Karen in her new kitchen!
Locals crossing the river . . .
Monday, July 21, 2008
Pictures!
Rob, Margit, Kirsten and the McKenzie kids
Karen in her new kitchen!
Locals crossing the river . . .
Karen in her new kitchen!
Locals crossing the river . . .
Friday, July 18, 2008
July 16, 2008
“So no one told you life was gonna be this way. Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA. It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear. But when it hasn’t been your day, you week, your month, or even your year…I’ll be there for you, like I’ve been there before…I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour…I’ll be there for you.” Great lyrics, I think. If you don’t already know, you should know that I am an extreme Friends fanatic. The series started when I was fairly young, so it was above my head at the time. But at the end of college and beginning of grad school, I got hooked. Things in Friends world are so calm and relaxing. You know how sitcoms go, some laughs, some conflicts, but by the end of the 30 minutes, everything is pretty much worked out, the happy music starts to play and everyone feels good (unless of course it’s the season finale, and then it’s an agonizing four months of waiting for resolution).
Anyway, since we’ve been overseas, Friends has been a real life-saver/sanity-preserver for me. I can remember one of our first few weeks in our scary first apartment in France, when I discovered that our Friends DVD’s would play on the player there. We were very excited. Just a taste of home. I remember late nights after holidays wishing we were with our families. We whipped out our favorite episode, and felt the tears fade to the back for a while. I vividly remember one night in particular. It was June 18th of last year; the day that Ella was born. It had been a very long weekend and an even longer day. It was about ten or eleven at night and we had just said our final goodbye’s to our little girl and laid her in a little box that the nurse then took away. Could life had been anymore messed up? After all the nurses left Margit popped out a little cake that Kirsten had made for me as a little reward for making it through the day. My mom and Rob, Margit and I were munching on the cake, and they asked me if I wanted to do something. I didn’t have to think long, and I said, “Yeah, I want to watch Friends.” I had originally planned on watching several episodes during labor, but the way things turned out, it was too intense. But this was the perfect time. So on my trusty Dell, we started it up, and for a half an hour it felt like the world would keep turning. For thirty minutes, the tears actually dried up on my face. For that short bit of time, everything stopped feeling so foreign and felt familiar again. Am I proposing that we take refuge in our favorite sitcoms? No. Reality always comes rushing back after the credits role. I had a counselor tell me once that he thought I watched movies so often because I was trying to escape the real world. I looked him straight in the face and said, “Well, that’s exactly it! If you could leave all your problems behind for 2 hours, just take a little vacation from them, with renewed energy to deal with them afterwards, wouldn’t you?” He wasn’t sure what to answer. In the life that I live right now, I don’t take many “vacations” from the reality all around me, but I’m thankful for my thirty minute “coffee breaks”.
So, why do I even mention this? Have I become Warner Brothers’ newest rep? No. It’s just that since we’ve been here in Africa the last three months, I’ve started to identify with the theme song. We used to fast forward through it and just get straight to the story, but now I always ask if we can listen to it. “No one told you life was gonna be this way…” First favorite line. Have you ever felt like that? A lot in the last few months has made me think, could I have gotten a memo about this or something? We grow up with these grand plans for our life, that turn out like nothing we had thought. Sometimes these days I think, do I have a reason for being right now? (don’t worry, I’m not depressed, just pensive). I don’t know how many of you have jobs like we have right now. I wouldn’t think it’s very common in America; maybe more akin to unemployment. As we wait for our next step and we attempt to make our days useful along the way, there is a lot of waiting, and lot of doing nothing. I am ashamed some days that all I have done is baked 2 loaves of bread, made meals, attended a Bible study and written a few emails. It’s not a lack of desire to do something “important,” it’s a lack of “important” things to do right now. Arabic doesn’t start for two weeks, our tutor hasn’t quite worked out yet. We’re moving today for the third time in 3 months, today is my day off of teaching Annelise. So those words from Friends always resonate with me…no one told me. I know that we have been told life would not be easy as pie, and there will be trials and it produces perseverance. All of that is true. But what it has taught me recently is to lighten up a little. Instead of thinking, poor Karen, out here in Africa, suffering the fate of extreme boredom and lack of purpose, I think, everyone thinks at one moment or another, “No one told me it was going to be this way!” But the beauty of this song is that it continues, move on, it doesn’t matter, it’s not the end of the world: “If it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year…I’ll be there for you…” It says, yeah, your life has kind of sucked for a while, in terms of earthly value. It may look like you have kind of gotten the short end of the stick the last few draws. But you know what, it’s cool, life goes on. Life is so much more than the sum of the good and bad things that have happened to you. It’s about who you are. You can imagine this theme song having a slow rhythm in a minor key and being kind of sad, but it’s not. It’s upbeat. That’s what I love about it. It says, life is this way, but it will go on. And I just need to do my best to enjoy what I can along the way.
