Christmas

This was my first Christmas away from home and I totally expected the worst: miserable homesickness, lame celebrations, loneliness, and maybe some food poisoning thrown in for good measure. I'm now here to say that it was far better than I asked or expected. But for your perusal, here's a bit of what Christmas looked like here:

Christmas baking: as a team, we alternated which house with an oven to use for baking each day. I'll have you know that we successfully navigated many substitutions or alterations in the recipes to fit with the food items available here. One example would be peanut cookies-- we started by roasting and peeling the paper off several cups of peanuts! Jess even made lasagna, but she had to start by making ricotta cheese and lasagna noodles. Despite the challenges, we produced a lot of amazing food!

Lessons in carols: on Christmas Eve we got together and sang carols, interspersed with Scripture readings. It was a beautiful time of remembering the reason for celebration this season. And, true to form, the power went out just as we started. No candlelight service though, seeing as we had five kids age five and under running around.

Christmas morning: I stayed over with some friends, and we baked cinnamon rolls for the morning. Family tradition lives on!  The cinnamon rolls were delicious, despite the fact that I decided not to make cream cheese for cream cheese frosting.

Cinnamon rolls!

In the afternoon, we got together at Tom and Megan's house for food, gift exchange, games, and a Christmas movie. We also got the kids to act out the Christmas story, which was the cause of much laughter and picture taking.

The angel (atop dad) gives good news to Joseph

Shepherds being contained while the staff and sheep are neglected

Shepherds visit the mother and baby

Finally, at 10:30 in the evening we called it a day, caught a taxi back to the airport town, and settled down for a good rest. 

Now it's the day after Christmas and I'm making a game plan for the week: setting goals for language learning, planning house improvements and cleaning projects, and catching up on things neglected during the Christmas rush.

Praise: for a wonderful Christmas! I thank the Father so much for the people He brought around me here, and for the opportunity to catch up with my family at home through video chat. Also, we now have covers for the furniture that is falling apart, and shelves in the kitchen!

Pray: our plumbing has still not been fixed. It's been 2.5 weeks now, and I'm very ready to be able to shower and use the toilet in our house. Also, because of the plumbing issues, we still don't have a solution for getting water into our upper cistern. 

Welcome to Africa

I'm experimenting with a new form of blogging: handwritten. So here it goes:

Settling in

Hi everyone,

It's been awhile since I last updated, so here's a bit of news to start off with:

-- homestay went well. I learned a lot of language bits and pieces then, but now have to assimilate it into my general vocabulary. The family I stayed with was super hospitable, and they made sure that I experienced a lot during my time there. We climbed a hill, had a picnic, visited a mineral spring, got water from a fresh water spring, cooked, made flower necklaces, visited a bakery and an aluminum pot making place, and a variety of other things.

-- I'm now settled into my home with Jess. It's a second story suite, with rooftop access. We have water issues, which you can read more about on Jess' blog.

-- language learning is now my full-time job. I'm working with language helpers to acquire phrases and vocabulary, then practicing in the community. It's a fun challenge, and some people have started greeting me by name.

Now let me tell you about our burn barrel.

See, trash is a problem here. The standard solution is to toss the trash in the rivers, woods, and ocean, but we didn't feel comfortable with that solution. So we're composting, recycling aluminum (for the people who make pots), and burning everything else. But how to burn in a safe way?

Jess asked around and found out that we could buy old fuel barrels from the airport. So we walked over there, accompanied by a language helper and a strong man (thanks Jeremy) and started asking who we could buy a barrel from. One person sent us to another person, that person sent us to the next person, until finally someone directed us to check in the tower. So we climbed the control tower at the airport to talk to the controller!

He talked with us for a bit between communicating with planes, then came down the tower with us to bring us to the big boss at the airport. The big boss explained that the governor wanted all the used fuel barrels, but he'd make an exception and sell us one.

So we had our barrel!

We tied it into the back of a taxi to get it home, but how to get it on the roof? The front door was too narrow, so we couldn't carry it up the stairs. Well, our clothesline is sturdy, let's tie it with that and pull it to the roof. Oops, the clothesline broke and onlookers below scattered quickly. One would think they'd have been further away, seeing as how three white people were trying to get a 50 gallon barrel to the roof.

Next plan? Carry it up the neighbor's stairs and pass it over to our house from there. The houses were close enough that it worked pretty well. Mission accomplished!

Next project? Getting the top off. One step at a time though, right?