Shopping for a community...

You may know, or may not know that I live within a community of people in the community centre. There are about 20 workers....we live (not all in one giant house together!), eat and work together (Plus we have a new DTS team arriving so even more mouths to feed nearer 50 mouths!) The charity YWAM all over the world live in 'community'. This post is not really about my experience of living in community, which so far overall very positive, it has its good and bad points, but so does living where you work, and being a missionary (wow - look at all these things I need to write about!)

Anyway this post is about something I experienced this week....we all eat together, which means you need lots of food to feed all these people - well I joined Beckie (she is in-charge of the Kitchen) on her monthly shopping trip to buy food for the house and WOW what an adventure!!

We went to a shop where you buy everything in bulk....well we started by buying about 120kg of rice! The shopping pretty continued like this....we filled up FIVE yes five large trolleys of food and cleaning supplies (so sad I did not get a photo of all our trolleys lined up at the check out)

This is just one pile of some of the food we bought...everything in bulk!

Anyway - lots of money spent to feed the lots of people (what shocked me most that we spent R$45 on garlic, thats about £16!!) and to keep the base clean too - but the adventure had really only just began...

Joyce came to pick us up, and we filled the whole Combi full of food, and off we set back up, up the very large hill we live on....well the Combi did not like this and decided that it could not get up the hill, so we had to call in some help - we unloaded about 2 people's weight in food into another car...and YAY success....we were able to get the food, the transport and all the people back safely, food unpacked and all before lunch!!

The Combi stuck up the hill with the food in it....but what you cannot see is al the food that is stacked in the back seats, and floor or really just how steep the hill is!!

It was such a crazy experience to think we had got so much food that it was too heavy for the combi to get up the hill, and just to see actually just HOW MUCH food we eat each month (approx), and we do not eat luxury and lots of food - we have an amazing cook that makes yummy food, but we certainly do not eat vast amounts....so yeah it opened my eyes to one part of community living!