Odd as it may be, it has given me a different perspective on things, so that when I read a devotional from my “Hope” book the other day (a devotional book for those dealing with loss and grief; highly recommend it) about trusting God’s plan, it made a lot of sense to me. The writer wrote, “Jesus calls us to abandon our own agendas, what we have deemed will please and fulfill us, so that we can embrace the kind and quality of life that only he gives…This is the call for everyone who chooses to be a follower of Jesus. The problem is, we don’t really believe that God’s plan for our lives could be better than the one we’ve crafted. We don’t believe we could be as fulfilled by the life he offers as we would be by the one we’ve planned.” Yeah…isn’t that true. She was just brave enough to say it. The truth is, deep down, I really don’t believe that the cards that God is dealing me are honestly better than the way I want it to be. It’s true, I don’t. I try really hard to think that, but I just don’t. Sure, I know cognitively, but feeling it is different. But part of what I started to see more clearly is that I do look at the “my day, my week, my month, and my year(s)” and think, yeah, this is not better than what I had planned. But the reality of it is that I have to look at the whole picture. The song says, “even if”. Even if it hasn’t gone the way you though, it’s cool, it is going to work out. Okay, maybe it’s not going to work out because Monica, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe and Joey will “be there for you.” But it will work out because of God’s character of perfection and goodness (and he will “be there for you” …okay, admittedly a little cheesy, but I had to say it!). And in the mean time, I just need to rake through my life and do the best that I can with what I have, believing that even though it looks like I’m living in Africa doing absolutely no good for the human race at the moment, God had these weeks, months, years in His plan since before time, and so, it’s all good. He wants it to be this way, and we’re here to please Him, so I can confidently say, “No one told me my life was going to look this way; but even though it hasn’t been a great day, week, month or year, it’s gonna be fine…in fact, great, in the end.
“So no one told you life was gonna be this way. Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA. It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear. But when it hasn’t been your day, you week, your month, or even your year…I’ll be there for you, like I’ve been there before…I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour…I’ll be there for you.” Great lyrics, I think. If you don’t already know, you should know that I am an extreme Friends fanatic. The series started when I was fairly young, so it was above my head at the time. But at the end of college and beginning of grad school, I got hooked. Things in Friends world are so calm and relaxing. You know how sitcoms go, some laughs, some conflicts, but by the end of the 30 minutes, everything is pretty much worked out, the happy music starts to play and everyone feels good (unless of course it’s the season finale, and then it’s an agonizing four months of waiting for resolution).
Anyway, since we’ve been overseas, Friends has been a real life-saver/sanity-preserver for me. I can remember one of our first few weeks in our scary first apartment in France, when I discovered that our Friends DVD’s would play on the player there. We were very excited. Just a taste of home. I remember late nights after holidays wishing we were with our families. We whipped out our favorite episode, and felt the tears fade to the back for a while. I vividly remember one night in particular. It was June 18th of last year; the day that Ella was born. It had been a very long weekend and an even longer day. It was about ten or eleven at night and we had just said our final goodbye’s to our little girl and laid her in a little box that the nurse then took away. Could life had been anymore messed up? After all the nurses left Margit popped out a little cake that Kirsten had made for me as a little reward for making it through the day. My mom and Rob, Margit and I were munching on the cake, and they asked me if I wanted to do something. I didn’t have to think long, and I said, “Yeah, I want to watch Friends.” I had originally planned on watching several episodes during labor, but the way things turned out, it was too intense. But this was the perfect time. So on my trusty Dell, we started it up, and for a half an hour it felt like the world would keep turning. For thirty minutes, the tears actually dried up on my face. For that short bit of time, everything stopped feeling so foreign and felt familiar again. Am I proposing that we take refuge in our favorite sitcoms? No. Reality always comes rushing back after the credits role. I had a counselor tell me once that he thought I watched movies so often because I was trying to escape the real world. I looked him straight in the face and said, “Well, that’s exactly it! If you could leave all your problems behind for 2 hours, just take a little vacation from them, with renewed energy to deal with them afterwards, wouldn’t you?” He wasn’t sure what to answer. In the life that I live right now, I don’t take many “vacations” from the reality all around me, but I’m thankful for my thirty minute “coffee breaks”.
