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.
Happy January, friends!
Here are a few more pictures; mostly of Canada:
You are a breath of fresh air! Love the update and what do you do indeed lol. Blessings and continued health etc etc to your family.
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