Photos from Our Life

I noticed the other day that I haven’t been posting many pictures on the web lately and I realized that’s because I’ve moved into the day-to-day stuff of regular life and most people don’t take pictures of that. But because our life isn’t really much like “regular life” to those at home, I’m trying to make a conscious effort to take some shots to help you see a little of what we see on a daily basis.

Without a vacuum, this is how we have to clean the rugs. Chris hates this rug, not only because it has to be cleaned in this way, but also because I don't think he wants to admit to owning a tiger skin patterned rug. But, hey, it gets the dirt off our feet before we get into bed. And that, my friends, is why there was SOOOOO much dirt on/under it! Amazing how much dirt piles up so quickly here.

We have locks on our gate, then another lock on our gate to our porch, then a lock on our door. Takes about 5 minutes just to get in or out of our house.

Got together with some Americans for 4th of July. This was what was being discussed in the corner at the party. It was just too funny to me. 

Saw these monkeys playing around Fr. Jim's car at the Church in Mabatini. What's even crazier about this picture is that Mabatini is a very congested area. It's highly populated and incredibly dense. So to see monkeys in such a place seemed really odd to me.

Speaking of Mabatini, I've been spending a lot of time in the parish there. The MK fathers run this parish so there's lots of opportunity to get involved. I've been spending time with their parish women's group. They make and sell chapati and tea after each Mass, so for the past few weeks I've been sitting with them, watching and listening. They like to pretend that I'm helping them, but really I'm just sitting watching and trying to understand little bits of Swahili as they chat to each other. I'm also going on home visits to the women's houses. It's an invaluable experience to see where the people live and meet their families. My hope is to slowly understand more about their needs and the challenges the women's group faces so that I can eventually help them a little bit. Right now it sounds like they struggle to break even with their post-church sales and the group doesn't really have much of a function other than that.

Tomorrow we head out into the bush for the week. We are going to visit a community of nomadic people that the MK fathers work with and where a MK lay missioner had her first mission several decades ago. We'll be "roughing it" for the week and camping, while we visit with the people and hike around. It's going to be so beautiful! I can't wait. I tested out the tent, made hummus, granola and brownies and everything is ready to go! We'll be offline for the week while we're away. But hopefully we'll have some spectacular pictures when we return.