So, why do I even mention this? Have I become Warner Brothers’ newest rep? No. It’s just that since we’ve been here in Africa the last three months, I’ve started to identify with the theme song. We used to fast forward through it and just get straight to the story, but now I always ask if we can listen to it. “No one told you life was gonna be this way…” First favorite line. Have you ever felt like that? A lot in the last few months has made me think, could I have gotten a memo about this or something? We grow up with these grand plans for our life, that turn out like nothing we had thought. Sometimes these days I think, do I have a reason for being right now? (don’t worry, I’m not depressed, just pensive). I don’t know how many of you have jobs like we have right now. I wouldn’t think it’s very common in America; maybe more akin to unemployment. As we wait for our next step and we attempt to make our days useful along the way, there is a lot of waiting, and lot of doing nothing. I am ashamed some days that all I have done is baked 2 loaves of bread, made meals, attended a Bible study and written a few emails. It’s not a lack of desire to do something “important,” it’s a lack of “important” things to do right now. Arabic doesn’t start for two weeks, our tutor hasn’t quite worked out yet. We’re moving today for the third time in 3 months, today is my day off of teaching Annelise. So those words from Friends always resonate with me…no one told me. I know that we have been told life would not be easy as pie, and there will be trials and it produces perseverance. All of that is true. But what it has taught me recently is to lighten up a little. Instead of thinking, poor Karen, out here in Africa, suffering the fate of extreme boredom and lack of purpose, I think, everyone thinks at one moment or another, “No one told me it was going to be this way!” But the beauty of this song is that it continues, move on, it doesn’t matter, it’s not the end of the world: “If it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year…I’ll be there for you…” It says, yeah, your life has kind of sucked for a while, in terms of earthly value. It may look like you have kind of gotten the short end of the stick the last few draws. But you know what, it’s cool, life goes on. Life is so much more than the sum of the good and bad things that have happened to you. It’s about who you are. You can imagine this theme song having a slow rhythm in a minor key and being kind of sad, but it’s not. It’s upbeat. That’s what I love about it. It says, life is this way, but it will go on. And I just need to do my best to enjoy what I can along the way.
Odd as it may be, it has given me a different perspective on things, so that when I read a devotional from my “Hope” book the other day (a devotional book for those dealing with loss and grief; highly recommend it) about trusting God’s plan, it made a lot of sense to me. The writer wrote, “Jesus calls us to abandon our own agendas, what we have deemed will please and fulfill us, so that we can embrace the kind and quality of life that only he gives…This is the call for everyone who chooses to be a follower of Jesus. The problem is, we don’t really believe that God’s plan for our lives could be better than the one we’ve crafted. We don’t believe we could be as fulfilled by the life he offers as we would be by the one we’ve planned.” Yeah…isn’t that true. She was just brave enough to say it. The truth is, deep down, I really don’t believe that the cards that God is dealing me are honestly better than the way I want it to be. It’s true, I don’t. I try really hard to think that, but I just don’t. Sure, I know cognitively, but feeling it is different. But part of what I started to see more clearly is that I do look at the “my day, my week, my month, and my year(s)” and think, yeah, this is not better than what I had planned. But the reality of it is that I have to look at the whole picture. The song says, “even if”. Even if it hasn’t gone the way you though, it’s cool, it is going to work out. Okay, maybe it’s not going to work out because Monica, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe and Joey will “be there for you.” But it will work out because of God’s character of perfection and goodness (and he will “be there for you” …okay, admittedly a little cheesy, but I had to say it!). And in the mean time, I just need to rake through my life and do the best that I can with what I have, believing that even though it looks like I’m living in Africa doing absolutely no good for the human race at the moment, God had these weeks, months, years in His plan since before time, and so, it’s all good. He wants it to be this way, and we’re here to please Him, so I can confidently say, “No one told me my life was going to look this way; but even though it hasn’t been a great day, week, month or year, it’s gonna be fine…in fact, great, in the end.
