Outer Space

I love kids and the way they think.
Kent had a movie date with the boys a couple days before his trip. He decided they were old enough to watch Apollo 13 together. Of course the boys loved it! Somewhere in Joel's 4-year-old head a ball started rolling. He was thinking a lot about space travel and the fact that it is not a very 'safe' thing to do. He asked me millions of questions about exactly what 'after-burners' do and how precisely the 'heat shield' had been destroyed. In exasperation I told him that I just didn't know and he should ask his father as soon as he returns.

Then, as I'm unpacking hundreds of books, the boys discovered their Dad's Calvin & Hobbes books. Really fun, a bit unorthodox, but James has been reading them to Joel every spare moment for a few days now. James found a hilarious page where Calvin gets a cold and is sneezing himself into outer space.

You can probably see coming what took me days to piece together...

Joel with tears in his eyes: "Mom I feel like I have a cold!

Can't you make it stop?!"

"Calvin sneezed himself into outer space, Mom!"

"Honey, are you worried you will sneeze yourself into outer space?"

"Yeah, and Apollo 13 had part of it burn up!"

"No you will not sneeze that far, I promise."

Which preceded a long discussion of real v. pretend and a slightly reassured little 4-yr-old Joel. He seemed much more confident after taking an anti-histamine. Hm.

He must have inherited my propensity to worry about anything and everything to the Nth degree...

Home

This is the view as you walk in the front gate. The rock work in the foundation is traditional for this area. I've seen it painted blue, black, red, green, etc. with white. The tree trunk you see is an avocado tree, and not far from it along the front lawn to the right are 2 mango trees. The 'driveway' for now is the dirt area to the left alongside the house. The front left window is Kent's office (very small) and front side window is the school room/family room. The second side window is Anna's room - with a pink curtain!


This is the view of our 'farm' from the back porch. The back wall is in the process of being rebuilt (higher!). This was used as a personal field for growing maize, beans, manioc, sugarcane, okra, squash, onions, passion fruit, papaya, and the trees are guava, mango and avocado. It looks much more overgrown now (most corn stalks now taller than me), three weeks later and we really must get weeding like mad to keep up with the tropical overgrowth! =)


There's the kids with the new-to-us car! I'm still not entirely confident driving such a behemoth on 4 x 4 roads, but we're getting there. As a side note, this is probably the only country in the world which imports its cars from a British-system with the driver on the right (Uganda), and at the same time maintains the French-system roads - driving on the right. So when we drive we are actually on the outside of the lane. Probably terribly unsafe and all, but the main things we have to dodge are pedestrians, bikes and motorcycles, oh! and of course, potholes! =) ...which never stay in the same place after a good rain...

Could Poverty Be a Blessing?

I know this blog has been strangely quiet. This may have something to do with our house still in half-unpacked boxes. Or the fact that we’re only 2 weeks away from finished with the homeschool year, or that I’ve just sent out a 4-page newsletter. For whatever reason, in the slivers of free time (actually while I was on the couch with a stomach ache and Kent was cooking dinner last week) I managed to read a most thought-provoking article with the above title.

This quote has been churning around ever since:
“What we have developed is only society, the collectivity, the organization, regimentation, planning, bureaucracy… and anonymous impersonal technology. As for man’s need to be treated not as a machine for production but as a person, to assert his personal identity, and to have genuine relationships with other people… we are incontestably underdeveloped, not even developing, but regressing. Everything is sacrificed to profit and to material prosperity… Even our pleasures have become mass movements, media-controlled… and exploited by commercial enterprises.”
-Paul Tournier in Creative Suffering

I'm not saying I agree 100%, but there ARE some ways it seems Africa is more 'in touch with the nature of things'. Little is taken for granted and relationships are more important than currency. There is a freedom in simplicity and a security in a vast network of family and friends. Thoughts?

Andrew

This is the boys' new instant bff who left today for an extended
furlough. Naturally, they are grieving, but, as with all the other
partings these last months, we know we will see each other again
someday. Andrew is their hero as someone a bit older who really
knows about lego creations and building castles and sandpits! When
Andrew came over with a carved wooden sword and shield we had to
build some too! =) Anna likes to call him 'Andrew Bandrew' for
whatever reason... We will miss you Andrew! We are praying for safe
travels and fun times for you!

