This is the Day

While my two-year-old lay on the couch, completely wiped out by malaria, she started feebly singing “this the day...this the day...” It nearly brought me to tears.

Here she is taking her painful injections like a champ, saying “I’m tough!” afterwards and cheering her baby sister on to take her medicine. “Baby so brave!”

Meanwhile I’m cleaning vomit off sheets and throwing out potty loads of diarrhea and my very sick little girl is encouraging her sister and trying to remind me that “this is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Expat Mama Recommends...

..that you DO bring an umbrella stroller! It is one of the best pieces of modern child equipment ever.

I used the umbrella stroller for the absolutely strenuous, mind-blowing trip from the US to Brazzaville, and we definitely wouldn’t have survived without it.

But the trip aside, I actually use it on our walks/outings on a daily basis. Some of the areas around where we live are a little too rough and sandy for pushing it, but it’s pretty durable and can get through most rough terrain. When it gets stuck, it’s light enough and easy to just lift it up (with the child inside) and carry it over the rough patches. Also a trick I’ve learned to maneuver it is to tip it up a bit so the front wheels are off the ground and push that way if it gets stuck.

Expat Mama Recommends...

...that you don’t pack in too many clothes. I bought way too many clothes for my girls and myself in America and even at great prices it wasn’t the best use of our money. It’s easy to find used clothes here in the market and it’s basically thrift store quality with even lower prices.

The clothes are cast offs or donations from America or Europe shipped in big bales and then re-sold here and across Africa. Usually I can get a shirt for myself for a dollar or sometimes less and a dress or outfit for the girls for that same price. It’s a way to help support the local economy and the local women who are the main ones selling these second-hand clothes.

I’m also making, altering and repairing more clothes now that I have a sewing machine (my birthday present from my husband). Of course for really stylish or trendy looking clothes, Walmart or Old Navy are still your best option, so plan to pack some things with you, if you want those styles, but the majority you can get here for super cheap. I have also had fun sewing matching dresses for the girls and the variety of fabric prints available here are endless.

Flashback: Christmas snapshot

Christmas morning started off with poop all over the house (Eileen), runny noses and extra guests; one who had stayed the night and another who showed up for the daytime fun. I woke up feeling pretty exhausted after another night fraught with fussy and crying children. Sometimes I feel like us all being in the same room is slowly killing us; mostly through sleep deprivation. After a few minutes of wallowing, I prayed hard for a good attitude and forced myself to smile and talk gently despite what I felt like. The results were actually quite good. I managed to get the poop cleaned up, feed the girls breakfast, light the charcoal stove, “preheat” the Dutch oven and have the cinnamon rolls set to rise all before 9am. The girls opened their stockings which had nothing but biscuits in them since Jim is not coming until sometime this month (we think) with our “real” gifts. Orcxance stuffed my stocking with matches, a tin of coffee and some cookies, and gave me a brand new hot water thermos. The one we purchased for Molly’s layette had all but fallen apart. The cinnamon rolls turned out great and tasted exactly right! It was kind of a miracle because I did the recipe without measuring cups or spoons, as those have disappeared over time. Molly had fun helping me roll the dough and spread on the filling. We used sweetened condensed milk as the glaze, which tasted almost the same as real glaze. We were lucky to have eggs so we completed the meal with scrambled eggs.

Flashback end of year activities

Some of the last things we did in 2021 included getting our toilet “pumped” and taking a very harrowing trip to the village Elondi. These events were supposed to occur on the same day, so that we wouldn’t be home when the sewer man came, but unfortunately he decided to show up a day late so we had to endure the situation. Thankfully I can’t smell much worth anything. We closed the window closest to the toilet shed and turned on the fan in the house. The sisters disappeared for most of the morning (I don’t know where they went) and Orcxance went to work. Molly and Eileen didn’t complain about the smell but I had terrible allergies most of the day. Not sure if that was related to the toilet situation or not. The process basically involved some rope, random tools and large plastic bottles and a lot of tedious work. He dug a gigantic hole right outside our toilet shed and then spent several hours doing something like hauling up buckets of water out of a well. Except it wasn’t water. He put all the nasty in the big hole he’d dug and then heaped it over with dirt.

Expat Mama Recommends...

...DO NOT bring peanut butter!

You may have heard the desperate cry of the missionary to “bring us peanut butter!” That’s actually the last thing we would ask for. Don’t worry about peanut butter, there’s an abundance. You can buy it at almost any roadside shop or stand, sold in tiny plastic bags, or larger recycled glass mayonnaise jars. You can also roast your own peanuts and make the peanut butter yourself. That’s my preferred method but due to cost we can’t always do that. There’s something very satisfying about roasting, salting and grinding your peanuts for some real tasty and totally natural peanut butter!

Expat Mama Recommends...

...Dollar Store necklaces. Yep, the Mardi Gras junky jewelry that kids here love. I recommend these because they come in different colors, are easy to fix when they break, and mostly because they make great gifts for kids here and my girls love pretending they’re food, putting them in bottles, chewing on them and wearing them as jewelry, among other things.

The reason this is an expat recommend is because I haven’t seen the equivalent anywhere here, and they’re so cheap. You can buy a whole bunch and they get a ton of use. These would also make a great addition to OCC shoeboxes!

Some new year planning

On January 1st, Orcxance and I sat down and brain stormed about how to organize and plan our “outreach” to the children this year. We have several people who contribute funds to help us give to those in need, and we wanted to come up with a specific plan for the year to make it easier to keep track of everything.

We settled on choosing one thing each month to do for the kids in our community, wrote it down in a notebook, and I’m going to try to be faithful to post on my blog about it each month so those who give have a way of seeing some of the ways their money is used. That way, if I don’t get an individual thank you to each person, you all can check here! (You know who you are)

We mapped out the whole year, but here’s an example of the first few months: January: new shoes for all the kids who don’t have shoes. That’s this month, and I went to the market today and got the flip-flops

February: a big meal of chicken and rice. March: pens and a notebook for each child. April: toothbrushes and toothpaste. May: new (used) clothing for the kids with really ruined clothes.

These things are IN ADDITION to our weekly coloring and game days, Bible lessons, etc. We will repeat a couple of the things (like the meals) and then do our annual kids Christmas party at the end of the year (assuming we won’t be traveling to the US this year, although we still hope to if possible.) Sometimes Molly escapes with only her shirt...Happy New Year!