Finding Faith in the Battle

I know I've been silent since Easter, but don't let that fool you into thinking things have been calm! We're now in week 2 of the semester, and we're both finding teaching to be much more tiring than we imagined (and all the teachers say AMEN!). Our time of language study was quite luxuriously flexible. We could fit our studies around errands and kids' schedules and whatever came up. No longer! That's been the hardest adjustment...that and having to have all 5 of us ready to be out the door for the day by 7am! Did I mention I'm a serious anti-morning person?? But we are having a blast with the students and with teaching. I was quite nervous about it at first, but I'm enjoying it now. I think my students are too, but then it's awfully hard to get an honest eval from them! Chad's doing a great job with his classes also, and we're feeling great being around the students more. Of course we haven't paid our phone bill or our water bill this mo...

So we had some challenges on Christmas, if you'll remember. Not one of the highlights in my past year, though I do enjoy laughing about it at times. But I tell you...Easter was wonderful! It started out slow, with trouble finding a goat. We see and hear them all the time, so we were totally bewildered at how impossible they were to find when we actually wanted to buy one. Plus we were trying to get the best price and passed up a couple early on thinking we could do better. We ended up not getting one until 1pm on Sunday (and paying too much...needing something automatically raises the price--they can smell the desperation, I swear!). Everyone had arrived around noon--all 21 people, and we visited and the 12 kids played on the new playground Chad built. I was so relieved when Chad arrived with the goat--I had no idea how I was going to feed everyone otherwise! The men went to work killing, skinning, and cutting up the goat while us women made greens, salad, goat stew, rice and nsim...

I made a delicious coffee-cake the other day, with cinnamon and coconut and melted chocolate drizzled over it. Anya wanted to help, so she pulled over the wash-tub to stand on so she could reach better. No problem until Isaac found he could climb up too, and his reach suddenly lengthened significantly. I had just poured a cup of milk out of the pitcher in order to make it sour with lemon juice, and Isaac's quick hands nearly got the cup. I breathed a sigh of relief as I grabbed it just in time and moved it beyond his grasp. But as I did so, I felt a shower on my bare feet, heard a waterfall flowing, and realized baking this cake was going to take much longer than I had planned. Isaac had poured out the entire 2Liters of milk all over the kitchen!!! In my efforts to save the cup, I sacrificed the pitcher. The clean-up was rediculous--I had to move the stove, move the fridge, wash dishes from the cupboards covered in milk-splatter. And of course that 2-Liters of milk was the last we ...

I knew that Ethan was enthralled with the Wii our friends recently got, and every time we visit he begs to play. But I hadn't realized it had gotten to such a drastic level until the other day. Ethan came running into the laundry room as I folded clothes, singing, "I just can't wait to get to heaven, to get to heaven, to get to heaven..." I asked him what he was most looking forward to in heaven: "Playing golf with Jesus" was his answer, which surprised me since none of us play golf here on earth! "Really?" I asked him, and he smiled sweetly and answered, "Well, yeah, if he has a Wii"