MOVED

Just to let you know, we have moved into our new home and are
getting settled. The kitchen sink got working last night and lights
are all working. Hot water heater got hooked up and we are starting
to unpack. We hope to be connected at the house in a couple weeks,
but this blog may be a bit quiet in the meantime. Pictures to follow
soon!!!

First Language Acquisition

My friend Jessica has inspired me to comment on Anna’s language development. I’ve noticed it a bit more than I did with the boys (James didn’t say much until age 3 with all that French in his head, and Joel had long sentences by 18 mos! –I’ll confess those are overgeneralizations). Lately, she’s talking incessantly and loudly whenever the four older people in her family give her ‘air time’, which is, in itself, a minor miracle given that I was so worried I had her hearing tested at 9 months for not EVER babbling! Ha!

Anyway, Anna has plenty of cute phrases like “Pick me down!” but linguistically a lot is happening these days for her. She has always substituted alveolar (t and d) for velar consonants (k and g): Daddy’s name is ‘Tent’ and ‘Ready to DOE!’ Recently, I’ve noticed she forms them just fine in word-medial and word-final positions: gecko is ‘decko’ and ‘lick’ is fine for instance. I take this as great progress. She CAN physically make those sounds just fine, but for now hangs onto the alveolars word-initially.

Anna also has trouble with consonant combinations like ‘tr’ ‘pl’ and ‘st’. She told me she wants to go really, really ‘fat’ on her bike and it took me a few seconds to understand. =) Every airplane flying overhead is ‘airpwane’; totally normal first language acquisition for English. If she were learning a Bantu language, on the other hand, it would never be an issue as they are almost entirely CV (consonant-vowel) by rule and end up with long words like : amenibariki (‘he blesses me’), but would never have to master our tongue-twisting consonant combinations!

As for vocabulary, she shocks me everyday learning what a ‘trocodile’ and ‘taterpillar’ are correctly. She called the trocodile a dinosaur first, but hey, I can see the resemblance! She’ll be the first Swahili speaker in the family I think. Last week she was sitting on the couch ‘reading’ a book when one of our employees arrived, she looked up and said, ‘Jambo!’ like she’d been doing it all her life. It totally shocked him. He said something like, “Wow! She’s a smart one!” (in French)

Sorry for your daily dose of linguistics! I recognize it's underwhelming for most people, but fun for a few of us!

To make you smile...

In absentia

Sorry to all who have been checking for our news in vain.
We are moving into our house this week, Lordwilling!
We have also have had no power (like for phones or computers) for
about 4 days. We are finally connected locally by radio and getting
used to our names 'kilo romeo' =)

We bought a car and that's wonderful, but we had to borrow money to
do it, which isn't so wonderful. And as with any renovation project,
everything costs more than you think it will! =)

Please bear with us a few days while we are 'in absentia' and
pictures will come soon! In case you're concerned for the kids,
don't be. They have a blast playing with their new best friends
almost everyday!

International Kitchen

I’ve always thought of my kitchen as a fairly international kitchen. Having lived in several different countries we gathered recipes as we went. Kent makes a mean Chinese stir-fry. I can mostly cook a decent Spanish tortilla (egg/potato/onion pie-like thing for those who haven’t lived in Spain). So I looked forward to what a kitchen could look like here. What I didn’t expect was that buying ‘local’ often means buying international goods from local merchants instead of ordering them yourself. And buying local is often really difficult or expensive to do. Eggs, for instance, are almost impossible to find from a local farmer. But every Wednesday and Thursday a couple local merchants get huge stacks of them from some international source and supply most of the town with eggs that way.

Anyway, to illustrate the 'hodge podge,' I’ll list some of what we have in our kitchen right now:

honey made in China,

rice from Pakistan,

sugar from India,

flour from Uganda,

locally grown/made peanut butter,

several boxes of Kellogg’s All-Bran from England,

a large jar of Smucker’s Grape Jelly from the US,

ketchup made in Holland,

cans of Tunafisch from Belgium,

and American Garden mayonnaise made in the US, sold in Uganda, and purchased here!

…gives a different meaning to ‘international kitchen’ doesn’t it?