Tumaini Jipya (New Hope)

It's Ash Wednesday* and the season of Lent has snuck up on me fast this year. I have been sick for the past three weeks with malaria, a persistent urinary track infection and a bacterial infection. The malaria started 3 weeks ago; I took medicine but it came back again 2 weekends ago along with the UTI. So I took different malaria medicine and an antibiotic. But by the following weekend the UTI was still there and, in fact, had doubled in count and had brought with it the bacterial infection. So now this week I have been getting daily antibiotic injections and have been going to a urologist and getting tests to make sure there's nothing seriously wrong with me, since I never had this issue before moving to TZ and have had it pretty persistently for the last 6 months. Anyway, I write all this to say that the last 3 weeks have been pretty crappy. Chris has also been sick and doped up on medicine for the past week and together we've made quite a pair.

When I'm sick I tend to get cranky. I don't make a good patient. I like to always be doing something, so to sit and do nothing, resting and recuperating is not easy for me. And when I'm away from home and feeling yucky and stuck in the house doing nothing, I find myself falling into self-pity and doubt. I start to focus on all the things that I don't like about my life instead of the things that I do like.

So I have decided that I am going to try to take a moment each evening in Lent to talk to Chris about what I liked for the day, what went well or what was positive. There are so many things that go right each day, but it's so easy to focus on what went wrong, especially here where things seem to almost always play out differently than I expect. I am going to try to think of this Lenten season as a time of renewed hope, "tumaini jipya." A time to remember that I am here in this exact place for a specific reason. That reason may never be revealed to me but I must have hope and faith that I am where I am supposed to be and that my life is playing out the way it should.

For now I want to say how thankful I am to be here with Chris. There is no one I'd rather be home sick with than my best friend and hubby. That has to be the best thing about this whole Tanzania experience so far. Time is not as jam-packed here as it is in the states and Chris and I get to spend a lot of time together. I feel like our relationship has grown and changed and gotten so much stronger over the past year. And I am so happy to be doing this with him.


*Well, it was Ash Wednesday when I started writing this post.