July 2, 2008
Today is our first true day in Chad. Other than the time that I visited in 2003 and Rob again in 2007 for a few weeks, we now have moved everything we own (that isn’t still somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean) to this place called Chad. We left the place we had called home, Meskine, Cameroon, for the last two months, piled into a rented van and the McKenzies car, and drove north four hours to the border. A pretty uneventful trip, except for the herd of over 100 elephants that casually walked by on our left at one point – a poignant reminder that we were indeed still in Africa, just after I had been musing that the scenery made me think of the plains in Wyoming.
The stop at the border is the worst part. It took over an hour today, pretty normal. What we actually do there, I’m not sure. But you stop for half the time on one side, sitting in the blazing hot sun, and about half the time on the other side, again, in the now hotter sun. Then today, something was wrong with the driver’s visa, so we had to be pushed aside into the customs area, usually reserved for large trucks carrying goods. At least there, we weren’t suffocated by the continuous black exhaust from the passing vehicles.
After leaving the customs area, we were officially in Chad. The scenery was dustier and the people dressed a little different. The area was a bit slumish, so it wasn’t a great comparison with the nice village that we had just left. But I know all “big” cities have their “underbelly” that isn’t meant to be their best side. We quickly left the paved road and began on a bumpy and puddle-filled dirt road. About ten minutes later we arrived at the Lutheran Guesthouse Compound; basically a 10 foot tall grey wall topped with shards of broken glass (think pretty barbed-wire). The guard opened the large metal gate and we drove in. The first thing that struck me was the lack of vegetation. It has been raining for a month in Meskine, the grass has sprouted, and there are beautiful flowers and trees everywhere. Chad is a bit more barren, and this compound was built in the last year and so doesn’t have any large trees.
Upon arrival and inspection we found that our apartment was actually being inhabited by another person, who will be moving in 2 weeks…hmm. So, Rob and I were sent to the available studio apartment. A far cry from the 4 bedroom house that we just came from, but as they say here, “flexibility is the hallmark of missionary life” (don’t think I’m a saint, I did get angry and then cried quietly in my room before agreeing to actually place my luggage in the studio…). After further reflection and the realization that there was nothing to be done to change this situation, I just decided to better it. We unpacked what would fit in the tiny room. We turned one of our luggage trunks into a small table by throwing a piece of fabric over it and placing some pictures and books on top. We found an unused low wooden table outside, wiped it down and turned it into a coffee table. The two sitting chairs, we placed side by side to act as a couch. I arranged all my spices on the counter to make it look homey, and hung some brightly colored aprons on the side of the cupboards. I also, just yesterday picked up a large tablecloth that I had a seamstress sew for me, and it fit just perfectly on our table! It really brightened up the room! I pulled out our fridge magnets and a few snapshot pictures of me, Rob and my mom at Disneyland from February, and one of McCain, our niece and Rob reading a book together. The fridge comes up to my waist and doesn’t hold much, but having the magnets made it seem bigger somehow.
We finally sat down after about four and a half hours of working (with the iPod blasting tunes in the background, of course) and tried to cool off. We then realized that all of the bugs that had been outside, had somehow found their way in to our house, attracted by the fluorescent lights. So we quickly closed all the windows and swatted down what we could. They were mostly just termites (like flying ants), so harmless, but gross. There were about 1000 in our kitchen sink. Next job…cooking dinner. We decided that despite the grunting and groaning when I was packing the extremely heavy boxes of canned food and other kitchen items yesterday, we were now exceedingly glad for every morsel of food we had with us, since we have no car and no idea where the market or even any small shops are. We opened a can of beef ravioli that I found in Cameroon before we left, sliced some white bread that Madeleine, my house helper had made for our trip, and grabbed a couple of bananas. A very tasty dinner for a first night in a new house in Africa. After dinner we went to the McKenzies house for a rousing game of Carcassonne and we munched on some yummy Lemon Poppy-Seed Tea Cake that I made the night before we left (Everyday Food, May issue). Pretty good end to a rough day. Could have been a LOT worse. Thanks God! In a few minutes, we’ll tuck ourselves in to our new bed: two twins put together to make a king, with a pretty lace mosquito netting all around the bed. And this time, no waterbed and the mattresses are the exact same height! This is good living! Until next time…
Today is our first true day in Chad. Other than the time that I visited in 2003 and Rob again in 2007 for a few weeks, we now have moved everything we own (that isn’t still somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean) to this place called Chad. We left the place we had called home, Meskine, Cameroon, for the last two months, piled into a rented van and the McKenzies car, and drove north four hours to the border. A pretty uneventful trip, except for the herd of over 100 elephants that casually walked by on our left at one point – a poignant reminder that we were indeed still in Africa, just after I had been musing that the scenery made me think of the plains in Wyoming.
