Furlough Pros and Cons

We're coming home for furlough in July. Here are the pros and cons (or what I'm looking forward to and what I'm dreading).
PROS:
1. Family, friends and my dog
2. Worship in English at our home churches
3. Restaurants, movies, babysitters, grocery stores
4. Places to go, people to see, food to eat
5. Cold weather, and cold Christmas at home
6. Playgrounds and all things especially geared to kids
7. No mosquito nets
8. Libraries
9. Constant water and electricity

CONS:
1. Traffic and gas prices (cheaper gas but more driving in the States)
2. Expensive produce that's not even that fresh
3. 8 hour jet lag with 2 children after 4 flights - yikes!!
4. Changing diapers on a kid with multiple layers
5. Layering clothing on kids who barely even know about socks
6. Busy, busy, busy American life
7. Well, I can't think of any more cons. Maybe that's because we're so ready to come back to the States that Dusty mutters Chipotle, Chipotle, Chipotle even in his sleep! :)

Birthday Insanity

Tessa turned 3 on March 18th. On Good Friday, we celebrated her birthday with our neighbor Micaiah who also turned 3 that day. We had 21 kids and 21 adults here at our house for the swimming party and NO WATER! That's right folks; the water was off till Tuesday night. That's 5 dry days with guests for dinner on Easter. Fortunately we have external tanks we used for the baby pools and filled buckets of rain water for bathing, toilets, and dishes. Whew! In addition to water issues, the kumbi-kumbi hit the night before the party. These are bugs attracted to light who shed their wings and crawl under the door leaving behind them masses of wings. The kids were in and out of the pools and every foot dragged wings back into the pool with them, so it was quite a mess, but they didn't care and the adults pretended they didn't either.

Here's the classic screaming kid photo - Josiah was then replaced by his baby brother who also cried for later photos. We're so blessed to have so many missionary kids in our community - it's amazing really. All are 7 and under, but most are younger than 4. Anybody out there want to come over and help us teach them? Please, please?! Seriously, we would love to know if God puts it on your heart to share this opportunity with someone who loves kids and wants to come to Africa for a while. Please pray for a short or long-term teacher for our kids. We want to start a co-op school soon, and just look at all these precious faces waiting to learn fractions!!

Easter Bunnies

Tessa's pink Easter dress this year came from mtumba (the used clothing market) here in Musoma. It is 100% silk, was probably a flower-girl dress once, and we bought it for less than $5.00 for a dress-up princess birthday party that she attended in January. We hunt the mtumba for upholstery/curtain fabric, fitted sheets, clothes, shoes, and other random items. You might remember the huge America flag I bought there? Jack doesn't have dress-up clothes, and guess what? He doesn't care and neither does anyone else! Of course here, any piece of clothing without rips and stains is pretty much dress-up anyway.

The Easter package from my mom arrived a few days late, so we had the Easter egg hunt the Saturday after Easter - it just made the holiday seem longer. Thursday before Easter was a Muslim holiday, and Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays here too, so we all enjoyed our 5 days off. I think Easter is a bigger holiday here than Christmas is. Churches have services every day starting Thursday. It's nice to be in a place that has never heard of the Easter Bunny, and where God has all the glory. Not that we don't appreciate a little Easter chocolate of course.

South Africa Vacation

Here's a few snapshots of our vacation in Cape Town, South Africa earlier this month. It was a beautiful place with great weather and so much to see and do. It was great for us to feel that we were no different from anyone else, and Cape Town is so "western" that we had almost no culture stress. In many ways, it felt like being back in the States. We could even drink water from the taps - a real luxury! We loved the aquarium, play grounds, restaurants, shopping, Dutch colonial architecture, and the concert in the botanical gardens. It was truly a great vacation even if it took us 2 days to get there.

Here we are on the top of Table Mountain, where we all got sunburned but still had fun taking the cable car up the mountain and hiking around.

Look closely: did you know there are penguins in Africa? I sure didn't. There is even a beach where you can swim with them, and although we didn't get to go down we could watch folks tanning and playing on the beach alongside the penguins. I never thought I would see people in swimming suits hanging out cordially with penguins. On the ferry to Robben Island, I also saw some floating on top of the water, kind of like ducks.

Here we are at Robben Island Prison, in the cell across the hall where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner for 18 years. Jack looks pretty happy here, but he tossed his cookies on the ferry on the way home. He's genetically inclined toward motion sickness thanks to my mom. Otherwise it was a good and eye-opening morning, and gave us an appreciation for our freedom regardless of our beliefs.

Home Security and Tummy Cheers

From these photos you can see the security gate and screen on our front door. It protects us from possible intruders, but also from mosquitoes, our bigger concern. No expat lives here without a massive keychain for the various locks around a home - for instance, we have 3 locks just for this door. All our windows have bars and screens on them. We don't even notice them anymore. The other security device we have is our tiny Rottweiler, Ellie, full grown at 50 pounds. Black dogs here are more feared than others, and we've heard it is because of the belief of black being evil. She's hardly evil, but does put up a good bark which is enough to scare the mightiest foes, even though they may only be wandering cats or goats.

I think all 3 in this photo are watching Dusty work on his piki-piki (motorbike). Jack, on this particular evening was so filthy after dinner that I removed his shirt, whereupon Tessa insisted on removing hers as well and then running over to Jack for "tummy cheers." Picture fraternity boys doing the belly bump, but on a toddler scale. Jack was clueless, but still thought it was funny, and I couldn't resist snapping a photo of them afterwards watching their Daddy at the door.

The next day they got to help him work on the piki-piki and play with the tools. Yes, Jack is indeed teething on a bisi-bisi (screwdriver). What a stud! Who needs baby toys when you can chew on tools?

Backyard Produce

Our yard has been very productive with passion fruit, bananas, avocados, and guavas while the neighbors can add lemons, tangerines, and oranges. Never having lived in CA or FL, this seems like a minor miracle - having fruit in our yard just dropping out of trees. The passion fruit are so high up in our trees that they sound like bombs dropping on our tin roof. One hit the other day during nap time, and from Tessa's room, I heard a startled "Oh! ha ha ha." We give away what we can't eat, which is also a nice benefit. By the way, avocados here are considered fruit, so we're no longer surprised to see them served in a fruit salad or sliced along with papaya and pineapple served at breakfast.

Workshop Finale

Photos: Dusty's speech, using the Swahili Bible. The kids outside the church who were chanting "wazungu" (white people) when we drove up. The inside of the church where the celebration was held.

The Orthography II workshop ended on Friday with a celebration of everyone's hard work. Several of the leaders gave speeches. All the wazungu were amazed when the guest of honor gave a lengthy comparison of the participants to breasts full of nourishing milk! Everyone else just nodded their heads in serious agreement. The point he was making was that the participants had done great work to lay the foundation for Scripture the same way that breast milk is essential for a child to grow. In this culture, breasts are just a very normal every-day part of life - but, gosh, that sure is different in the Western culture, isn't it?

Dusty gave a strong speech in Swahili, and a participant from each of the languages read a story. Each language group wrote a story for the first time in their mother tongue, which is pretty amazing for everyone. It was a privelege to hear them read the stories even though we couldn't understand them till they retold them in Swahili. They were clearly proud of their achievement and looking forward to sharing the stories with others upon their return home. We're thankful we get to be a part of this ground-breaking work, and it's always exciting to have a small part of the project completed.