Phases of 50 part 4: 53

Not many photo-ops this week, but here are some random ones of the kids at school and other activities.

I made brief mention of my Birthday at the end of last week’s blog, but another year down probably merits a bit more reflection.  I am writing this balancing my one-armed reading glasses delicately on my nose.  I started to need them about 6 years ago and since I never had glasses before in my life, I have not been able to develop any good habits of keeping them handy or intact.

My strategy here is to buy about 8 pairs in the US before I come back each summer and hope that I will lose or break less than one pair a month.  People do seem to feel sorry for me, especially when I am balancing a pair armlessly on my nose like Ben Franklin and some have even donated a pair or two to me at random times.

My vision and thinning hair seems to be the only physical signs of aging, the forewarning of impending mortality.  But I am not feeling morose about it and continue to do my best to age into wisdom and experience rather than becoming an old fool.

Looking back on the pastiche that is my life, I am amazed at the experiences I have had and that all of this memory can be inside of one person.  I really have lived a lot!  Some years admittedly were ‘eaten by the locusts’ but I really feel that God has redeemed them all to me in the last decade. 

Facebook continues to a surprising map of the tapestry I have woven.  I see there friends I have collected along the way.  I appreciated the well wishes of more than 50 of them whom I have come to know over many decades.

Life here continues to be interesting, but I think I need to update readers at home on the unfolding events that are concerning us these days.  Probably the most alarming thing is how much richer we are getting!  Not usually something that one complains about, but in this case it is not good.  The problem is the very rapid devaluation we are seeing of the Burundian Franc vis-à-vis the US Dollar.  When we moved here it was about 1100 francs per dollar, and now it is close to 2000 francs per dollar, almost a 100% decrease in value in 5 years.  But more than half of that has happened in the last 3 months. 

It is tempting to see that our programming dollars are going a lot further, but when we realize that people’s salaries in local currency have less and less value, we are gravely concerned.  Local food prices are skyrocketing, not to mention the cost of imported goods.  The problem is that even local produce depends on fuel to get into the city. 

Burundi has always had a terrible balance of trade but I don’t pretend to understand what is happening now.  I have heard some theories about block grants that went to the govt. in dollars being cancelled this year because of corruption, or that the IMF if forcing the country to liberalize and not protect its currency value.  Some blame the fire at the Central market, but the financial collapse seems to have begun even before the fire.  Others claim that some wealthy and powerful people are hoarding dollars and raiding the banks.

One thing is clear, as expressed to Rebecca by our friendly neighborhood Forex moneychanger:  “There is almost no foreign currency in the country right now.”

I don’t know what the reason is or why this is happening but it is having a devastating effect on the economy here.  I could not imagine I could watch such a poor country get any poorer.  But it is.

One immediate consequence of this has been a serious fuel shortage as merchants are not able to keep an inventory of fuel.  The price of gas is regulated by the govt. so when the currency value goes down, gas station owners cannot make enough devaluing local currency to buy more fuel in dollars.  They have quit selling it altogether as of yesterday in anticipation of a much needed price rise. 

Because of this, Rebecca and I bought a second very small fuel efficient 1998 Toyota Raum to use for driving in town as the Fortuner uses a lot of gas and will only be used for trips upcountry now.  What was amazing is that we bought it for $3000 because the price in francs, which would have equaled $4000 a month ago when we started looking, dropped 25% and the owner was very happy to even sell it when she did.  

A car was not our only purchase this week though.  We have needed to replace our stove, which has been falling apart bit by bit.  We have been living without the use of 2 of the four burners and the oven door that would not close properly.  The last straw for me was having to try to circumnavigate the chair with the 20-liter drum of water on it that we use to hold the oven door shut.  To get something in or out had become a fairly major ordeal. 

It tool me several trips to get the right stove and when we got home we found that the oven did not work.  After taking a good bit of it apart to find the problem, I discovered that one had to hold the regulator knob in when lighting the gas to get the flow to start.  Fortunately I was able to put it back together again.

We have also raised all the salaries of our staff this month to help them deal with the currency devaluation, but even with a 25% raise, they earn (in dollars) just the same as we were paying them a year ago. If inflation continues, we’ll probably need to raise them again. But we are probably some of the few that can afford to keep pace with inflation. Parallel to this economic disaster, is a notable increase in the number of thefts happening to people around us. We don’t think this is an accident as people become more and more desperate.

I am hoping the Franc value will level off soon, we would dread seeing something like what happened in Zimbabwe or DRC under Mobutu happen here.  Please be in prayer about this, and if there is anyone who can explain clearly to me why it is happening, I would like to understand.

Besides this we had a series of work related crises this week that we can’t really talk about here.  Fortunately we were in town all week trying to complete all our late year-end reporting by Friday. So this meant that we were actually dealing with the 7 different crises during the period that we were also staying up late to finish the reporting. Perhaps it just added more interest to the week, relieving the boredom of data-entry. Rebecca’s perspective: I would have liked to take a rain check on one or two of those crises. Anyway, we don’t always have that choice.

One of the biggest challenges in relation to that is our decision to fast for Lent.  Rebecca and I are only eating one meal per day (dinner), so we definitely feel a bit lower in our energy level to deal with problems.  The other is problem is that you can fast from food, but you can’t fast from parenting, and having to keep the kids in line without eating during the day is a challenge as well.  Despite all of that, the fast has been a good opportunity for quieting our hearts, minds, and spirits, and being available to the ways God is using us.

The low energy I felt yesterday also proved to useful in tolerating the nearly 4-hour wait at the ‘DMV’ to get the new car registered in my name.  I had to sit quietly and wait for a title search nearly the whole afternoon.  I did so, and fell asleep for over an hour, which passed the time well.  I can now see there is a high correlation between patience and hunger, which might explain why people here seem so calm and patient in general.  Impatience and stress use a lot more energy than patience and calmness.

Although the week was generally not punctuated by many major events, we did have Yolanda and Melody pass through over the weekend, and Saturday evening we were invited to an adult Birthday party for our friend Naja Spanner.   It was at their house and we had arranged a baby sitter for the evening.  Sadly David spiked a fever that afternoon and we ended up bringing him along with us.  He was quite happy with that and spent time arranging the toys of Elias and Aviaja who were at a friend’s for a sleepover.

The party was nice with many of our mutual friends. We stayed until after 11pm which is very late for us.  Unfortunately we came back to find that Oren had found a website on the computer with a lot of free video games and was playing them incessantly when we got home.  It was quite shocking considering he only discovered there were such things as computer games in the past few months.  (Mostly while we were trying to meet our annual reporting deadlines, and doing lower quality parenting.)

We are working to wean him off them again, and teaching him how to be disciplined.  Fortunately our Internet speed is still a bit too slow to allow for too much gaming. 

The weekend was OK despite David’s sickness.   Our small group was big this week as most everyone was there at once.  We had dinner with our friends Tim and Jeanette afterwards. 

It was good to see David’s virus had ended by Sunday and on Monday morning both kids were back in school and we were ready to begin another week.

Rebecca’s notes: One high point of this past two weeks has been reading to Oren. He has reached the age where chapter books are starting to interest him. Over Christmas, we read the first Narnia book. In the last two weeks, we read the Magician’s Nephew. He has really loved hearing these stories and he’s old enough to understand the analogies that C.S. Lewis is making between Aslan and a Christ-figure. It has been very good bonding time for us. David is totally bored, on the other hand, and just rolls over and goes to sleep when I start reading Narnia. In a few years he’ll like them – maybe then, Oren can do the reading!