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| Nai, her mother, and Riziki: celebrating successful surgery |
This week it’s Rebecca writing to give account for the
past few weeks – time flies and there hasn’t been a lot of time for sitting
down to reflect. But we have had some really good moments, worth giving thanks
for or at least noting.
Weekend times with friends
Over the past two weekends, we have really begun to feel
more as if we have a real community here. On one Friday, Oren’s school friend
Abraham and his whole family joined us for the opening weekend of Captain
Marvel. We’ve become fans of the MCU, and so it was very entertaining to enjoy
another intelligent action movie. I can’t understand the bad press…
The following Saturday, we had a fairly quiet morning,
catching up on a lot of life details. In the afternoon, we organized our second
game of Ultimate Frisbee. We were joined by the Gingerich family and the
Thompson family (who live on our base), along with a few children of teachers
at the Joshua school. It was super fun once again, and not nearly so hot –
especially after the heavens opened about an hour into our play time. I really
wish I had gotten some photos of the level of mud that was involved! A few of
the kids just kept playing, even in the rain. The rest of us chatted and got to
know one another more until the rain let up. Then we found dry clothes for
everyone, played board games, enjoyed a shared indoor picnic, and the kids
watched a cartoon together, sprawled all over our living room floor.
And then Sunday! Right after church, our boys joined the
Gingerich boys and their dad Eli for a special trip to the Snake Park… it was
feeding day! We don’t have photos of that either, but apparently a good many
chickens, chicks and hunks of goat (for the crocodiles, who don’t care about live
food) joined the “circle of life.”
Meanwhile, Paul and I hardly knew what to do with ourselves,
being without kids after church! But it was a perfect time to catch up with a
lovely family we had gotten to know in our first year here and had moved to
Kampala 9 months ago. We shared time in bible study and in Sunday school, so it
was great to compare notes about being in different communities. And then, we
headed off to our family bible study, where we rejoined our kids. They are so
happy to be connecting well with friends in that group, just as we have been so
happy to have adults to share and pray with. We really missed being in a family
bible study in our first year here! We even had a nice Saturday afternoon at our
pool with some of these friends this past week.
School and extracurriculars
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| David's class door decoration: finished product |
Last week was a big week for our kids at St. Constantine’s
as they celebrated book week. The primary school decided to try a new way to
reach out to parents: A Parent-child learn together morning. I joined David for
his first two lessons of the morning. I was sad at first to sacrifice my usual early
morning swim, but then happy to realize that I would be joining him for his PE
lesson in the pool! It wasn’t nearly so much of a workout, but it was very fun
to swim beside him and learn more about how they teach swimming at their school.
(I must admit that I was only one of two parents who actually got in the water –
the rest observed from the deck. So, the kids were pretty surprised to see a
parent want to get wet with them!)
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| David and friends working on a tree branch |
Then I followed David’s class to his English lesson. They
were working on designing a door decoration to celebrate book week. One of
their class books was “the Twits” by Roald Dahl. The students divided into
groups of 2 or 3, each working on a specific part of a tableau to present the
story. We as parents were encouraged to join in, offer ideas, and interact with
the kids. It was a fun lesson to be part of. Following the lesson, Parents were
invited to have tea and chat with one another. I was also busy trying to get the
work out about another big event coming up…(see below).
On Friday, students were invited to dress up as their
favorite book character. David really wanted to be Greg Heffley, the
protagonist of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. Since he’s a line-drawn
character, it took us a lot of collective thinking to understand how to pull it
off. But finally, David had the idea of making a book cover and sticking his
head through the place where the line-drawn Greg would normally be. It was very
fun to make it together – though it all came together at the last minute! (because
we had a last-minute farewell for a woman on our home compound. She’s leaving
to give birth in Europe, and the adoption paperwork for her two kids here
finally came through in time for her to take off. Being part of community is
great in so many ways! Also takes some time!)
