Finding Faith in the Battle

Holiday spirit. It’s a foreign concept for me right now. I suppose back in the US the Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations are out in full force. I imagine the evening news is full of reports about consumer spending sandwiched between desperate ad campaigns by toy and clothing and car companies. I can’t say that I miss that! But I just cannot believe that it’s half-way through November already. A friend said her sons were coming to visit soon, right before Thanksgiving. I said, “Thanksgiving? I thought you said they were coming soon”. I hadn’t looked at a calendar recently! And every day temps are in the high 90s. Sometimes it rains and we add humidity to the heat. I was not expecting this heat. (Yes, I KNOW it’s Africa! But the internet said moderate temperatures for Malawi!!!!) The ladies in the mission all gathered to plan Thanksgiving dinner and what holiday craft we should tackle for the annual ‘women’s craft week’ in December. It’s a whole new level of culture shock to be sitti

We’re still here, and we’re doing well! Sorry for the silence for so long—computer problems happen all over the world, it’s just harder to fix them in some places! So what’s been going on in Malawi over the last month, you ask? Anya has been bumped up to a higher-skill swimming group (she’s a shark now, not a stingray!) and her legs are often sore but her ego is soaring since she wins most of her races. She also had a field hockey tournament where her team won both the tournament trophy and the “spirit award”. While she was in as mid-field, her team’s defenders never saw the ball (puck?) because it never got past her! She loves our new Rotweiller Jake and her pet chameleon that lives in the tree outside our window. We also had a brief relationship with a hedgehog (quite cute and only a little stinky) but we couldn’t get it to eat anything so we released it in the dog-free yard of our friends. She stayed up until 1am crying about that one! We had a meeting with Ethan’s teacher, and disc