Adjusting

I have been thinking a lot about adjustment the last week. On Friday night our whole family was able to catch a ride to the track tournament. It was an evening tournament so both shorter and cooler than usual. Kris has been coaching the jumping events…high jump, long jump, triple jump. Robbie has been doing track, but this particular meet was for the highschool students. As I was talking to other parents, they related their adventures in adjusting. It made me realize that I am doing really good in the phase of adjustment I am in. One man told us that he hated being here for the first six months that he was here. I have been thinking about that. I am sad at times. I miss my friends so much, but I don’t hate it here. Sometimes I still wish things were different…that the air was cleaner, that I had a vehicle to run my errands, that certain foods were more readily available or that they were cheaper. But I don’t really find myself yearning to be somewhere else. I guess I am looking at this whole adventure and saying to myself, “There is a possibility that this might just be two years of my life. Two years goes by so quickly! I don’t want to miss out on what this time holds because I was wanting to be somewhere else."

I am getting used to living here. As I was driving home for church yesterday, I remembered some of my first impressions of the area. I remember seeing all the trash and overgrown vegetation and thinking that this place was so ugly. Now I see the beautiful flowers on the trees, the people, the sunsets. I see some beauty. I don’t think this place is as beautiful as Mexico, but there is beauty to find. I thank God that we live on this hill above some of the smog. We still have black feet every day from the grim that deposits on the floors, but it is God’s graciousness that has allowed us to live close to the school and up on the hill.

Some of our daily difficuties right now are:
1. Not having a vehicle to get around.
2. The schedule of life. We are up by 5:30am every morning. Kris and I are night people! We love working late into the night, but when you are up at 5:30am, you are exhausted by 10:30pm.
3. A lack of down time for Kris and I. This ties into the above schedule. We just have not figured out yet how to get consistent time together for just the two of us!
4. Life in general just takes more time and work. While there is so much more available here in Manila than there was in PNG, it still just takes so much more time to cook and clean here.

I have started helping Nathaniel’s teacher on Friday mornings. That has been a total blast. They are a great group of kids, and every time I am around his teacher, I like her more. I like to meet the kids he comes home and tells me about.

This weekend Kris put a lot of work into building the frame for our water bed. We are hopeful that we will be able to set that up soon. Kris is looking forward to sleeping in a bed without his feet hanging off the end, and it will help us to be cooler when the weather gets hotter.

So we are settling into a little routine. We are really looking forward to the kid’s school break at the end of March. We are not planning to go away for that, but a family here has offered to let us use their vehicle. So we are looking forward to a couple of day trips. We have been told about a waterfall a couple of hours from here, and ShaeLynn really wants the whole family to go snorkeling. So we will probably get up real early one morning and drive down to the area where she had the field trip a couple of weeks ago. Of the two evils of either camping or getting up really early, I think we can manage getting up real early to go to do that.We would like to go into one of the tribal locations this summer to see another part of the country and specifically how God is at work there.

Anyways, just thought I would post some of my thoughts about life right now.