A Quick Update

Well, I wish I could write volumes about life here recently but I can't...

*Rachel left last night for home, and the house seems a bit empty today! She gave a little concert yesterday and we had a chance to see the children say goodbye to her. Some were teary-eyed and clearly loved having her there. We really enjoyed having the opportunity to have her stay with us--the time flew by! We will be keeping her in our thoughts and prayers as she prepares to head to Buenos Aires and then Hong Kong for studies this year.

*Mark and I have both been sick with some type of upper-resp. crud for about 3 weeks. Mark seems to be on the healing side finally, but I just get worse every day. Antibiotics are not helping and I can barely stay awake during the day. Cameron has also been coughing terribly but seems to have no other symptoms. Ava woke this morning with sniffles and coughing...blech. I'm just so tired of being tired and stuffy and groggy. I will admit, though, that my down comforter and matress from home are helping immensely! At least emotionally.

*We are going on 3 days with no electricity. I'm at an internet cafe right now trying to catch up on emails. No electricity is more of a pain in the neck than an actual emergency...although we'll be heating water on the stove tonight (thank goodness for our gas stove) to wash in since we have no hot water. By tomorrow afternoon, though, we will be starting to lose whatever's in our freezer (meat) and some stuff in the fridge, which will be costly, as meat is one of our bigger parts of our budget. If the power comes on today or this evening, we'll be OK in that respect. Our phones are also almost out of charge, so I'm off to find a place where someone will let me plug them in to charge them. *sigh* Not to feel bad--our friends in Dar have not had power for days and days--they are on rationing, 24 hours on and then 24 hours off, but something's wrong with their house power so even on their "power days" they are ususally without power. Whenever you think you are being dumped on, look around--there's always something that will make you feel blessed. This is the longest we've gone without power since we've been here and since it's a problem somewhere, not rationing, we do have the pumps working so water is coming in.

*We are leaving Sunday evening for another 3 weeks at language school. We are nervous about our progress, feeling like we've just struggled so much with the language, so we'll see. We'll be home on the weekends to get laundry done and for a change of pace. The O'Neils from Golden Valley (now from Dar es Salaam) have 3 kids the same ages as ours and will also be there so we're looking foward to seeing them and catching up on life here and there.

*We celebrated 4th of July with other displaced Americans, having a BBQ, red, white, and blue sugar cookies, and even sparklers. It was a lot of fun and helped take our minds of the 4th of July evening that we love so much in Bloomington. The weather, though, was pure Montana--probably 60 degrees, clear skies, bright moon, completely dark, out in the woods, so Mark and I felt a bit homesick at the same time.

*We are looking forward to Scott Augustine arriving tomorrow evening. Scott is the founder and chairman of Peace House Foundation. It's always good to see someone from home and he'll hopefully be a big help to Mark in negotiating some of the more legalistic aspects of brokering a working agreement with the Lutherann Church. We will be welcoming Joe Storms on July 28th who will be working on some photography work for PHF as well in the 2 weeks he'll be here.

With the lack of electricity at this point, I'm not able to post pictures so you'll have to wait for those. We also had the misfortune of having our camera stolen from our car, so that has been an enormous loss for us. We do have a camera that we keep under lock and key for PHF use, but we don't use that for our personal comings and goings. So personal pics in general will be a bit infrequent for quite a while. We did purchase a TV and stereo now that our dvds and player are here. The Tv doesn't get a lot of use (we only get 2 channels) but the stereo has been wonderful to have music again in the house! But, those purchases also mean the camera will have to wait. Theft is just one of those things that's a part of the fabric of life here...something you have to come to grips with personally or you'll go crazy. We'll let you know how to do that when we figure it out ourselves! :-)

Until later...