A House

10 August 2011

Sometimes we feel a little lonely and down due to our isolation here in Mbuji-Mayi.  Then the Lord reminds us that He knows we are here.

This is the week of the butterflies.  Most of them look like this one but there are others too.  Later the caterpillars will come and eat our plants.  

Though it is the dry season, we have flowers in our garden here.  The gardner is quite proud of the flowers he has planted.  This one just bloomed this week.

This little spider (yes spider) likes the flowers too.  The flowers attract the butterflies ... and you know the rest of the story.  "Said the spider to the (butter) fly"  Simba the gardner was removing cobwebs and I noticed something hanging on the web.  This spider looks like a little crab. 

The underside of our spider.  Count the legs.

This is a palm nut from which is extracted the dreaded palm oil.  Ann avoids foods with palm oil.  Here the Africans extract the oil by boiling these nuts and skimming the oil off the water.  I'm sure that big factories use a different process.  People here pop these nuts in the mouth, expel the soft shell, chew on the fibers inside, and then spit out the large nut.  I haven't tried one.

There's a large palm tree across the street through the electric wires.  

Our "blue house" in DayBreak solicited a comment from one of the Laputa sister missionaries who looked through our photo album.  Said she upon seeing this photo: "Is that a temple?"  

Granted that her knowledge of English was limited, I still found her comment insightful.  Yes, we do consider our "blue house" to be a temple.  We dedicated our home and asked the Lord to bless it and to protect it.  We do the Lord's work in this house: We welcome our family and cherish their visits.  We do genealogy in our "temple" house.  It's a temple with a small "t".  

This is a Temple with a capital "T".  It also welcomes families and seals generations together.  

This a our home in Mbuji-Mayi, Congo.  Before we saw it, Ann asked the Lord to provide a home with certain features.  She desired tile on the floors and walls.  She desired a home with a pleasant view.  She desired a home that would provide us safety.  The Lord provided for all her desires. (Check out "desires" in the scriptures.)   He gave us perhaps the nicest home in all of Mbuji-Mayi.  And He keeps blessing us.    We now have 24-hour electricity.  (Before we had no power during the day.)  We now have 'high speed' internet (with a small 'h' and single quotation marks).  (Before we couldn't use skype or magic-jack without echos and annoying delays.)  We no longer have odors coming from the bathrooms.  (We no longer use the "uni-sex urinal pictured in an earlier blog.  We had it repaired twice but it still leaked.)  Water is still a problem throughout the whole city.  A good brother fills our 13 yellow bidons (water jugs) and we flush with a large bucket and we take sponge baths with small bucket, kneeling in the tub. 

Life is good.  We especially love hearing from our family.  (Friends are good too.)

Not much in this blog other than we are thankful for His blessings.  He has pre-provided everything we need.  

dad and mom