Lately, we’ve been bothered by our 7-year old breaking out in hives- very likely due to the dust from her room wall peeling and popping out.
Apparently, this is a ubiquitous problem in our small town- because cement is mixed with local soil which contains some sort of bicarbonate, that eventually soaks up moisture and causes this issue.
The entire house has the issue, and so does every house in the region.
Things like this can really get you down— last Friday, my outburst was related to unexpectedly having 9 people arrive at our home, trying to assess the termite issue, carpenter ant extermination, peeling wall etc… and it was the amalgamation of loud words, incoherence, language barriers, heat etc… that became a challenge.
Last weekend, we had the beautiful privilege of visiting the Dutch man who bought our second pup. He’s a farmer and General Manager of one of the largest raspberry farms in the region.
He shared how living here nearly broke him. How HARD Africa is. How one night he screamed out loud alone in his empty house when after trying to buy a mosquito net 3 times, it was still wrong. (Incidentally that happened to us too!)
BUT…
And here’s the big BUT—
We all agreed on one thing. You have to come to the decision that if you want to live here, you’ll have to EMBRACE it. There are hardships of living in a land so raw and broken. But there are also very many charms and joys if you look at the right places.
Is that you, too? Are you frustrated where you are? Because I do remember feeling vexed in Singapore too. Everywhere has its own brand of hardships, but would we choose to EMBRACE what comes our way?
Incidentally, my 7-yr old says her word for this year is “about something like being open to new experiences and what comes my way,” so we settled on “EMBRACE.”
So today, when the fundi (meaning carpenter, pronounced foon-dee) came and did the walls, even though it was so dusty and inconvenient, and means we all have to sleep in different rooms for a number of nights… I could give a sigh of relief and say, “At least there’s a solution. It’s not permanent, but it helps us understand what everyday people living in poverty or wealth here, even, face on a day to day basis.
On a more positive note, after grappling with the hard fact that we couldn’t receive parcels, I’m so so moved that over the new year, a few new friends reached out to me to say they’d be willing to ask their family members or friends visiting to help us bring in items we needed 😭😭😭
So if there’s something you’ve been dying to get to us that we need, it’s possible— just through UK, Sweden, Switzerland or America. 😭
How creative God is— all this while I was lamenting not having visitors from Singapore and God sent a Nigerian-American visiting Tanzania on an internship to head back to USA for Christmas, and he returns next week with a parcel of Chinese books from shipped by a kind women from Singapore who covered the mailing costs all the way to us 😭😭😭