Greetings from the Pearl of Africa!

Helloooo and greetings from the Pearl of Africa!

We are here safe and sound after a rather long day and a half journey  (see photo of our team plus our friend Erin in the bus as we finally head to the Village ) followed by a nice long sleep after we got to the Village!  (See photo of our team in front of the hut--- left to right: my lovely mamma, Anna, Donna, Brittany, and me (Tanya) and of course Zach, the lone person on our team with a Y chromosome). Once again this year, our team was greeting by ALL 197 children lined up along side of the road singing “Welcome welcome we love you!” .  And this time it took a wonderfully long time to go down the line and hug or shake the hands of all the kids.  My have some of them grown and how wonderful to see new faces since last year! 

There’ve been changes to the Village since last year too.  Good changes including two new houses, a piggery which is almost ready for pigs, a library and two new latrines, plus a whole slew of bush that has been farmed by the kids and is now growing a ton of maize (or corn as we call it).

Some  changes that I wouldn’t really classify into the “good” category are cobras…yup, the snake.   Our team hasn’t seen any yet but on the morning before our arrival, Mike one of the missionaries here killed a small cobra right outside his hut.  And apparently there was a rather large cobra that killed one of the chickens a few months ago.  Whoa!  So our headlamps and slow walking have become our best friends as we travel to the latrines in the middle of the night.

Speaking of which, Donna and I bonded two times last night as we both headed to the latrines together TWICE in the middle of the night. The first trip was rather non-eventful, but the second found ourselves running like little school girls when we opened the far last latrine door and was greeted by Scruffy the rat.  I’m not sure who was more scared at our shrieking, us or the rat who promptly turned right around and ran back in the latrine.  So being the brave and fearless women that we are, we combated this problem head on…..by using the second-to-last latrine instead J.  And in the combination of us trying to not laugh out loud plus exhaustion and giddiness, I believe the noise level was almost enough to wake up the entire compound.  Luckily, the roosters took over with their exponentially louder crowing so we could blame anyone’s early awakening entirely on them.

But despite the “not so good” changes, one thing remains and that is the amazing smiles and laughter of the children!  Since it’s the weekend, we’ve had some time to just hang out with them, and play (tried to teach them football which very quickly turned into something more like rugby- see photo of Donna and the boys)! Teenage boys are teenage boys, regardless of which continent they live on!).  We’ve also been able to show them pictures of our families back home and apparently they love wedding  and  family pictures as much as I loved showing them!  Just as I would show one group of kids some wedding pictures, more kids would join and we would start all over again….several times!  (And apparently my husband’s handsomeness is cross-cultural as the girls and house moms agreed that he is quite easy on the eyes J ).

All in all it’s been a great start to our time here.  Our team is being challenged and encouraged already. God is moving amongst our team and has healed a few headaches and a bug bite already!  So fun!  And we know there is more in store as He is soooooo good and loves to do that sort of thing!  So stay tuned and we’ll post some updates when we can!