Serious Pass-Times of Senior Missionaries in Nigeria

Things are different here. Not bad, nor good. But, definitely different! Costs of Food and Paper Products are very high. The largest single expense for Senior Missionaries is food. So, you adapt. Senior Missionaries squeeze every micro-ounce of American Toothpaste out the their tubes before resigning the empties to the garbage. We scrape every last bit of Peanut Butter out of the small bottles we buy. It costs between $6.50 and $7.00 for an 18 oz. bottle of peanut butter. Paper Towels: $2.00 for a small roll. The Paper Towel game is to make one square last all day, apiece.....total of two squares per day. Napkins: cost $1.50-$2.00 for 24 napkins, so we cut them in half. That gives us two meals out of one napkin. Toilet paper: $2.50 per roll. The toilet paper game is to make one roll last for one week. Mostly we make it. Tuna fish: $2.50 per can. The Tuna Fish game is making sure we extract every flake of tuna from the can and lid before sending them to the trash. We can get 3 meals out of one can. One meal for the two of us, and then one meal for one of us with the left overs. Tuna gets "doctored" up with Mustard, Mayo, one small gurkin pickle, & about 1\3 of a cucumber.

There are other little money saving games we play, but you get the idea. Linda said she thought we used a roll of toilet paper per day in each bathroom at home. I don't think we ever gave a thought to how many napkins or paper towels we used in a day. Tuna was great stuff, but you used a second can if you needed more. Peanut butter came in large jars of Skippy, and you never ran out. You certainly did not spend time with a stiff spatula, scraping out every last bit of peanut butter. Things are definitely different on a Mission in Lagos, Nigeria. And, we are definitely not in Kansa anymore, Toto!