Monday musings

-A gal I met at Sydaleigh's open house told me about a church they go to yesterday. It was too late to get a ride to attend when she called, but next week we hope to be able to check it out. Excited to get connected in a church here.

-Last Wednesday some missionaries came over to our house. They serve at an orphanage/school/clinic in Yako, which is about an hour and a half Northwest of here, in the direction of Mali. Kelly met them when they were visiting/speaking at her parent's church in S. Florida and after the service she stalked them down and got their contact info to give to me. Gotta love friends!

We chatted via email back and forth before we moved, and before we left the states we offered to ship with our luggage some totes they needed to get to Burkina. So while they were in Ouaga last week they came by the house to pick up their totes and stayed to visit for a bit. They are wonderful. Truly. It was such a joy to sit in their company and listen to their hearts and hear about what God is doing up in Yako through their lives. As soon as we get our car that is the first place we are going. We hope to be able to drive up there once a month and serve along side them. We were told they have about 50 babies in the orphanage right now, and they need 24 hour supervision. I wouldn't mind holding me a baby or two. I'm sure my baby crazed girls wouldn't mind either..... :~)

-Baking here has been...interesting. I don't have a mixer, or a whisk, I have yet to see baking soda in any store I've been to, I haven't been able to find cocoa, the butter here is not labeled by tablespoons (or, at all) so you just have to kind of guesstimate how much you are using, the granulated sugar is the size of coarse kosher salt, there is no powdered sugar....so you just have to make do with what you have to work with. Which, undoubtedly has led to some failures in the baking department...the cookies I baked for Friday night's dinner date with friends was one of them. Fortunately our host also baked dessert so we were saved from my tiny cookie failure. I have been baking bread, and that on the other hand has been turning out quite good.

-I think I have come to terms with the fact that we live with bats. I have accepted seeing them fly in the sky over our backyard (and everywhere else for that matter) and hearing them squeak at night. I have even come to be grateful for their existence seen as how they eat their weight in bugs each night.

All of that being said.....it still freaks the crap out of me to be out in the backyard, look up and see those freaky little buggers hanging upside down from our trees! Watching me....with their little tiny black "take another step and I'm gonna swoop down and bite ya" kind of eyes.
(The girls can never know of their existence. They would never step foot in our back yard again if they knew they were there.)

-The mosquitoes here are eating us alive. My attempts at saturating us in Deet are proving unsuccessful. I currently have fifteen bites on just my left arm (six of which are on my fingers! What kind of pathetically needy creature is so desperate it would resort to biting me on my fingers?!) My left arm looks like I have the chicken pocks...or some other weird red bumpy illness. Those bats are slackin'. They are not meeting their mosquito quota each night! Isaak brought his bb gun and if those squatters don't start paying up in the form of dead mosquitoes I'm gonna shoot 'em outta the trees.

-Freddy Kruger was inside my stomach most of last week. He finally clawed his way out, to which I am grateful. I'm sure that won't be the last I will see of him.....

okay, more musings later.....