Shelves Full of American Goodness

Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone.

But when she got there, 

the cupboard was bare...

Well not in the Faber household! Due to limited food choices and high food costs here in Liberia, we are allowed a consumables shipment consisting of 2,500# of stuff. It sounds wonderful and like a little bit of Heaven, but the reality of putting together a consumables shipment was an exhausting challenge.

I began the process on Jan. 1 with sticky notes all over the house. Every time someone changed a roll of toilet paper they put a slash. New bag of flour? Slash. New container of laundry soap? Slash. Do you know how much stuff you go through in two years? I certainly don't and it added a bit of a challenge going from a five person household to just the two of us in a few short years. That change turned all my shopping and cooking expertise upside down. By May I was able to get some scientific estimates on what we used and how much we would need for the two years.

I began my shopping in Taipei. I checked on the weight of our household shipment when we arrived three years earlier, factored in the pieces we had bought and deduced that I had about 1,500# of extra weight that I could use. I made several trips to Costco in Taipei and bought all the toilet paper, laundry soap and other non-food items that I could. My household goods shipment was underweight by 50#. I patted myself on the back for this extreme success. :)

Back home I tried to find a balance between shopping and enjoying the home leave time with my friends and family. Not an easy thing to do when your running to a different store with an extensive list between every visit because you're on the right side of town or only 5 minutes out of the way. Our focus was liquids because we can't have them mailed to us. Some amazing friends let us continually drop loads of food off in their garage for a month. We all watched the pile grow and made bets on what the weight was the day the movers came to pack it all up. Just before we left America our food was loaded on a truck to be shipped to Monrovia.

Our consumables shipment arrived about 6 weeks after I arrived in Africa. Until it came I had moments of complete melt-down where the only solution was to once again go get an overpriced pizza at the hotel down the street. Cooking was a challenge. I won't go into the miserable details, because well, after all, we didn't starve to death. Life is happier now that I can make our comfort foods or at least foods that are familiar to us and that we enjoy!