch up, so over the next few weeks I will be sharing what has been going over the last month - since the last time we wrote we are now in our third country.  We left Sierra Leone at the beginning of December.  As usual we hosted many thank you events, 2 of which were small lunches held personally with the US Ambassador and the British High Commisioner, both of which have been a huge help in our stay here.  Plus we held a big thank you event to all that have helped our stay in Sierra Leone go smoothly.
Then we had the day worker thank you event.  Each year we employ around 200 local people to help us out with extra work, translations, skills etc and they become part of our family for the 10 months we are in a country.  Saying goodbye to them is hard.  I must admit, the Sierra Leoneons topped it in the celebration category as they attempted to lift certain crew members up in the air and carry them around our international lounge, Tim included.  Now I've searched and searched for photo evidence but all I can come up with is the initial push and lift - the carrying around the room, you'll just have to imagine and have a chuckle to yourselves.
So you lure him in with a bit of African Dancing 
Make him comfortable with dancing and surround him 
then grab and lift! 
We have some very strong people!

Sharon and her friend also said goodbye to our tailor friends.  We were able to get them a new iron and bibles to remember us by and our picture is stuck on their wall.
Saying goodbye to Foday, Osman and Omar, wearing one of the skirts he made
Nathanael said goodbye to Tenzing, a friend he made at the US Embassy.
Then there was the saying goodbye to everybody who has come across our path during our time in Sierra Leone.  The sail wasn't too long because we were just going to Ghana for a few weeks of downtime before heading straight to Togo.  Our schedule is changing this year so the dry dock can be done in the summer so we are fitting in 6 months in Togo as we only gave them a short time the year before!  The sail saw many dolphins and we will tell you more about Ghana in our next posts.

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