Not the first day I was expecting…

I had such big plans for this week! Jack and Tilly were going to be in school every morning. Sydney was going to be in “daycare” three mornings a week. My guard / gardener would be making the yard look awesome. My wonderful empregada would be making the house shine. Ayla & Richelle would be all settled into their new little house out the back. My foot would be almost better and I was going to be out walking every morning. And I had HUGE plans for stepping up my Portuguese learning. I was going to do lessons every morning and map out the whole city of Lichinga and go into every single shop and little place I could find, just for the adventure of it. But TIA has hit in a big way and it’s left me feeling sadder than I thought it would. I mean, I was kind of getting used to the chaos and learning to work around it. But this has knocked me.

Ayla & Richelle are in Africa… just a little bit too far away to drop the kids off to school / daycare. They’ll be in Malawi a little longer than anticipated while we get some visa issues sorted out. The guard situation isn’t looking too good… Paixão’s gone on holidays for a few weeks and André looks like he’s going to die – I think he has malaria. Out of our 11 team members… only 5 of us are actually here in Lichinga. Tomorrow it will be 4. My empregada has found another job. My foot hurts – if only I knew a good Physio here in Lichinga, the one I’ve got is terrible. Cam is heading off tomorrow morning to spend a few days in Maputo helping out Jonno there. I don’t think I’ll get to do any Portuguese lessons this week. It’s just all too hard. So I’m having a little pity party for myself 😦

That’s something that gets me about living here sometimes… there’s just not many people to whinge to. All my “problems” by comparison are just so lame.  I mean it’s not really that much of an issue that Ayla hasn’t arrived in time to start the school term. My language nurturer’s daughter’s teacher just didn’t rock up at all for her first two weeks of term! She had to swap to another class in the end – and that class has somewhere between 70 and 80 kids in it! Yikes. My kids have all their resources and 1:2 attention. The fact that I’m rich enough to have two guards and an empregada kind of rules me out of being able to whinge about that. Even though we’re hardly ever all in the same place at the same time – I’m pretty well convinced that we have the best team in the world. I love those guys so much and know they would do anything to help me out. My foot… well, I met a guy last week who broke his leg, it doesn’t seem to be healing after quite some time, guess he didn’t have top notch medical people fly him down to see the orthopaedic surgeon in Joburg. As for Cam going away… it’s only 4 days – better than the 2 or 3 weeks that he used to do.

Sometimes when I was having a pity party back home, I used to go to Vet’s house and sit on her couch and not say much at all for quite a long time and then just dump all my stuff on her. Quite often she’d just give me a well needed kick up the bum. Wish I could do that now :-). I sometimes write these “woe is me” posts and then just delete the whole thing cos by the end of it I just feel like yelling at myself to get over it. And I freely admit that a lot of this stuff is just not a big deal. But I also don’t want to pretend that things are always great and I’m super positive about everything all the time. It’s hard to find a balance there.

But just in case you’re feeling like this has all been a bit emo (or maybe I’m just doing this to make myself feel better), here’s a list of great things that I am thankful for:
– we just had a team from Parkerville Baptist visit – they were great! They were fun and enthusiastic and encouraging and just so willing to give anything and everything ago. I wish they could have stayed longer. Cried a little bit after they left 😦
– I really love learning Portuguese. I’m so thankful for that cos it would kinda suck being here if I didn’t 🙂
– Syd spent the morning hanging out at Levi’s house. I did school with the kids in peace and Cam got to clean out the septic drain without a little helper. It is super awesome having such a great team of wonderful friends. Love!!!
– It is only 3 weeks until my sister and my brother-in-law and my two gorgeous nephews touch down in Mozambique – Woohoo!!!
– My amazing husband has made the kids an awesome bunk bed… as well as a million other things lately. I feel blessed. I’m not sure that many people could put up with some of the ridiculous things I come up with for him to do.
– Lichinga is beautiful. Like seriously beautiful. I went for a walk with the Parkerville guys on Friday and I was just blown away again. It’s a great place to live.
– My kids are pretty great in school – 95% of the time. It doesn’t hurt that we’re learning about farms and horses!
– Life is good. God is good.

First day of school 2013 – Jack (Year 2), Tilly (Pre-Primary), Sydney (photo-bombing)