The stop at the border is the worst part. It took over an hour today, pretty normal. What we actually do there, I’m not sure. But you stop for half the time on one side, sitting in the blazing hot sun, and about half the time on the other side, again, in the now hotter sun. Then today, something was wrong with the driver’s visa, so we had to be pushed aside into the customs area, usually reserved for large trucks carrying goods. At least there, we weren’t suffocated by the continuous black exhaust from the passing vehicles.
After leaving the customs area, we were officially in Chad. The scenery was dustier and the people dressed a little different. The area was a bit slumish, so it wasn’t a great comparison with the nice village that we had just left. But I know all “big” cities have their “underbelly” that isn’t meant to be their best side. We quickly left the paved road and began on a bumpy and puddle-filled dirt road. About ten minutes later we arrived at the Lutheran Guesthouse Compound; basically a 10 foot tall grey wall topped with shards of broken glass (think pretty barbed-wire). The guard opened the large metal gate and we drove in. The first thing that struck me was the lack of vegetation. It has been raining for a month in Meskine, the grass has sprouted, and there are beautiful flowers and trees everywhere. Chad is a bit more barren, and this compound was built in the last year and so doesn’t have any large trees.
Upon arrival and inspection we found that our apartment was actually being inhabited by another person, who will be moving in 2 weeks…hmm. So, Rob and I were sent to the available studio apartment. A far cry from the 4 bedroom house that we just came from, but as they say here, “flexibility is the hallmark of missionary life” (don’t think I’m a saint, I did get angry and then cried quietly in my room before agreeing to actually place my luggage in the studio…). After further reflection and the realization that there was nothing to be done to change this situation, I just decided to better it. We unpacked what would fit in the tiny room. We turned one of our luggage trunks into a small table by throwing a piece of fabric over it and placing some pictures and books on top. We found an unused low wooden table outside, wiped it down and turned it into a coffee table. The two sitting chairs, we placed side by side to act as a couch. I arranged all my spices on the counter to make it look homey, and hung some brightly colored aprons on the side of the cupboards. I also, just yesterday picked up a large tablecloth that I had a seamstress sew for me, and it fit just perfectly on our table! It really brightened up the room! I pulled out our fridge magnets and a few snapshot pictures of me, Rob and my mom at Disneyland from February, and one of McCain, our niece and Rob reading a book together. The fridge comes up to my waist and doesn’t hold much, but having the magnets made it seem bigger somehow.
We finally sat down after about four and a half hours of working (with the iPod blasting tunes in the background, of course) and tried to cool off. We then realized that all of the bugs that had been outside, had somehow found their way in to our house, attracted by the fluorescent lights. So we quickly closed all the windows and swatted down what we could. They were mostly just termites (like flying ants), so harmless, but gross. There were about 1000 in our kitchen sink. Next job…cooking dinner. We decided that despite the grunting and groaning when I was packing the extremely heavy boxes of canned food and other kitchen items yesterday, we were now exceedingly glad for every morsel of food we had with us, since we have no car and no idea where the market or even any small shops are. We opened a can of beef ravioli that I found in Cameroon before we left, sliced some white bread that Madeleine, my house helper had made for our trip, and grabbed a couple of bananas. A very tasty dinner for a first night in a new house in Africa. After dinner we went to the McKenzies house for a rousing game of Carcassonne and we munched on some yummy Lemon Poppy-Seed Tea Cake that I made the night before we left (Everyday Food, May issue). Pretty good end to a rough day. Could have been a LOT worse. Thanks God! In a few minutes, we’ll tuck ourselves in to our new bed: two twins put together to make a king, with a pretty lace mosquito netting all around the bed. And this time, no waterbed and the mattresses are the exact same height! This is good living! Until next time…
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