Ask, and… ?
A look at Robin’s new favorite garment. I bought the fabric intending to commission a skirt. We asked the seamstress to make a skirt for me and a shirt for Robin. She told us (through a pretty confused interpreter) that there wasn’t enough fabric for both. We ended up with these capris. How awesome is that? Ask, in Africa, and you shall receive something totally different.
We have had a really up and down week so far. The lows have included two fruitless meetings with the landlords of the house we wanted to rent, a continued adjustment to the changes in our diet, the stress of planning for multiple classes without teachers editions or test booklets, some back and forth information about a car we wanted to rent, some back and forth information about a car we wanted to buy and the eventual realization that we had neither a house nor a car and no prospects of getting either before school began. But that has just been one side of the coin.
The highs for this week have been pretty amazing. We’ve spent time in the home of Sam and Nancy Shewmaker, we’ve lived with Caleb and Jennie Beck for the week, we got to experience a terrific thunderstorm (as Robin already mentioned), we rode on moto taxies for the first time and had the crazy adventure of getting separated and arriving at our destination at different times, I’ve drunk a large amount of African tea, and, finally, we found a new house and signed the contract to rent it within an eighteen hour space of time. Incredible. The new house situation just happened last night/this morning. We should be able to move in on Saturday. Yay 🙂 And, as a side note on the moto taxies, I have discovered that the helmets the taxi drivers provide their passengers are much too large for me and are subject to falling down over my eyes at the slightest wind pressure.I haven’t decided if I would rather watch the world flash by or remain ignorant in the blackness of the helmet. It’s a tough call.
We have spent a lot of time here with a Rwandan guy named Charles. He’s a friend of the missionaries and he has been helping us find houses to rent. Plus he’s been at different events. He has this sense of humor that keeps us all in stitches.
-At one of the houses they had Olympic synchronized swimming on the television. Charles was fascinated and kind of repulsed at the same time. He told us “Never in the history of Rwanda has such a thing been seen.”
-He tried to convince one homeowner that Brian (our headmaster) spoke, “French, English, Kinyarwandan, Swahili…and Spanish.”
-He told Caleb today that “maybe I will get married in about ten years. There are 6 billion people in the world so there is no pressure on me to produce children.”
He says these things with such a straight face that at first it was hard to take things as a joke, but now we know better 🙂
Delving for a Rhapsody 
the capris are definitely wonderful. i can’t WAIT to get my hands on some african chitenges! (skirts) I don’t leave soon enough! Love you!