Matt's birthday

We got back from our 7 week village stay today and I'm taking advantage of email and internet in abundance! Whoo hoo! It's good to have a lack of things sometimes to really start appreciating them! Such as: refrigerators and washing machines, HOT SHOWERS!!!, friends who speak English....

Anyway, I wrote a couple blog posts while in the village, so now I'll get them up!

Here's the first one I wrote, on Oct. 8.

Matt's birthday fell during the middle of our village stay. At the end of the day, he said he wasn’t depressed, but after how the day went, I know I sure would have been if it had been my birthday! It was amazing!

To start things off, all four kids had potty accidents throughout the course of the day. Julianne has been having a lot of diarrhea the last few days.. no fun with cloth diapers. (not sure if it’s due to her last tooth coming thru or a bug of some sort). Justin peed all over the floor twice and Nathan even pooped in his pants, which I didn’t discover until Julianne picked something up off the floor and when I went to investigate…. Even Kaitlyn, who never has accidents, waited too long and wet her pants. What a day.

The day started as a normal work day… the kids and I upstairs in the house doing school work, and Matt downstairs in the office working with some guys to do the back translation of Genesis. But after lunch we were going to do some fun things. It started pouring in the afternoon, and it poured, and poured and poured! We got more rain yesterday than we have in all the 4+ other weeks we’ve been out here! (And our water tank actually overflowed for the first time as well!)

I made a chocolate cake for Matt (a mix, not from scratch, as we’re out in the village), and I have to confess, it was the WORST cake I have ever made! I mean, in the end, it tasted alright, but it was a pathetic mess. Totally fell apart, the can of frosting was a bit runny (all the humidity maybe?) and so it was sliding off the cake, and the cake broke and was sliding all around, etc. Needless to say, I didn’t bother to take any pictures as it was a totally embarrassing mess. In all my years of cake making, I have never had one this horrendous!

We decided that something fun to do on a special day was to have a family movie. We had a movie that we hadn’t watched before, so we all sat down to watch it. But even then, it wasn’t just a fun, relaxing time. First, part way thru the movie somehow the wrong file got copied over and the whole thing switched to French. So it took a while of reopening things and such to sort that out. Then it started pouring so hard that the noise of the rain on the metal roof was louder than the speakers! So we had to wait. Then the computer battery ran out so Matt had to get my computer, copy the movie on it and start it there. A nice, relaxing movie.

We had originally talked about watching the movie after dinner, but it turned out that it was a great thing that we opted for an afternoon showtime instead. Just as we were finishing up dinner by the light of our 12 volt fluorescent bulb, the rain bugs began to appear! Now, our house is very, very nice as far as a village house goes, but it is totally NOT bug proof. As we watched, the swarm buzzing around the light grew bigger and bigger and there started to be a pile of them on the floor under the light. When I lit the candles on Matt’s cake, bugs started swarming that light too, and sticking to the frosting. We didn’t eat that piece of cake! With rain bugs and their attraction to light, the only thing to do is get the lights off. So we quickly got the kids ready for bed, while swatting bugs away and trying to keep all lights off except for the main room, so that they wouldn’t end up in bed with us. So everyone was in bed by about 7pm, with the light off. And as it is the waning moon now, it was PITCH BLACK… can’t even see your hand in front of your face dark. So, there we were, all in our beds, in the pitch black, with the mosquito nets tucked in to keep as few bugs as possible from climbing all over us, at 7 pm.

To top everything off, almost no one even remembered it was his birthday! We got 1 email from a family member, but not even our parents remembered! =(

Happy Birthday Matt!

Waiting

Should I be feeling guilty that I'm happy I'm not currently sitting in the village? I could have been woken up at dawn by roosters, and then spent most of the morning sitting around, wondering if and when the church service was going to start!

We were supposed to go to Hamelengan (our village) on Friday, but because of Justin being pretty sick, we were asked to postpone. Justin had another check on Friday afternoon and we were cleared to go out. But I'm so glad that we didn't go on Friday. Matt and I both have the cough thing that Justin did, just not quite so bad. But with neither of us feeling 100%, the thought of all the work it would have been to be setting up/cleaning/unpacking/visiting in the village makes me so thankful that we have a few extra days.

But almost everything for the village is packed up and waiting out at Aviation for our Tuesday flight. So it's nice to not be tripping over boxes and rushing around packing still. I've still been doing little things (drying pizza sauce, making granola, making a meal to freeze for our first 2 nights out in the village) but it has been nice to have a little extra down time. (We haven't had much of that over the past who-knows-how-many months)

Everything packed and ready to be taken out to aviation Wednesday morning

So, I'm going to use this extra time to get a little reading in, and to be on the internet (find recipes, read friend's blogs, check facebook). Because in a few short days, I won't be able to. We still get emails (so if anyone is ever inspired to write, please do!) via our 2-way radio HF email modem, so we're not completely cut off from the world, but still, it can sometimes feel that way a bit.

