Last blog entry from Africa until May

Last blog entry from Africa until May
Well, we are leaving in a few days to come back to the US for a while so this may be our last blog until we return.

We are anxious to see everyone but will miss the children here. One of the older girls asked e to take her with me because she wants to see Jamie. I said, “But Betty, you don’t have a passport.” To which she replied, “I’ll use my health passport”. Very clever, I thought. I told her that there is no picture on her health passport and she said, “No problem, I’ll take a picture of myself and glue it to my health passport.” Oh, I wish it were just that easy and that cheap. (The health passport she was referring to is a book that follows them around for life. Instead of the doctor office keeping your charts, the doctor writes in this book and you bring it with you each time you visit a doctor, hospital, health clinic, etc. The doctor writes prescription information, sicknesses, whatever, in this book so you always have a complete health history with you – if you don’t lose the book.)

I asked Mphatso, one of the five year olds if she had her passport and if she was ready to go with us. Her eyes lit up, she shook her head and said, “Yes”. Oh, I would love to bring her home, no front teeth and all.

It will be nice to sleep in a house that is in a relatively quiet neighborhood – at least quieter than it is here. It will be nice to not hear the same some six songs repeated over and over and over. It will be GREAT to eat Mexican food and we both really want a salad. I’ve tried making salads over here a couple of times but each time, I’ve had stomach issues for days so we don’t even try any more. It will be nice to stay up later than 8:30 each night. Last night we went to bed at 7:00 because we had been without water for 2 days already and power since early afternoon. Our laptop batteries were drained and we had no power for lights to read by so we went to bed.

We went to the field to harvest the maize with the kids on Saturday. It was great fun, especially for me, the “city girl” who has never been in a corn field. But it was hot and we were itchy so as soon as we returned to the orphanage, we went home to take a shower. Then we discovered that we still had no water. Oh great, what fun and we had no water in our reserve drum either. We bathed in about a pitcher full of water each and called it good.

We are currently on Day 4 with no water. When we left for church on Sunday, stinky and all, there were lots of people in our neighborhood out searching for water. Our reserve ran out on Saturday so we rented the big truck this morning and had water brought over from the orphanage. However, when we came home from church, God showed his faithfulness again. It was raining. I mean it was really raining. All the way to our house, we noticed people had buckets, tubs, whatever they could find to catch water out. It rained and rained and rained. When the rains finally stopped, we had all our tubs and buckets filled and were able to function as normal. We even filtered the rain water to drink. God knew that his people needed water and he was faithful in providing water for our area of the city. Thank you Lord!!

Like I said, we will miss the children and Peace (3) just started playing and teasing with us. But………we’ll be back in late April. Surely, they won’t have forgotten us by then.


Note: This is picture of Peace sitting in the maize field as we were harvesting on Saturday.