Visiting an active work

Lately we have had 3 families living in the guest house here. 

They have been here to get paperwork done in some of the governmental offices in town.

While they were here, one of our more veteran missionaries offered to arrange a trip into a tribal location that is not too far away. This place is also reachable by motorbike.

I, Erlend, also had the chance to go along.

Our town is incredibly hot and dry, so it was awesome to go on this trip, because we started by driving on a serpentine road up a mountain to 700-800 meters above sea level.

On the top of the mountain, we had to leave the paved road we had drive on for about 2 hours.

The rest of the trip, about 40 minutes, was all on very narrow trails. Don't let the bridge fool you, that was the absolute best 5 meters of this road, and it was also new. Before it was built, travelers had to go all the way down into the gully, cross a little river, and then hope they made it back up the other side. Having to stop on a steep hill like that, with a very heavy motorbike is not fun...

After arriving in the village, we were greeted by the team, our national co-workers, there. There's one family from another tribal group and two single ladies that are originally from this tribe, but have just lately moved back after 20 years out in the bigger cities.

This is the kitchen in one of the houses. A pile of dirt on the floor for insulation, and on top, a oil burner, and for when they are out of oil, a place for a small wood fire.

This is a picture of their roof. The green part is a type of weak roof that has to be changed every year, and the brown part is a stronger kind that usually last about 2-3 years.

These hooks are to keep their food safe. If they have bought some pork, or have killed a chicken, they hang it on these hooks so that the rats can't get to it.

After seing their houses, we had a meal together. We brought some traditional yellow rice, and our hosts had prepared some rice, steamed fern, papaya leafs and fish.

It was really cool to get to spend time with these guys, and to get to know them a little bit. It is also the first time I have been in the interior since my language level got high enough to speak freely with nationals.

Here we are, us 3 visitors together with the missions team. It was a real privilege to meet them and to hear their stories. Just because they are also nationals, does not mean that their task is easy. This team needs a lot of prayer,  they have had a lot of challenges, and as the time to start teaching God's Word is getting closer, they know there will be more difficulties. Please join us in praying for this team, and the effort they are making to bring the gospel of God's salvation to this lost people group.

Here are some more pictures of the road when we went back down. It is pretty rough terrain up there, so what you see in this picture is farm land on a very, very steep mountain side.

The clouds were not especially low that day, that is just how high above sea level we were.

Can you see me in this picture?

I had borrowed my language helpers Honda Win for the trip. It is only a 100cc bike, which sounds very small, but since we pretty much never made it out of 1st gear, and since many of the hills were very steep, this small, light, bike was much better than one with a bigger engine that would be heavier.

I'm hoping to be able to go back to this work soon, and I'm excited to bring Anne there also, because when we work in town, it is hard sometimes to imagine that we are a part of the team, that we are part of the work to spread the gospel that is going on, so it is nice to be able to do visits like this. Not just to remind our selves that the jobs we do in town is helping these teams, but also to, hopefully, be an encouragement to the people who are really working the front lines.

Spontaneous family photo shoot

For a week now we have had three families, who are waiting for their new visas, living in the guesthouse and we have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them, hanging out and showing them around town.

Today we decided it was time to get out of the city, so we drove up into, what we call 'The meadows'.

One of the guys took his camera and here is what became of that.

We love coming here for a little picknick and some fresh air

 'our' city

 Guess who is making us smile! Hint: His name starts with E and ends with rlend. :-)

 our pretty girl

 we call this the "Marilyn Monroe" :-)... it is windy up there

 she cracks us up

 handsome little big guy

"Mama, stop it, you are embarrassing me!"

Rocking their Polo Shirts

Even though they can push each others buttons, at the end of the day, those two love each other.

We even got some proper family pictures - thank you Payton for taking them!

But then the boys had enough of all that picture taking.

everyday life is different every day

Hi, anybody still out there? I know we have been really bad about posting regularly lately but we can always blame bad internet connections and the business of everyday life :-).