Getting ready for the village.....

Unfortunantly, getting ready to head out to the village doesn’t mean just tossing some clothes in a bag and we’re off! In the past, I’ve given myself up to a month before we actually go to the village to get organized and packed. This time I have just two weeks. Our past several months have been full of packing and travelling and transitions, and I’m finding it really hard to get back into that way of thinking. Personally, I’d LOVE to stay in the same place/same house/same routine for like six straight months. But, as we’re leaving for the village in less than two weeks, I don’t have that luxury.

Getting ready for the village involves getting all our clothes and bedding washed and packed. We always bring all our bedding back to Ukarumpa when we leave the village as hand washing sheets and blankets in the river (or now, in my shower base) just doesn’t get them as nice and clean as I would like. So I’ve been washing and airing out lots of village clothes, sheets, towels and blankets. Then they go into our heavy-duty rubbermaid containers to head out to the village.

Then comes planning meals. I don’t do good if I just bring a variety of stuff and figure out later how to use it. I’d be sure to forget some basic ingredients, or not have enough of something. So I sit down and make up a calendar for our entire time out in the village. Then I plan meals for each day. Once I’ve figured out enough meals for our stay, I go back and double and triple check everything to make sure I know exactly how much flour, sugar, margarine, eggs, etc I’m going to need. I have to figure in how many times I’ll be making bread or tortillas, how much milk it will take for cereal and recipes that call for it, etc. I have to estimate how many loaves of banana bread the people in the village are going to ask me to bake for them, etc.

Once I get all the amounts figured out, I go shopping at our store here at Ukarumpa. I then have to get all the stuff boxed up in cardboard boxes and labeled for our flight. I try to make a bunch of pancake mix and granola ahead of time, so I don’t have to spend time doing that in the village (and it saves on how much gas I use out there as well).

Since we have no refrigeration I can’t take any perishable items. (except for eggs, which don’t need refrigeration, and margerine, which can last quite a while without). Because everything has to be flown in to our village on the helicopter (which is rather expensive) I try to dehydrate as much as possible to cut down on weight. The things that are on the list for me to dehydrate this coming week are: cheese (for pizza, burritos, etc), spagetti sauce, pizza sauce, ground beef, italian sausage (which I’ll use on our pizza), beef jerky and probably some fruit roll-ups.

As you can see, just the food prep takes a lot of time.

Thankfully, I don’t have to plan Kaitlyn’s and Nathan’s schoolwork. The school here provides exactly what they will need for our time out. I need to plan some school activities for Justin however, as he will need some things to keep occupied with while K and N are working.

Days can be long out in the village (especially if we are getting a lot of rain), so I want to plan a variety of craft activities the kids can do if we are stuck in the house.

I also need to get over to the school library this week and pick out the allotment of books that the kids are allowed to take out to the village with them. These books will be for reading assignments, as well as leisure reading, and ones we read aloud as a family.

I am also in the process of sewing curtains for our downstairs storage room in the village. I need to make some for the translation office room as well, but there is no way I have time to complete that before this village stay.

I’m definitely feeling a bit stressed as I look at my “To Do” list for village planning. I have now just 12 days till we leave for the village, and really only about 10 to get packed, as we have to have all our stuff out to avaition at least a day before our flight. So I guess it’s time to stop blogging and get back to planning and packing!

Introducing........

our very first Taylor family pet!

Here's Daisy!!

The kids have been begging for a pet of their own for a while now (Kaitlyn at the foremost), and we've been putting it off as finding pet sitters for a pet that you have to leave every few months can be quite a challenge. (And we have no plans of helicoptering a dog, cat or other back and forth to the village!). But Matt and I decided that a guinea pig was fairly low-maintenance, and would be relatively simple to find someone to watch when we go to the village. So now we have a guinea pig. =)
Ideally, we'd like to eventually let Daisy have babies, and then keep one of them, so that she won't be a lonely piggie. However, with the amount of time the kids are spending with her currently, Daisy may be begging for some alone time before long! =)

Snapshots from the past week or so

Here are a few pictures of stuff that has happened in the last week or 10 days or so:

Nathan and his friend Marissa climbing trees and playing on the swing

Kaitlyn getting a horse ride last Saturday

The kids playing with their belated birthday gift from Grammy

Justin and Julianne enjoying a beautiful sunny day!