It’s been a great week for us! We are enjoying getting into a routine more with schooling, work, family life and friendships. The house is also feeling more and more like home. We bought a few bookshelves this week and they’re beautiful, we have a beautiful kitchen cabinet and today we bought a carving and 2 paintings we hung on the wall. It’s all so beautiful because everything is handmade from wood so I love it.

This week I taught English 5 days and I am simply loving it. I love the students so much, I teach a beginner class and my youngest student right now is 18 and I teach an intermediate/advanced class and my oldest student is maybe 40. They are eager to learn English and we have such fun conversations. I love getting to know each of the students better. Josiah attended class with me a few times this week and the students enjoy hearing him speak English and interacting with him. Please, pray as I continue to lesson plan and teach and we minister to each student.

This week we also traveled about an hour away to a hospital called Kibuye. It is now a thriving compound filled with other missionary families serving at the hospital in some capacity and some Burundian residence and doctors live on the campus too. Here is their blog if you’re interested! There are probably about 20 kids ages 1-15 who live there and attend a small missionary school on the campus. They invited us to join them for a beginning of school picnic lunch. The boys had such a blast meeting all the kids and playing with them. I enjoyed meeting the moms and seeing the potluck lunch so I could get more recipe ideas! It is quite a drive filled with giant pot holes and missing road at times so we were all very tired after the fun filled day!

One neat thing for all of us was speaking to a family there who has an 11 year old son who is now in 6th grade. The mom shared with me that it has been a prayer request for them for their son to have someone his own age and it has been something I have prayed for Josiah too. It was neat to see how God is providing this friendship for both of our sons.

Things are not always easy, but I think I can say for all of us we are enjoying our time here and getting more comfortable. Cooking has been a big struggle for me to figure out. It’s just quite different…the timing, amount of food, food availability and it can be overwhelming for me. I am thankful for our oven and stove top and our fridge, but it is smaller than in the States so it takes me longer to make things. This week the boys helped me make tortillas and we had a delicious “Taco Tuesday” with fresh guacamole, salsa, beans, corn and homemade tortillas. It is a vegetarian diet so when we do go to restaurants we order a lot of meat dishes!

The boys love finding neat insects and reptiles still and they enjoy going out every single day with their dad and their slingshots in hand and exploring the mountain. They also love going down the mountain and playing with the kids, they’re getting to know some kids better in spite of the communication difficulty.

A normal day for us is something like waking up at 6:30am, we read our Bible, brew our Burundi tea and coffee for Josh, then do family devotions. We greet our guard who has kept watch all night for us and greet the other guard when they change for day/night shift. We also greet our house girl who shows up each day, except Sunday, to do dishes, laundry and she helps clean for us. The boys begin their school work while I make something for breakfast: homemade muffins, donuts or bread, eggs and bread (from now on toast-we just got a toaster today!) or just cereal on mom is too tired to make anything days. Josh will go down and feed the pigs and soon hopefully be collecting some eggs from the chickens. Most days he also has school work to do or prepare for a weekly Bible study he is doing with the men. We’re so thankful he has 1 class left to finish his master’s degree!

We eat lunch together, usually ramen which is imported from the Middle East or sandwiches-egg salad, peanut butter and honey or Nutella sandwich sometimes with a side of cucumbers or carrots. After lunch I make sure I am ready for my class and I teach for an hour-2 hours in the afternoons. The boys will go hunting or work on a project with Josh or build with Lego’s/Engino’s or go down the mountain to play with kids during that time. After my class we take our showers because the sun sets at 6:30pm and we have solar power so if you wait until the sun goes down you will have cold water with much less water pressure. I begin dinner preparations oftentimes with help from the boys and/or Josh, then we eat dinner. Oftentimes friends will come visit and we spend some time fellowshipping in the evenings. Sometimes after dinner once in a while we watch a family movie or maybe a show together. If our internet isn’t working (Netflix) then we use a portable device we have shows and movies on. Then every night we read together as a family, right now we are reading a book called Race for the Record by Dave and Neta Jackson about a missionary boy in the Philippines during the 40’s and 50’s.

That is a “normal” day for us, we also laugh because what is normal or what is expected/planned is ALWAYS changing. Suddenly you’re going to the city for an unexpected 3 hour drive one way or someone is in your house for a visit! I enjoy the unexpected changes usually and you definitely learn to be flexible fast here. If you have any questions for us feel free to comment or email us! We’re trying to answer some common questions friends or family ask and to give everyone a glimpse of what life is like here for us as much as possible. So, hope you enjoyed this read!