Every day life is never boring here. Like this morning, Erlend was in the middle of his normal language session when he got a phone call. Within 5 minutes he was out of the house in fancy clothes on his way to a  4 hour meeting at the immigration office that he was supposed to be part of. (it was the first time he had heard of it that morning). We have learned to just roll with it. Some days it is harder to roll than others....

A few pictures of the past few weeks.

The flu has come and gone but language sessions are forever (hopefully not FOREVER, even though it feels that way right not :-))

We are actually encouraged with our progress in language study. I (Anne) seem to have made a long awaited jump (although small, it still is progress). When I listen to Erlend I can hear his progress. 

Telephone calls, official meetings and hour long conversations with friends in the national language have become a lot less scary for both of us and the latter even enjoyable.

Erlend and I both came down with food poisoning for 24 hours and we were so encouraged by our local friends who dropped everything and came to help us, taking care of our kids, cooking and just being there for us. What a blessing they are!

I had to fly to the capital a few weeks ago to get a tooth fixed (it ended up having to be pulled), but my flights were canceled and delayed several times, due to all the smoke from forest fires.

We are so thankful that we have had some rain this week that helped to clear up the air. We can breathe and fly again!

This week we have 3 families living at the guesthouse as they are waiting for their visa. 

We have enjoyed showing them around town, taking them to the beach and hopefully helping them a bit as they are all transitioning to new phases in their lives. 

In this pictures the kids enjoyed a movie night together.

On and major accomplishment of our little big boy.

Ladies and gentlemen, WE HAVE A WALKER!

Packages

Last week we got some exciting news. Usually the post will send packages straight to our house, but for some reason they stopped doing so a few months ago without telling us about it.

So somehow we found out last week that there were 3(!) packages waiting for us at the post office.

They came on a day we really needed some encouragement so the Lord timed it perfectly.

Our co-workers who are currently back in Norway blessed us with some awesome stuff.

Pretty clothes for the kids, special sweets, cute decorations and...

... lots of licorice for Erlend (he was THRILLED!)

 Alia, Kila and Elisabeth where excited about the special candy necklaces

A sweet family from our church in Germany also sent us a package with a lot of good quality, cute clothes  that their son has out grown. Max fits into most of them already. 

Vielen Dank, Richters!

I am not trying to say that you should send us a package (not saying that you shouldn't either :-)), but if you want to be an encouragement to somebody who works overseas, why not ask them what food or things they are missing from home, put them in a box and send them their way. What an easy way to make somebodies day.

Looking at the town surroundings

A couple of days ago, we decided to go for a drive out of town, just to see something else.

On our little trip we found a few interesting things

Alia standing on a piece of cultural heritage (explanation below next picture)

Far out of town, up in the hills, we stumbled across a open field with, I think, 6 large rocks.

Each one had one single perfectly shaped hole in them. 

Next to them was a sign that explained that this was a protected cultural heritage site, and that the fines for damaging them is pretty hefty.

But there was no explanation to what it was, and so far, everyone we have asked about it have no clue either.

The town we live in is located in the bottom of a bay, and there is a mountain range both on the peninsula west of town, and also on the mainland east of town. Because of this, all clouds get stuck in the mountains, and we can see rain up there at least once a week, but down in the town, it almost never rains. probably only 5-6 times this year, so far.

Because of that, up in the hills we have palm trees, and lush rice fields like in this picture, but down on the plain and in town...

...we only have dust, dry grass, shrubbery and cactus.

We also came across this house... Bright pink, neon green, orange, and red. And people say the houses in Norway are colorful...

These small bridges are quite common outside of town. Better to balance across a slippery log then to walk to the next real bridge 

crazy days

This is an attempt to write down all the things that happened during the last week and especially 24 hours.

On Friday we came back from an exhausting trip to the capital. We had to renew Alia's passport, not because it expired but because she had no empty pages left. (not a typical problem of a two year old).

Since both parents have to be present when applying for a child's passport both Erlend and I had to go and since Max did not want to stay home alone, he came along, too :-).

Both kids had come down with fevers before we started traveling and while Alia got over it in a couple of days, Max added projectile vomiting and 24/7 whining into the mix... oh the joys of traveling with young kids.... 

