Rainy Season, A Community of Missionaries, and a Milestone for Oren

In case I had not mentioned it, rainy season began last Tuesday at 1:15 in the afternoon. It is a pleasant change here—like summer into fall in the US. The nights are cooler, the house is not getting dusty as fast, and the mountains of Congo became visible again from our front porch yesterday evening.

It is a welcome change, and our garden is really appreciating it. Our mango tree is already providing us with some fruit and we expect to see some really big ones coming soon. Rebecca and Oren planted a kitchen garden in some of our planters around the porch, and we anticipate harvesting a fairly large crop of lettuce soon as well. When I focus on the blessings of being here, one thing I do appreciate is the amount of fresh produce available here year around, especially tomatoes. I remember those brief summer seasons at home where we could enjoy eating vine-ripened tomatoes. Here in Burundi, they are the only kind you get, 12 months per year. There are no cans of anything here so all of our tomato sauce, pasta sauce, salsa, etc, is made fresh every week. This goes for pretty much everything from avocadoes to herbs like basil, cilantro, garlic and ginger, lemons, limes, orange juice etc.

It is a good time to count blessings because electrical power is not in that number. We are now down to an inconsistent 4 hours every 24 max. We have bought some rechargeable battery operated flashlights, etc. We are also looking into some alternative energy supplements including a solar panel to charge a battery. I was surprised to find how widespread the use of solar energy is outside the US. It is intriguing to me, the idea that creating electrical power could be so decentralized. What if every household in the US, for instance, had its own solar panel to charge batteries and ran their household off of that power. It would be far cheaper in the long run than paying electric bills. My own idea is to create an exercise bike that one could ride to charge a battery while watching TV, than you could run the lights or TV off of the battery the rest of the evening while relaxing.

One thing that surprised me as an American is that absolutely NO one I talk to knows what is going on. There is speculation and rumor that Burundi owes money to Rwanda, the Lake is low, machines in Congo broke down, etc. But no facts, no investigative reporting, etc. For all we might like to complain about the tabloid style muckraking of the US press, I can assure that the truth would have been long exposed by now if this was happening there, and if heads needed to roll, they would have long rolled by now. Here it seems that suppression of facts to avoid embarrassment, etc. is still quite possible by some ( I am not going to speculate in this blog!).

What I have been told by one of my partners who is well connected is that this is the new Bujumbura. It is not seasonal, this is the new reality!

OK, enough of a diversion. I am sorry this has been so much on my mind of late, but we do spend a lot of time sitting around in the dark without much to do.

This week had its ups and downs, mostly ups. It was a second full week of being able to live in our newly established daily routine. Since our Kenya vacation we have tried to establish better habits of work, exercise and parenting. David is far too mobile to take to the office, so the new routine involves me taking to Oren to school at 7:30 am, then swimming from about 8-9, then working at the office from 9-12 or running errands in town. Rebecca takes care of David at that time. We all come home for lunch and on Monday and Wednesday we swap off doing language lessons in the afternoon. On Tuesday and Thursday and Fridays Rebecca goes to work in the afternoons and swims as well. We also have Marcelline put David on her back while she is working on Friday mornings so we can work together at home and coordinate our independent efforts. It is working OK right now, definitely better than before.

We continue to have our Tuesday evening Bible study although it is honestly not very well attended these days. I think the limitation is that it is in English, and there are just not a lot of English speakers in our church who can get to it on a school night evening. Most of the Anglophone missionaries we know have families with young kids and cannot come.

The good news on that front is that we are developing a group of friends, who are in a similar situation to us and are able to get together on a Saturday. We have now had a gathering of the some 4 to 6 families in the last two Saturdays. These are all long term missionaries,
one family is working with the Anglican church, (they are German and have 3 boys)
a second family is here to work with World Relief in their AIDS awareness in churches program. (They are Danish and have a boy and girl)
The third is an American family who come from 4 generations of missionaries to Burundi. They support a local church that was planted by their grandparents. They also have 2 boys.
Our other good friends are Zachee, Bridget and Tim, and Astrud and Travis’ family (who have 5 girls, two adopted from Rwanda.)

What I find somewhat amusing is spending so much time together in a group with Europeans from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands who only share English as a common language. It is also interesting being a novelty as Americans.

This Saturday we had the group over to our house along with the 3 SALTers and a few other friends. It was an afternoon gathering and the type of thing our house if perfect for. We opened all the doors, took the extra furniture out on the porch, which created large play areas for kids. We also had the trampoline of course. We served Mexican food and salad. It was a lot of fun, especially for all the kids there. It was really good to feel there is a community for us here that took a while to find.

I will try to say a bit about them individually in the future. For me it is interesting to see what impulse brings missionaries out here. One thing that is not surprising is that we share some sense of call in common. I do remember working as a dancer in New York City and finding myself in classes surrounded by hundreds of people who were driven in just the way I was. It was a bit unnerving. I feel that sense a bit here as well. Our desire to do this was somewhat out of the ordinary back home, but here, we are surrounded by the exact same type of out-of-the-ordinary folks.

Apropos to this, we have been going to the English fellowship on Sunday afternoon at the Rainbow center. We have been doing this in addition to the Sunday morning service we attend. We are doing this to give Oren a good Sunday school class. Rebecca taught the class last week and I assisted this week. It seems to be going quite well and many of the aforementioned kids are part of it.

Oren and David:

David has generally been doing well although this week he was sick with a very high fever. On the second night we decided to take him to get tested for malaria. He is the only person in our family still on antimalarials, but we missed a dose last week so there was a window for him to get it. The test was negative, which was only slightly encouraging because everyone always seems to get a negative test whether they have it or not. But he did get better by this morning and seems to be fine. The doctor did prescribe bactrim for some diarrhea. This seems to have helped also. We were told that chicken pox are also going around here, and David is teething as well.

One thing I will say about raising a baby in the 3rd world is that we save a lot on baby food. There is none to buy. We just break up whatever we are having on our plates into small pieces and he eats it. He is a good eater and loves rice, bananas, mangoes, french-fries, fish, and anything he can get his hands on. He is also still breast-feeding. (There is no affordable formula here either.) For those of you with babies, I just want to let you know that you don’t have to buy expensive baby food or a food processor to provide food to your baby. They don’t in much of the world.


I will close with Oren. He is doing really well in school these days and actually enjoys going. (Many friends now.) He even says a bit in French now. I am including a picture of him in his class.

The picture I am missing though would have been taken during a midday swim at Club du Lac T. Oren really wanted to go wade in the water. I was a bit leery because he is still not grasping the idea of holding one’s breath underwater. The Lac has a chop and a surf like the ocean. Oren played a bit letting his feet get wet but decided to go in deeper. I stayed very close, but he began to get braver and let himself be hit and knocked over by the breakers close to shore. In short order he was basically body surfing with the waves crashing over him (no waterwings). He TOTALLY understood at that moment how to hold his breath and had a great time. When we got back to the kids pool he jumped in a went right underwater to kick along the bottom. It was a major milestone and an exciting day for him.