"Cha cha cha cha changes, turn and face the strain..."
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...