Preparing for a Week Without Mommy

In keeping with the animal themed header of past weeks, here is a rhinoceros beetle Oren is holding that I found floating in the pool while I was swimming last week.  (He is now a pet in our porch planter.)

We have enjoyed our first week with Grandma Jean.  In fact it seems to have flown by.  This is probably due more to the amount of preparatory work we had been doing for the current week than anything else.  Just to bring you up to date (dear reader) we have now entered what will prove to be two of the most challenging weeks of the year.  (I say that with caution as we are only in January!)  But it is definitely out of the ordinary as I will explain:

Last summer during our week retreat together as a couple in Vancouver, Rebecca and I were very intentional in considering ways to make our work and life here more manageable and life-giving.  We have found the cross-cultural work is generally more draining and one needs to be very thoughtful about when to engage and how and when one can rest.  Raising young children is another even more challenging factor. 

Among our more important decisions was to do less travel together.  This is a big change as we tended to do all of our visits upcountry and to Rwanda as a family.  The change is necessary for several reasons including  Oren now being in first grade where there is high expectation of consistent progress in learning at the school (and good attendance).  

We have been putting this into practice over the past 5 months, but it has only entailed small ventures out of Bujumbura to visit partners.   In these two weeks, however, Rebecca is going out of town to Uganda to lead worship at a large regional conference called the Great Lakes Initiative.  She will be back Saturday night and I will leave Sunday morning for a week in Rwanda and upcountry to facilitate a mission team's visit to one of our partners.

This is a big challenge for us as we prefer to do parenting and work in partnership, so we are both being stretched.  

So the days preceding Rebecca's departure on Friday have been quite busy, moreso for her as she has had to do alot of extra work to prepare the actual worship services (music, prayers, etc) for the conference plenary sessions.

Our morning routine the past week was not much changed even with the addition of Jean who got up with us in the mornings, but as we headed off to drop the kids at school and to swim and work, Jean headed off to Hope Africa University.  She is a medical librarian and had made connections there before coming to help build capacity of the library staff while she was there.  I think it has been a very interesting and challenging experience for her to work here.  We have enjoyed hearing about her experiences.  I think the big shock is that the medical school and library have virtually non-existent internet access which makes research very difficult for med students and doctors.  She had hoped to connect the computers to a large medical database available worldwide, but I think she has felt that even getting a half dozen computers usable at all for internet access may be a major accomplishment.

Nonetheless, from what we umderstand her input has been greatly appreciated by staff there as she has also helped them make connections to other organizations like WHO.

We had several social events with other parents last week as well.  Danika and her kids came over Wednesday after school for lunch for a playdate.  That is not the best time of day for David and Oren and they both behaved dreadfully much of the time.  I think, though, as a younger parent it gave her some comfort to see other slightly more experienced parents struggling with some of the same issues she is grappling with as we all attempt to raise our kids to be thoughtful, polite, individuals, in this unusual setting.

I think the highlight of the week though was Thursday evening when Rebecca and I were given a date night by Grandma Jean who offered to stay home with the kids so we could go out.  We went to our favorite 'date' restaurant here called Botanika.  It is located in the center of town but when you enter the inner courtyard and restaurant it really feels like you are completely transported out of Bujumbura, to somewhere in Soho, New York City.  (but alot cheaper!)  It feels like times together as a couple are few, far between and precious.

(Actually we talked to Danika about arranging a date night exchange with her and Scott on a monthly basis, hopefully that will be able to work out in the months ahead.)

Friday was a busy day as Rebecca was leaving by plane.  She was supposed to leave in the afternoon but got a call the night before to tell her her flight had been moved up to midday.  We went to work and I took her to the airport before picking up the kids.  In the afternoon we had several people arrive who were going to be going to the conference by bus or later flights on the weekend.  Yolanda and Jodi came down and stayed the night at our house, and our SALTer Janelle came over as well to visit with Yolanda.  With Grandma Jean we had a very full house with the kids sleeping with me in our room.  

A large crew came over for Sat. morning yoga and then I took Jodi, Felix, and Yolanda to the airport and bus stop respectively.  Jodi had planned to fly but she discovered, when she got to the airport that her plane had also left early only no one had told her.  She made a mad rush to the bus stop with the other conference interpreter and they managed to make it onto two buses headed to Kigali where they hoped to join the second leg of the flight.  (They did succeed.)

