Beds, and language learning!

Well it has been a relatively uneventful week, our main challenge was trying to fit a 6ft bed through a 5ft door, Alex had to use all his Engineering skill and ingenuity to dismantle part of the bed (it’s base is string so works on tension) and then reassemble, think; many bits of wood to make levers and Julie’s fingers getting trapped when the lever slips!!! We start school on Mon, with varying degrees of excitement – well Alex is excited and I am dreading it. It will entail being in a classroom by 8am and leaving at 12.30 every day for the next 4 weeks. We hope it will give us the much needed motivation to continue KiSwalhili study and force us into more intensive learning. It would be great that this would be the case and it wouldn’t (as I fear) be sitting in a room bored out of our brains by a teacher (loosest sense of the word) who couldn’t care less if we learnt anything or not as long as they get paid, ok maybe this is a little harsh out of 7 teachers we have heard of only 5 are like this we are hoping for either of the other 2!!

I am finding communication with Subby (our house help) a challenge, she chats away (which is great) but I can catch probably 5% of the words and have almost zero understanding of what she is saying. She laughs at my attempts to speak Swahili but mainly we play charades! We seem to have settled into a routine when she comes though which is far less stressful than it was 2 months ago. Please do remember her even though I can’t actually say truths to her yet!

Our friends Paula and Rich are all set to join us in Oct and have their final interview on 20th May. We are so excited about them being out here, Paula and I were at university together and she was one of my beautiful bridesmaids. She is a primary teacher and Rich a civil Engineer and a mechanic for a hobby.

This is now our 5th month away from home and we have so much to be thankful for. We haven’t heard from our tenants in Bristol (which we hope is a good thing) so we presume all is ok with our house (no need for 2am call-outs yet Chris!) we have family coming to visit in the summer which we are so excited about, the house is starting to feel like home, even Alex is impressed with the kitchen transformation, we will post photos when it is complete. We counted how many new contacts we have made that could be meaningful and it is well over 40 and I learnt how to tell the time today!!! We do really miss home and news of close friends engagements and pregnancies makes us miss it all the more, we often fall into the trap of wondering what we are really doing here, but we know this is part of a big plan and feel peaceful as we start each new day looking for guidance and people He would have us meet across our path.

Thank you so much for all the thoughts and support and parcels!!