Life the past few weeks

Our internet has been very unpredictable for the past couple of weeks. It only works intermittently, sometimes for just a couple minutes at a time, so it's been very difficult to get online and update on life. 

The reality of life in Burkina...terrible internet made even more terrible. 

But, with the internet working at the moment, and unsure of how long it will last, I will take some time to quickly bring my blog up to speed. (Ha! The internet just crashed, again! Thankfully this page is loaded and I can keep on typing even though the internet is down....but it may be a while before I can actually post this... aah, c'est la vie)

It's been three weeks since Burkina's revolution. 

Revolution. It's weird to say that word in the context of what transpired, but alas, that's what happened. The people of Burkina, through a very loud and concentrated voice, some through violent and destructive means (which was sad and unfortunate) convinced their president to resign and saw their entire government dissolved in the process.

It has been a rocky past few weeks. In a nut shell...the military seized control in an effort to regain momentary stability, prevent anarchy, and ensure safety. They briefly closed all land and air borders not allowing anyone in or out of the country. But that has since been lifted and flights have resumed. They issued a curfew which is still in effect, but everyone is respecting it and there have not been any major clashes with the police or military for the last two weeks. But, politically, things have been very convoluted. With the international community putting a lot of pressure on the military to relinquish control and hand over power to a civilian- the military, opposition party leaders, and religious leaders have been busy meeting and trying to find some way to move forward and reestablish the government in a way that is acceptable to everyone. Not an easy task.

Thankfully, this week they all came to a consensus, and agreed upon and swore in a man to be the interim president until elections can be held next year. The military has strategically set themselves up to still maintain a lot of power and leverage, but in the end they satisfied the international community to hand over presidential power to a civilian, and for that, many are quite satisfied.

This is a very big step not only for Burkina, but for the entire region. 

In a region where coups, political protests, and collapsing governments are all too common it speaks very highly of Burkina Faso to have successfully agreed to terms of reestablishing their government and maintaining a fair and democratic state in such a short period of time. Burkina has set themselves up to be a prime example of teamwork and compromise in an effort to maintain stability following the downfall of their government, if things continue to go well.

Prayerfully, the next several months leading up to the elections will continue to be peaceful.

So, that's the most recent news of the political situation here. 

As far as life in our family during this time....

Well, we were hanging low for a while, but life has resumed as normal, thank goodness! Americans were ordered to "shelter in place" for nearly a week during this time. 

I gotta say, being locked down in our home with the kids, and not being able to go anywhere, had us all going a little bit stir crazy by the end. But we made the best of it. 

School was canceled the Sunday prior to the protests for the entire week, which followed the Fall break the students had already been on the week before. 

So, the kids had been out of school for over two weeks.

But, it actually turned out to be a blessing that school ended up being canceled another week. Not just to avoid the kids being out during this time of unrest, but because the Sunday that school was reported canceled, Sydaleigh came down with a fever. And she ended up being sick almost all week long.

She had a pretty high fever consistently for four days. Even with ibuprofen and Tylenol it wouldn't seem to go away. She was feeling bad, poor thing. So with the protests that had broken out earlier in the week and Sydaleigh being sick, we were staying home anyways.

 Although, Paris would have been a great alternative too. =)

We swam a couple times. But our pool is pretty chilly right now and the kids just didn't feel like being wet. And Syd was sick for a while. So, we had to come up with other ways to pass the time.

 We had to get creative.

 We were trying to impress each other by doing cool tricks on the chair.

 Errrr, I think we need to work on our tricks!

Most of the time the kids just jumped face first into the cushions! ha!

Marvelly and Steve playing the fishing game she came up with.

Dress up, of course. Marvelly the queen. Sydaleigh her baker? And, I'm not sure what they dressed Steve up to be...an ancient Egyptian? Or, a Mrs. Butterworth bottle?  It's a tie. And, I'm sorry Steve. =) I promise to buy you some really manly monster dress up clothes when we move.

Playing in the refrigerator Sydaleigh made out of her milk carton cardboard box from school.

  
Maps. Ransom stuff. We kept busy. That's all that mattes. And when we exhausted all of our creativity and had no desire to busy ourselves.....we watched movies. Lots and lots of movies.

And that was that. We stayed safe. Kept busy. Waited for life here to quiet back down.  And I'm happy to report that things are moving in the right direction.