What is the meaning of this?!  Empty bottles of whiskey in the home of missionaries?  It seems every missionary home from Congo to Cameroon has whiskey bottles like this!  What lushes!  Has culture shock made them go completely bonkers?  Do they need alcohol to cope?  Have they been influenced by those to whom they’ve gone to minister?  What’s the deal?

Actually, the bottles are just “packaging” for the best peanuts you’d ever want to eat!  Women soak peanuts in salt water, dry them and roast them.  Then, to package them for sale, they put them into bottles.  A 750 ml bottle of  peanuts goes for about $1.50 to $2.00.   When we lived in Congo (Zaire) we used to use the empty bottles to keep drinking water in the fridge – they fit so nicely in the fridge door.  But now that plastic  water bottles are bigger and easily available, we “recycle” the whiskey bottles, returning the empties to the sellers so they can fill them again with yummy peanuts.

One does wonder – who IS drinking all this whiskey to get empty bottles in the first place?  Well, not us.  And hopefully not the women we buy the peanuts from either.  So if you visit a missionary in Africa, or see photos of their dining table and notice whiskey bottles, be assured that they were purchased for the peanuts they contained.