Squeezing In a Birthday

Rebecca hanging ladybug balloons in preparation for David's Birthday.

I feel like I am racing against time to get this blog up before we leave on a plane to Zambia. It would be ideal to have this posted before we go. The problem is that the flight is at 2:30 in the morning and our taxi arrives at midnight. Rebecca and the kids have just fallen asleep at 9:30pm which leaves me a couple hours to write. But do I want to do this or sleep?

The reason for the Zambia trip is an all Africa MCC regional meeting which is going on all this week. It should be interesting although the travel could not be less ideal. In order to minimize the number of school days missed, we have opted to take night flights. Unfortunately these leave at exceptionally late hours and could not be less ideal for travel with young children. The good news is that the kids will only miss 4 days of school. The following week is fall break but we have a team retreat scheduled for Tanzania (right after we get back). The return to a normal routine is really nowhere on the horizon for me. After these two weeks I will need to go up to Rwanda to place our new service worker Matt who will be arriving in a few days.

It seems this is pretty much typical of our work here. Not that it is insanely busy all the time, but rather that there are periods of a great deal of hustling and bustling with short lulls in between.

This past week was spent entirely in Bujumbura, a small blessing, but it has not been slow at all. I feel like we have been in meetings or hosting people almost everyday. Among our visitors were Peter and Linda Taylor, some friends of ours here who are getting married. We made arrangements on Monday evening to host an engagement party at our house. Jodi Mikalachki, our former service worker at Hope School, who is now working with an English language initiative through the US embassy, was with us on Tuesday evening. We do not get to see her often eventhough she is in town.

Wednesday was a busy afternoon with me teaching several dance classes for the normal Wednesday teacher as well as taking Oren to soccer. The good thing is that Oren's soccer practice is in the field right outside the dance studio. Rebecca and David usually come over and hang out with the other mom's and kids watching either the dance class or the soccer practice. This routine is repeated on Friday as well only I teach adults in the evening on Friday too.

Tuesday's and Thursday's Oren does karate, so we do spend a significant amount of time going to his activities. I usually take him to the karate class at the French school. David goes with me while Rebecca takes the afternoon shift at work on those days.

Oren's homemade Roadrunner 

Friday I think it all came to a head when several folks came down from Gitega who were participating in the GLPI conference. When I got home from teaching in the evening I found we had 3 guests, Michael Sharp, Violette (the trauma healing facilitator for that week) and an MCC DRC partner. Fortunately most of them left later in the evening, but both Rebecca and I were really beginning to feel the strain of excessive hospitality.

Probably the thing putting the most pressure on us this past week, was trying to plan for David's 4^th Birthday party. His actual Birthday is the 29^th of Oct. but we realized it would be impossible to have a kids party on that date with all of our travel. We decided to schedule it for Saturday and invited several of his friends and their families. Invitees included the Miller's (Joel and Jeanette), Tim and Jeanette with Isabel, the Ivaska's and their daughters, Thomas and Naja's family, several German friends with kids in Oren and David's classes, and a few others. It was actually a very big group, and consistent with tradition, David and Oren wanted a costume party AND a piniata. That is all well and good, but with absolutely no evenings free it was not clear how all of these preparations would be accomplished.

I was able to get a start on the piniata on Wednesday evening and paper mache'd a balloon. I was not exactly sure what I was going to make, but David was going to be a ladybug for his costume so I thought that might be a good theme. (Actually David wanted to be a 'bug scientist, but we were not sure how to dress him up as that.) Oren wanted to be a road runner.

On Thursday we were able to start painting the balloon and by Friday evening it was ready to be stuffed with candy and hung. (Thanks Krystan for leaving paints at the Kigali house to paint the ladybug with!) We worked on the kids costumes with them when we had some spare moments and by Saturday morning they were pretty much complete.

ladybug piniata

We had a leisurely morning on Saturday after yoga, hanging around at Nina and Bela's house for several hours after we were done. It will be sad to see their family leave at the end of November, but she will be finishing her assignment with GIZ and returning to Germany.

