A life less comfortable

I've lived in many places: lots of American places, an English place, a French Alps place, a Gabon sea-side place and now a rain forest place.  We live in a large house with 7 bedrooms, a study room and craft room, 6 bathrooms, several screened terraces, a large living/dining room with golden wooded ceilings and a kitchen, bright with light and views to the house next door and forest beyond.  This house is shared by 14 souls (that's pilot talk for people).  14 people from far flung places converging for this year in this place.  Some of us were little more than strangers when we moved in just over 8 weeks ago. UBAC Hostel God has nestled us here in a rainforest filled with wild night sounds.  A chorus of singing crickets and deep-throated croaking toads and hyraxes screaming like banshees slip in through open windows.   Hyrax es are often mistaken for rodents but are actually more closely related to elephants.  It's like somethi...

11 days from today I will board a plane and leave this place.  Gabon has been our home for nearly 5 years.  When we came fresh from language school in the French Alps we were abruptly thrust into a new way of living.  The learning curve was high and we often felt completely overwhelmed and out-muscled.  My new life went ninja-like on me and my leg was more than swept! (mixed metaphors I know)  However, little by little, this new place became the new normal.  We home schooled our kids with a couple of embassy and missionary families, we learned to drive Kamikaze-style, we reset our expectations of what one could do in a certain amount of time, we sweat buckets in the sweltering humid heat, we stumbled our way through speaking french with twisted tongues and hazy understanding.  We placed our kiddos in boarding school a country away.  We started a mission aviation program for the Bongolo Hospital, from scratch, with no previous experience to guide u...

"In the aftermath of an exuberant craft time clean-up by a group of deaf kids being ministered to by some lovely visitors from France my ipod drowned on the kitchen counter, a victim of a mini flash-flood cascading down the kitchen cabinets from the guest house bathroom directly above. The soapy water tinged with "washable" green paint murdered my poor ipod. I'm left with an empty husk of technology, my music silenced and still."  This was my facebook status last night.  As mourned the loss of my music I was struck by the irony of my musical silence being inadvertently brought on by a group of deaf kids.  They have never heard music, any kind of music, and in thinking along those lines I felt overwhelmed by sadness, not at my loss, but by theirs.  The team from France is here to work with the one and only deaf school in all of Gabon.  The kids attending this school represent a mere fraction of the deaf population here in Gabon.   Due to the rolling power c...