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| David as Greg Heffley |
So, the other big-time commitment right now is the school
event I’m helping to organize. I joined the Parents’ Association of the school
back in June, to get to know more parents and a wider group of non-missionaries
in Arusha. Now we’re planning an
Active Family Day, featuring a 4 on 4 football tournament. The idea is for
parents and students to play on a football team together against other teams in
the student's age group. We really want to encourage parents to have fun with
their kids, meet other parents at school, just be on campus, be supportive of
their kids' education (not just paying the fees and leaving education to the
teachers).
Beyond the football (organized by our Parent-teacher representative,
who happens to be the Primary sports teacher), we've got lots of other things
going on, and it's been so fun to work with a smaller group of parents to plan
the various aspects (and get to know these other parents better). An Indian-Tanzanian
businesswoman and a Dutch NGO worker have teamed up and collected 29 raffle
prizes from local businesses.
A Tanzanian woman from Moshi (who grew up in
Botswana and did her masters in peace studies in Oregon) is organizing 12
different food, drink and activity vendors. A Dutch stone sculptor who has lived
here 20 years (our vice chair) is pitching in giving advice and arranging the
whole set up, as the only veteran member of the Parents' Association. I'm
trying to keep all the balls in the air and keep everything moving with the
school, getting help from prefects, etc. So many details! We’ll learn and it
will be even better next year, but regardless, I think it's a good effort and
it will be a fun day. And we will be VERY tired at 7 pm on March 23!!!
Dust you are…and to dust you shall return.
And there were a few more somber events in the past two
weeks to remember as well. A young woman at our church (Peace Corps volunteer)
lost her step-father suddenly just before Ash Wednesday. She is returning to
the US for good in April, so she couldn’t travel to attend the funeral. So, she
hosted a small, personal memorial service for him in the front yard of family friends.
We gathered with
just a few plastic chairs, a table with some photos, and about 20 friends and
colleagues. The evening was clear and breezy and golden. We sang Swahili hymns
together and read scripture and heard preaching in Swahili about how we each
have a time, and when our time comes, we just need to accept it. The service
was really done with love, but also very much in line with the beginning of
Lent with Ash Wednesday: we are dust and to dust we shall return. All we can do
is marvel at each day we are given and marvel that God reached out to touch us,
dust that we are.
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| Memorial service |
We
were also deeply touched with a sense of our mortality on Sunday morning after
church, when we learned of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. That is a flight that
any of us working in Africa could have been on, because it is the best, most
wide-reaching airline on the continent, with a great safety record. All of us
use Ethiopian, and we feared (with reason) that we might hear that colleagues
or friends were on that flight. We were spared that kind of news as the days
unfolded, but many around us have lost people they’ve known and worked with.
And
finally, another more positive note on mortality. Our housekeeper Nai has a
younger sister Riziki, 14, who was born with a strange birthmark – a mass of
blood vessels close to the surface right at her waist. For years, they went to
different doctors and paid good money for advice, but no one could figure out
what this was or what to do about it. Since she started secondary school, Riziki
has had to walk 10 km to school one-way, and this birth mark became incredibly
troublesome, rubbed raw with her uniform and heavy back pack, and constantly
bleeding. Back last year, our good pediatrician recommended that she see a
visiting plastic surgeon when he came on a whirlwind visit to Arusha. And finally,
at the beginning of March, Riziki was able to be seen, have surgery to remove
the mass, and then was accepted for recovery at a special children’s home for
post-operative rehabilitation, Plaster House.
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| Riziki and Nai at Plaster House |
Nai
accompanied her little sister throughout the process of the first consult,
ultra sound, and then surgery and recovery. She recounted to me later the
miraculous things she had seen among other patients: children with cleft
palates, people with no noses, people whose chins were attached to their
shoulders – and within days, those same peoples’ faces, and lives were
restored. Nai could not stop talking about how incredible it was to have a
specialist come, to whom none of these problems were unusual or difficult to
deal with. He just calmly looked, made notes, made a plan and fixed them.
I
also had the chance to visit Riziki at plaster house a week after surgery and she
looked well and happy. She had lessons during the day, made friends with other
teenage patients, and was really enjoying the clean environment, good food and
good care. Nai and her mother met me there, and I was so grateful for the time
with all three women to celebrate a hopefully life-changing medical success
with Riziki.
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