Normal

We've been home for four weeks now, and are finally getting settled into a routine, which means that I'm getting settled into my role as Homemaker and Stay at Home Mom and Missionary Wife. 

This means cooking and playing with the baby and texting my sister and answering the front door and going to church on Sundays and reading To Kill a Mockingbird with Abram in the evenings. It also means being watched all the time, struggling with language and friendships, forgetting to buy enough vegetables on market day and having to stretch the menu for a couple days at the end of the week. Abram is home in the afternoons, and he's so good with the baby, but I'm supposed to be letting him work, and shouldering most of the babycare. I do get to attend one of his classes (eschatology), which is fun because it hurts my brain and gets me out of the house three days a week.

Sometimes my life is frighteningly normal and I fear I will get bored, and it's probably something other mothers can relate to: diapers and diapers and dishes and...diapers. Did I brush my teeth this morning? Where did I put my phone? Did I wear this shirt yesterday? It's fine, but I forgot it has spit up all down the shoulder, but it doesn't matter because there's no one here to notice, but-- did I? I honestly can't remember.

But there are other days where I realise that our life is pretty bizarre. Filling up our bathtub with water to wash the dishes in later, because the pump is broken. Wondering which language David's first words will be in. Curtsying when I run into the school principal. Changing David's diaper on the steps outside of the church building, with about forty witnesses.

We tuck a mosquito net around my son every night as he goes to bed. We boil or filter all our drinking and cooking water. People bring fish straight from the lake, which is outside our front door, to our kitchen, and our friend Mary cleans the fish, guts them and fries them for dinner. A friend of ours lost his job because he is a Christian, so Abram is giving him work any way he can: cutting grass and planting tomatoes and washing the car and watering our lime trees. The mangoes are fresher and larger than any in North America. The rice we eat was harvested down the road.

It's a strange contrast. On any given day, if you ask me what's on my mind, the answer could be 'trying to figure out what to make for dinner', or it could be 'wondering if our friend's son/baby/mother will live through the night'. Will we get enough rain for the crops to survive? Will David get malaria? Will our neighbours have enough food to feed their family? Where did I put my phone?

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I'm writing this at a restaurant in the town of Mwanza, the nearest city to us and the nearest source of fast internet. David is in his car seat, on the table, casually gazing at the largest lake on the continent.

I know it looks like he's facing away from the lake, but he's not. Promise.

I want to romanticise his life; I brag about his passport stamps, his first safari, his friends from many countries. But we are not the first couple to raise a baby overseas. He's not the first baby to visit Lake Victoria. I'm not the first person to blog while my baby naps. He may or may not appreciate his life, and he may or may not grow to love Africa as much as we do. (Don't you take your homeland for granted? At least at first.) I would love for him to grow up as an 'African boy', barefoot and tree-climbing, and maybe work or minister here when he grows up. But I would also love for him to know his grandparents, and to crawl around his aunt's kitchen floor. Both have their perks.

Our decision to live here comes with its privileges and sacrifices and difficulties and rewards. This is not a novel concept; every couple makes choices that have their pros and cons. Every family has fun memories and adventures and every homemaker has experienced joy and boredom all rolled into one. Every mother has changed diapers in unusual places.

As I process this, I am grateful for routine, grateful to be home. Grateful that we have just enough adventure to mix up the tedium of a 'normal' life.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind taking a nap here, either. Or...taking a nap anywhere.

Doing his best hippo impression.

Studiously ignoring the elephant that is maybe 30 yards behind him.

Safaris and lake resorts are fun, but let's face it. We spend most of our time here, changing diapers.

Settling In

We are finally home, after 10 flights, 20 hours in the car, and four thousand disposable diapers (gross).  Now I'm attempting to blog, nurse David, and upload photos on a very, very slow internet connection. Why didn't I make time to blog while in North America, Land of the Fast Internet? Why? Why, Ashby?

In the past few weeks, we visited friends and family in four different countries. We went to a rehearsal and dinner for a wedding in Kenya, we celebrated Thanksgiving in America, we celebrated Christmas in Canada, we celebrated New Years back in Kenya, and we drove from Nairobi back to Tanzania without air conditioning. (It's summer here!)

We spent New Years Day with the VG kids. Precious, Peter, 

Jane and Mariano were unsuccessful in fixing our A/C.

This is Canada. It is not summer in Canada.

As soon as we got back to our village in Tanzania, we all three promptly came down with bad colds. Welcome home!

Our time in Ontario and Oregon was wonderful, exhausting, overwhelming, went by too quickly, and will be cherished forever- I got to meet my nephew, you guys. And Abram and I got to go on a date. ALONE. We miss our families already, but we are glad to be back home, too.

Because I was sick and in bed for much of the time, it took me at least a week just to unpack our (many many MANY) suitcases. I wish I could say I enjoyed the process of sorting through all our wonderful gifts, but between the heat, the fussy baby, and the sinus infection, it was mostly a blur. BUT. We are feeling so blessed by our friends and family: our suitcases were full of clothes and diapers and toys for David; natural/gluten free/whole foods for Abram and I; books for all three of us; new (!!) clothes for me; etc. We may not come back to the US or Canada for a couple years, so we are very excited to have all this stuff to help make our home feel more homey.

Speaking of homey, I have on my to-do list to give you guys (that is, my sister) a tour of our house! Stay tuned!

Abram has a busy term ahead of him: in addition to research and interviews for his dissertation, he is teaching three classes at the Bible college here. I am auditing one of his classes! I leave David with our friend Mary on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for a couple hours and get to sit and listen and learn things about the end of the world (dun dun dun...). It's exciting to get out of the house a bit, I've wanted to learn me about this subject for a while, and it's a great opportunity to get to know some of the students a bit more.

Besides taking the class, my goals for now are to get settled into our home, raise David well, support Abram in his work, fine-tune my Swahili (my grammar is getting worse...in English AND Swahili. Mommy brain, anyone?) and be a blessing to the many, many visitors we have on any given day. Last week I counted, and we had seven different visitors in a two hour period. In other words: right now, my ministry is our home. (Almost every day, someone observes me feeding David WHILE answering a knock at the front door WHILE cooking dinner, and then asks, 'so, what do you do?')

 

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, etc. 

I am going to try try try to update our blog every couple weeks. This is mostly dependent on fast internet, so I can't promise anything!

Happy January, friends!

Here are a few more pictures; mostly of Canada: