Hi. My name is Verity, and my favorite thing to do is go swimming in the river with all my friends. I also enjoy playing soccer, bumping a volleyball back and forth, sitting around and talking, and oh, I really enjoy holding babies. Other things I enjoy are playing in the rain and getting together with my friends to cook over an open fire. We cook sago, bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, fish, yams and greens. Sometimes we get ramen and cook that, too.
Since our bigger refrigerator doesn’t work anymore, we use a little one that doesn’t have much space. So, if my mom makes too much food, we share it with our friends or anybody who walks by for a visit.
Another thing I like to do is paddle around in our dugout canoe. When my brother, sister, and I want to use our canoe, first we get our friends, then we head to the fuel shed to get our paddles. After that, we go down to the waterfront and jump into our canoe, push off and start paddling.
Sometimes we find big patches of floating grass coming down the river; they look like small islands floating by. We like to paddle over to them and beach the front of our canoe on them. Then we all jump out of the canoe at the same time and swim all around the floating grass and the canoe. We like to climb back in the canoe and jump out over and over. Sometimes we walk on the floating grass. Eventually, we float all the way back to our house, then we all get back in the canoe and paddle upriver in search of another island of floating grass, and do it all over again. We keep doing that till we are too exhausted from paddling; that’s when we quit. It is so much fun!
I usually help my friend cook. She is around 24 years old and is like a sister to me. She lets me help her start the fire. Sometimes I bring over some yams or greens, and we cook them together and eat them for breakfast. My favorite food here is really young green coconuts, because I can eat both the coconut and the shell, which I like. There is another kind of coconut that you can eat the husk, too.
I like watching the young boys climb the coconut trees. They wrap their hands around the tree and then put their feet up. Then they keep moving their hands and feet further up. They kind of look like a frog crawling up the tree. Once they get to the top, they grab onto the leaves, pull themselves up, then either twist the coconuts until they fall, or they stand above the coconuts and kick them with their feet until wobam, they knock them down.
Oh, and I like making whistles out of papaya leaves. We can’t leave that part out.
If you want to see this little missionary’s whistle, check it out at the following link. youtube.com/shorts/4eEq3w1oqQo
