When Life Gives You Lemons......

I will never forget an object lesson a camp counselor gave my cabin-mates and I one summer at Camp.  She gave us all lemons and talked about how bad and hard and sour things happen.  But we can choose what we do with them.  We could take our lemon and say, “It’s too sour” or “what a waste” and do nothing.  Or (and here she gave us all a candy cane), we can make the best out of what we have been given.  And we stuck our candy

canes into the lemons and sucked up the juice thru the sugar straw.  Candy cane lemonade is pretty tasty!

 

As I look back over our first 10 days out here in the village, I’m rather amazed at what a good attitude we all currently have.  There have just been a lot (did I say a lot?  I meant a LOT!!!) of little things that have added up to make this a very difficult stay so far.  God has been gracious though, and even though we have been given a ‘bunch of lemons’ so far these 10 days, He is helping us take our ‘lemons’ and make the best out of them.

 

We started off the trip by discovering on our first day here, as we were unpacking and sorting, that the school bag containing pretty much all of Kaitlyn’s schoolwork for the next 6+ weeks was missing.  It also contained a smattering of schoolwork for Justin, Julianne and Nathan that they had brought home from their last day of school at the Ukarumpa school and needed to bring out to the village, and which I had tossed into the bag the afternoon before.  This made for a very stressful first afternoon in the village.  Considering that our supplies had been loaded onto a Kodiak at Aiyura and then flown to the airport at Nadzab (Lae), off-loaded to await a 2^nd Kodiak, loaded onto the 2^nd Kodiak and flown to the airstrip at Yalumet, off-loaded to sit and wait for the helicopter to finish flying us first from Aiyura to Goroka to Hamelengan, to come pick it our supplies and shuttle them to Hamelengan, well, there were a lot of places it could have been lost or even stolen at.  Thankfully, we did find out fairly soon that somehow, while it was taken with the rest of our luggage out to the plane in the first place, it was simply never put on the plane.  Needless to say, we’ve been very frustrated, especially me, as ‘Teacher’.  If this had happened to either of the boy’s schoolwork, it would have been frustrating as well, but both of them are quick with school and learning new concepts.  Kaitlyn is the exact opposite.  She does not learn quickly and everything is more work for her.  So to be without her schoolwork has been a challenge.

 

I am SO thankful for her teachers, school staff and dear friends who have gone above and beyond in trying to email (and scan and send) us her daily assignments!  I’ve had friends hand-type up her math lessons and email them to us.  Her language teacher has been scrambling to come up with new things for her to do for her reading and writing assignments, or re-typing and sending me instructions for assignments.  So while we are behind in school, at least we are not just sitting still, but still have materials to work with.

 

But that leads me to the second difficulty we’ve encountered this stay:  NO SUN!  We’ve been out here 10 days so far.  And it’s rained and been grey  and gloomy Every. Single. One. Of them.  Usually, even if it rains for most of the day, we usually have a couple of good hours of blue sky and sunshine in the morning.  Not this stay.  Today (10 days in) we actually saw some shadows when we first got up this morning.  No actual blue sky mind you, but the clouds were thin enough that some sunshine was getting through.  But here it is, 9:30 am now, and that’s long gone.  Last weekend, we did have an hour or two of some blue sky and sunshine in the afternoon on both Saturday and Sunday.  But I think all of us are feeling the need for sun.  I literally have not left the house since going to church last Sunday.  I haven’t even been going outside to the clothesline.  It’s not worth it to hang any laundry there… I just hang the wet clothes on our porch, where they will eventually dry in 2-3 days.  But Matt has had to cut work short several days due to lack of solar power, and some days we haven’t had enough power to download the emails with Kaitlyn’s schoolwork.  So that has been a frustration.

 

I know Matt has been feeling frustration about work as well.  Most of the work he planned to do while we were out here involved working with other people… our co-translators and various others.  But one of our co-translators has been gone the whole time we’ve been here so far (just got back last night), and others have been busy with their other responsibilities and it’s been hard for him to find people who are free to work.

 

I was disappointed when we arrived here to discover that my garden was gone.  Granted, it wasn’t full of stuff when I left, and we were gone for almost 6 months, but when we got back here it was in utter ruin, and even my pineapple plant that I planted a year or so ago was completely uprooted and gone.  It is always hard for me during our 6-8 week stays out here because we have no fresh food at all.  By the end of our stays, all I can think about are salads and fruit!  So having a few things in our garden (cucumbers, green onions, potatoes) helped with that a little bit.  We had been told that someone would look out for the garden while we were away, but that didn’t happen.  And who would uproot an entire pineapple plant???  So I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged by that.

 

I will say that we are all thankful that so far, we have all had good health.  That is a huge praise!  But it feels like this transition has just been too much for Elijah.  I think maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to come out of it a little now, but the first week or more has been really tough.  He’s just been a grumpy mess.  He’s not sick or teething at the moment, but he’s spent most of the past week crying and hanging onto my legs and wanting to be held and nursed 100% of the time.  I think now that he’s older (he turned 18 months old last week!) he’s just more aware of the upheaval and changes around him.  It’s been a challenge to do anything:  school with the kids, making meals, cleaning up dishes, anything because of him hanging on me and just needing to be held and comforted.

 

Finally, I have to say that (no matter where I am) exercise is one of my main sanity-keepers!  I even bring out a couple of my favorite exercise dvd’s on our hard drive so I can do those a couple times a week out here in the village.  And as much as possible I like to take the kids and get out on hikes (both to get out of the house and use up their energy, as well as get my my daily exercise quota!).  But due to the lousy weather and lack of solar power, this has been a challenge as well.  There has been no power to do an exercise video, and with the daily rain, it is too wet and muddy and slippery to even consider trying to get out for a hike.  I’ve tried to do something most days, like situps, pushups and such, and one day I attempted to run two miles in place (I figured that since I regularly run 2 miles in 19-20 mins, I could just run in place for the same amount of time).  But that gets old fast!  So I’m missing being able to regularly exercise.

 

So, there have been a lot of discouragements in our stay so far.  But I’m not trying to complain.  As I said at the beginning, I’m actually amazed at the good attitude we’ve all managed to have most of the time so far.  But please, pray for sun, and that aviation will figure out a way soon to get Kaitlyn’s schoolwork to us!  But even if neither of those things happen (or happen soon), I hope that we will continue to take our lemons and stick candy canes into them and make something sweet out of something very sour.