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Pilot light

“The printer isn’t working.”

“Did you try it in the oven?”

In a land where relative humidity is around 80% even during dry season, and there is no glass in the window to make climate conditioning possible, the pilot light turns the oven into a perfect hot box. It’s a warm, dry place to dry out electronics…or straighten candles?

We don’t know if Mike’s strategy to straighten crooked candles in the oven worked, because he left them there, without telling anyone, then departed for a week of meetings in Bamenda.

Christy didn’t look in the oven before putting the bread in.

We were all outside harvesting groundnuts when Christy came out from checking the bread, asking if smoke should be coming out of the oven. Becky and I looked at each other and chuckled, wondering what the poor pre-teen had done wrong, but when Becky went to find out, she encountered a kitchen filled with billows of smoke rolling out of the oven, caused by the paraffin which had melted all over the inside of the range.

The moral of the story is always check the oven to make sure nothing is inside before preheating it or attempting to bake anything.
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