Saturday continued to be eventful even after the morning activities.  The main activity though, was completely unscripted.  Yolanda went to the post office Friday to pick up mail, we were surprised to find that all of our Christmas cards and parcels finally arrived.  (It seems like Christmas never ends here!)  It was nice to get all of the beautiful cards from friends (albeit late), and there were about 4 parcels of pre-Christmas items, a chocolate filled Advent Calendar, some ornaments, and a gingerbread house set of cookie cutters as well as candy canes and M and Ms for decorating a gingerbread house. 

Oren was very excited about the gingerbread house kit and set his heart on making another gingerbread house on Saturday.  With a little convincing I agreed to go along with the project and by late afternoon we had built a second gingerbread house within 30 days of our last creation.  (I don't usually do more than one of these per year.)

Other activities over the weekend included helping Grandma Jean plant some flowers in our yard and Sunday after church we took Jean to our swimming pool where Oren wowed her with his jumps off the 3 meter platform.  Sunday evening we invited our Danish friends to eat the gingerbread house with us.  Naja and Aviaja were able to come over and we devoured the roof together.

That pretty much covers the past week except for one "Africa Wins Again" story worth telling (purely for humor.)

The incident happened on Wednesday evening where I am now putting my adult ballet class.  There was recently a change in keys for the room I teach in, and I am often locked out with no one around to open the door when class begins.  This week however, one of the other teachers who takes my class managed to get an original for the lock of her own and offered to make me a copy.  I was really happy because not having to worry about getting in to class every time I teach is one less anxiety.  

I got to the class 10 minutes early and she came 5 minutes later with 2 copies of the original, freshly minted.  We tried them both and were sad to find that neither worked.  She apologized and said she would take the key back the next day.  She pulled the original out of the purse to open the door only to find it also did not work at all.  On closer inspection she found that in fact, during copying the hardware store owner had somehow confused the keys and had made a copy of some key that was not hers and had returned the wrong original and wrong copies to her.  So we were locked out again that evening.  I have to say, as much as one tries to anticipate what will go wrong here, you will always be surprised by something unexpected.

Sometimes surprises are good.  We have had an unbelievable amount of electricity in the past 3 weeks.  I don't think we have had one power failure.  We almost don't know what to do with all that cold refrigerator space since we are so used to using all our left overs and stocking nothing.  I almost feel guilty running the fan all night.

What is interesting to me is that neither I nor anyone else I know really knows why there is good electricity now.  Just like we never really understood the cause of the very low amount of electricity delivery, or the sugar shortage.  We speculate, we share rumors, but there is no source of reliable information.  Living here, I have become aware that it is possible to live without concerning oneself much with the question 'why'.  I don't think many Burundians are much interested in that as so few have any power to changes their circumstances.  One learns to accept negative consequences and enjoy fully changes for the better, no matter how temporary.  

I don't have much confidence that this good electricity stint will last, it will become bad again, but I am enjoying it.  I am starting to live more in the reality of the present which is where people seem to live here, neither looking backward nor forward.

I do fail when it comes to death though.  At least twice monthly one or more of my professional Burundian colleagues is off to the funeral of a young or youngish person who has died or was killed.  I am struck by the fact that no one ever seems to know the cause of death and does not seem to concern themselves much with that question.  One friend lost a 25 year old nephew last week.

"He was fine in the morning then got sick at noon and was dead in the evening."  

I asked if doctors had determined a cause of death.  He said no, but maybe he was poisoned.  Burundians blame many unexplained deaths on poisonings by jealous neighbors but I have no idea whether these suspicions are plausible or not.  I know that the 4 women who died in childbirth in the hospital for 'unknown' reasons were probably not poisoned by a jealous neighbor.  

I admit that I am appalled by the lack of curiosity here.  When I tell colleague that in my country if a young person died in or out of a hospital for 'unknown' reasons, suspicious or not, there would be an investigation and autopsy to determine the exact cause of death in every case.  (Even for an elderly person who dies in a hospital.!)  My colleague shrugs and seems to be asking what all the 'to do' is about knowing the exact reason for something that cannot be changed.

I do, however, look forward to a time when healthcare in this country would be good enough that knowing a cause of death could be used to prevent a similar death in the future, particularly in a hospital. 

For now, I am trying to be less obsessed with trying to ferret out every reason for every inconvenience I experience here, and feeling grateful and less entitled about amenities we take for granted at home. 

If you are praying people, we could use spiritual support the rest of this week for Rebecca and next week for me.  This week has started well enough with me getting the kids ready and off to school for two days now, but there are still three to go then it is Rebecca's turn.