We found out later that most of his behavior was because of the arrival his first tooth. (if every tooth means a week like last week, my every day coffee and painkiller intake will increase drastically).

A few days ago we found out that our co-workers have to return to their home country, due to medical issues. (this is already the second family we see leaving since we came to this region 8 months ago).

We are very sad about the news, for the family who we will miss and the hole they are leaving in our team.

Yesterday our bank card stopped working which is not a good thing, considering that it is our main source of cash. Then I got messages from other European co-workers who also work here, telling me that their cards also didn't work. Great, nothing like not having cash in a foreign country!

Around the same time I got a message telling me that my friend and language helper had a motorbike accident and hurt her arm.

I was supposed to pick up a German family (they are visiting their relatives here) from the airport last night and two hours later another friend. 

As I was about to head out the door, we got a phone call, telling us that the house, all of those people I was supposed to pick up, were going to stay in that night, had been broken into and some things were stolen, so nobody could stay at that house.

Since the guesthouse was full I had to find a hotel they could stay at (which is hard, when no credit cards are working).

Then the other friend (the one I was supposed to pick up from the airport later that night) called me saying that she was considering not getting on the plane since her tooth was hurting (no dentist in our city), and if I could try to get a dentist appointment and book a room for her in the city she was in, but please all of that within the next 10 minutes since she was about the board a plane. 

Then Max started crying and threw up his bed while I was on the phone with the dentist (first call with medical personal in the national language, yay for me!)

During all of this, Erlend was trying to help out with the communication between the guys dealing with the break in, and the foreigner that rents the house. Because he is in his home country right now, it was very hard to find out what was stolen, since nobody really knew what was in the house to start with.

I got the appointment and room booked for our friend and called her back. She had already boarded the plane but got back off so that she can have her tooth fixed today.

Confused? Yes, I was, too.

Aaaanyways, I hurried to pick up the family from the airport. I had never met them before, but I was the only Whitie, picking up the only Whities coming of the plane. Easy!

12 hours later I proudly report that 

- we got the German family settled for the night (and managed to find a card to pay for the room) and this morning on to their final destination, 

- my friend with the tooth ache is at the dentist right now, 

- Erlend is out trying to fix the credit card problem, 

- we are working on finding out what was stolen from the house, 

- and also working on helping my friend with the hurt arm....

Appropriate t-shirts

We went into town to have a new passport photo taken of Alia, and while waiting for it to be developed, we decided to go down the street to a new store we had noticed the day before.

The store is a travelagent-candy-souvernir store, and they have a lot of cool t-shirts.

When we saw the ones in the picture, we just had to have them, because they describe life here for us very well lately...

the normal, the milestones and the waffles

We have not blogged in a while for several reasons, which are total sleep deprivation, bad internet, the feeling that nothing exciting is happening... only to name a few.

But Erlend encouraged me yesterday to just write about the everyday life things that are happening.

We are deep in language study and seem to have hit a 'aaaahhh, why don't we see progress'-stretch (which is usually happening right before you can notice progress).
So nothing new with us, but the kids have hit some major milestones.

Alia is officially potty trained and I never thought I could be so excited about somebody using the (sometimes extremely questionable, public) bathroom.
There were a week and a half of frustration but once we figured out that Alia just wants some privacy when she is using the toilet (who can blame her, right?), things have been smooth sailing.

Our firstborn is learning new words daily. I think she is adding one to each language (all four of them) each day at least. What a drooper!

Many of you know that Max has been sleeping very badly over the last 4 months and we came to a point where we could not take it anymore and tried the (controversial) crying out method.
He seems to respond to it quite well and we have gone from screaming for an hour to only 10 minutes and from waking up 20 times a night to one or two times.

Another big thing in Max's life - he got is first (really bad) haircut. I didn't realize how hard it is to cut a little boy's hair who will not sit still for one second.

Oh, yes, and he is crawling, pulling himself up and almost standing unsupported.

 Celebrating potty training and a bad first haircut with our favorite treat - waffles!