Merry Christmas!

A few Saturdays ago, we invited over the neighbor children and another little friend and enjoyed decorating Christmas cookies together! This was a first for our friends, but they enjoyed it!

I also told the Christmas story, using these little picture cards with the verses on them. Each family represented (3) was able to bring a set of cards home to play with and learn the Christmas story.

We want to wish you all a Merry Christmas! We are leaving today, Saturday, for Tanzania to visit Victor's sick father in the refugee camp. We would appreciate your prayers! We will not be home until the New Year. We'll catch up then! Praise God Victor drove into our yard Sunday evening, December 12, with our new vehicle. We are so glad to be all together again as a family!

All Creatures of our God

It was raining outside, as it had been all day. Suddenly shrieks were heard from the children's bedroom. The 'auntie' staying with us and I turned from were we were in the kitchen just in time to see a big slimy frog come leaping out of the children's bedroom. I'm sure he was as startled as the girls were terrified! It is still a mystery to me how he got in the house. I could not get a straight story from the girls as to where they first saw him. Anyways, maybe he was trying to escape the rain. The 'auntie' staying with us bravely caught him in a basin and deposited him outside.

You can see him below, next to the waste basket in the kitchen. I'm sorry the picture is not clearer. It was a quick grab the camera and snap before he lept away.

Do you see the next creature we chased around the children's room the same night?

He here is a bit closer up....zoomed in, visiting the section of our library that holds our "My Little Animal Board Book" How appropriate!

Can you still see him, by the same book? This is our Mozambican book holder. The girls were having a hard time lining up books neatly on a shelf. I had seen a type of cloth hanging bookhold in the Aldies food store in Wisconsin before we came. So using that same idea, we sewed loops in a capulana (the wrap skirt cloths so common here), put bamboo sticks through the loops and hung it from the ceiling beam. It works great! The small books are to go on top, the medium size books in the middle and big tall books in the bottom pocket. As you can see, the girls don't always get the sizes right (the Berenstein Bears book is a medium size and should go in the middle pocket) but they are much better about putting away their books now. And the book hanger takes up very little space in their small bedroom.

Anyways, back to the gecko. Thankfully, since our first week here we have called the little geckos around our house "Sammy, our pet." So the girls are pretty excited (and not scared) when they see one and we see them (there is more than one) almost daily. It is spring here and it has been fun to find tiny baby geckos around the house. But this particular gecko has been living on the girls' floor in their room for 3 days. I don't know if he fell off the wall and couldn't climb back up but he was definitely living on the floor. He would startled me as he would scramble out of my way as I looked for things in the girls' room. I tried putting some legos as a ramp from the floor to the wall to see if he would climb up it and resume living up by the roof as most of his kin do. But it didn't work. As you can see from this picture, he did manage to climb into our book hanger. Of course, then Victoria did not want to get a book out. Earlier in the day, an MK had been playing with the girls. She has been here a year and a half and is more advanced in her tolerance of creatures. She actually touched the gecko and chased him around the room for awhile. So the night of the frog, after our brave 'auntie' threw the frog out of the house, she worked on catching this little guy. It took some work as he scampered out of reach, but finally she cornered him and he too got put out of the house. So for today, their room was "creature free." Other creatures we have found have tended to be smaller in size, a cricket, a fly, little worms, etc. It seems as if the creatures are seeking refuge from the downpours outside.

Rainy Season

It is December 6 today and we awoke to a gray drizzle that soon became a steady pounding on our tin roof. It was a welcome sound. The rains are late this year. The heat has increased in intensity, the clouds have built up, the thunder has rumbled for about 2 weeks now but very little rain has fallen. So we are thankful for the rain.

When it is pouring like it was this morning, most people stop and stay where they are. Meetings are understood to be postponed until the downpour stops. Maria, our house help lady, got caught in the market in the rain. So she found shelter there and stayed until the rain stopped, arriving about half an hour late.

My dilemna now is how to manage the children's play. The girls happily went outside as soon as the rain stopped. What fun to climb the sand piles (for the construction work of our garage), to rub hands in the mud, and to run off some energy. But there is a cleanliness cost to this fun! When I get the camera back from Victor, I'll take a picture. Clothes, shoes, hands, feet black with mud and sand. (Even the panties, under the pants got brown!) So do we only play and live inside during the rainy season, trying to stay clean? Or do we go for all out fun outside? Even careful play outside would leave one dirty. So we are going to try this: when they are tired of outside, we clean up and stay inside the rest of the day. As for the clothes, there will be one or two sets of play clothes that will be just that: for playing in all sorts of weather and conditions and then hand washed and used again. Crocs (their footwear) are washable as are their little bodies!

The other challenge will be drying cloth diapers! Thankfully our old 3rd or 4th or 5th hand washing machine still works to spin them almost dry. We'll be thankful for every sun ray that breaks through the clouds these next 3 months or so.

Thank you, Lord, we still have water to clean up with. Our neighbors to the right had water until last week. Their water level in the well dropped so low that it is mostly muddy murky water now. So they come for water now too. We have been learning to conserve water too. But if these rains continue now, the wells should fill up again.