The house was a bit of a mess but we somehow managed to get it arranged by the time the first guests arrived. We cleared about half the living room of furniture so we would have some indoor space for games in case it rained. Miraculously it did not the entire time of the party. I say this because if there is one thing I can say about the rainy season this year, it is that it is one of the wettest I have seen in my 4 years here. It seems to be raining almost constantly. It is great for our gardens, but extremely inconvenient, especially when it happens during morning rush hour. This can extend our 5 minute drive to school by up to 45 minutes because of the number of accidents on the road.

When most of the guests had arrived we started the costume party with a costume contest. There were quite a variety of costumes, several of the little girls were princesses and balerina's (one pioneer woman) while the boys were football and soccer players. Oren and David were probably the only 2 animals represented. They did a nice costume parade and the winners got prizes.

We played musical chairs next, several times in fact. It is interesting to see how popular the old standards are at a Birthday party. We also brought out the parachute and played with that as well.

The piniata was a big hit after David opened his presents which was followed by Birthday cake. (We copped out and had one made.) David very much enjoyed being the Birthday boy as he has been to quite a few Birthday's in the last year and has asked several times when his is.

Among his favorite presents were a number of bath toys, probably because he is always SO dirty, and Elias and Aviaja gave him a bug collectors container with a magnifying glass built into the top. It is excellent for magnifying bugs and David LOVES it.

When guests left in the evening it felt like the first time we were alone in the house as a family for a week. It was not completely unscheduled time though, as I had volunteered to teach Oren's Sunday school class the next morning. Despite somewhat last minute preparation, it went very well as I had a moment of genius on telling the story of Jacob and Esau from the point of view of Isaac. I dressed up in a blanket with a headband like a shepherd and hung a black platic bag from my ears to look like a beard and dark glasses (because I was blind.) I sat and told the kids the story as if I was Isaac recounting being tricked by Jacob, but I did like a kind of cooky, grouchy old man, (who probably looked somewhere between a bedouin and a terrorist). The kids found it very funny, but were also extremely engaged in the story.

adult's corner

We talked about times they had been tricked by someone or had tricked someone. There were many amusing stories about brothers tricking each other, (especially to get access to a gameboy). The lesson went very well and I actually really enjoyed teaching it.

After church we went home and spent some time with Michael Sharp before our Bible study. Several other GLPI participants who had come down to Bujumbura for the weekend rendez-vous-d at our house before heading back up to Gitega.

The timing was again tight so there was really no time between their departure and the arrival of our Bible Study group. It was great to them (just Tim and Jeanette and the Ivaskas this week), despite the lack of 'down time'.

Sunday evening we began to pack and plan for our departure tonight (Monday). We did send the kids to school today so they would not miss too much. Sadly, despite considerable effort, we were not able to take a morning swim ourselves. The reason for this was that they have officially closed our pool “Entente Sportif” for several months while they do a major renovation. I hope it will be more permanent than the one they did about a year and a half ago. (The broken tiles replaced on the bottom of the pool came back up after 3 months.)

We tried several other places but for various reasons were not able to swim. We are hoping to find another pool where we can continue this very important part of our weekly routine. It is an important part of keeping us from getting too stressed out from the kinds of things that weeks like this past one can require of us.

We are still struggling with fuel shortages, although I have been able to continue to exploit my taxi-driver connection to get gas for a small service fee. (He also picks up and delivers the car so it has definitely been worth it.) I am hoping the crises ends soon though.

There have been other stressors this week, we have had a number of tech items fail including a computer, ipod and hardrive. I won't go into too much detail because I don't want to be a complainer, but suffice it to say that a couple weeks away from Burundi are not entirely unwelcome, even if much of the time will be spent in meetings.

Hopefully I will be able to post again at the end of this week from Zambia.