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This is not a good picture of my office at all, but with your laptop as a camera, it's hard to stand outside the doorway and take a good picture of a small room at night, facing the light. What looks like a shadow or a different-colored part of the wall above/behind the desk, is actually a white bulletin board that I will hang somewhere in that vicinity.
This is facing in the other direction.
Hooray! My office is done! I've begun putting things away; you can see some books and things on the shelves; I hope to finish that before I go on vacation. Then I'll have to hang things on the walls, but I probably won't do that before I go. I intend to have the room functionally finished, though, so that when I come back from vacation I can sit right down to work in my brand-new office.
I am very excited!
And I have two more days here before I get up early in the morning and leave on my vacation!!!
I am very excited about that, too.
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This is me cooking
bluejean soup.
Looks like it's almost ready.
I'm just kidding.
My best jeans were quite faded but not really worn out, so Marcela had the bright idea that I should dye them.
It's too early to tell, but it seems like it may have worked. Also on the same day, the jeans that were being made for me finally got done! (Those are the ones I'm wearing.) Hooray! I have jeans to take with me on vacation in a few days!
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It's been a while since I've written, I see. I don't know when I'll write this month's prayer letter. We have been unusually busy!
We have a bug problem. They are unpleasant, they are many, they live in the furniture. Last week we had a professional fumigator come in, which was a lot of work. We had to pack up all our stuff, go away, and then come back later and clean the house thoroughly. It's kind of like moving without changing houses, or spring cleaning all on one day. It's exhausting. And the bugs didn't die. The fumigation apparently only made the bugs mad, because now there seem to be more of them than ever. We called and complained, and the fumigators are coming back today for free. So once again, we have to pack everything up, leave, come back and clean... hoping and praying that it'll work!
Yesterday we bagged up all our clothing and towels and blankets and everything in plastic and brought it to the laundry room, to be washed in the hottest water possible before being allowed back in the house again. That'll be a lot of work, since we'll fill the machine by hand (it's faster, and we need to do it fast because we need our clothing) and hang everything to dry on the line. Also, we carted few items of furniture to the dump yesterday. Between the furniture and the clothing, parts of the house are quite a bit emptier than they were! Today we fumigate, tomorrow we clean, and by tomorrow night we are hoping and praying to be bug free! Please pray with us!
I am taking the time to write now because our water tank is empty, so I can't wash any more clothes. That's kind of a blessing, since it gives me time to do other things I need to do, like pack up my stuff and get ready to go away for the night.
A fun thing has happened: I've been teaching math! There is a young almost-teenager in our church and I'd been praying for a way to spend more time with her, since the teenage years are particularly difficult for Christians in Jerez and I figured she'd need someone she could talk to sometimes. I've been kind of a mentor for her, and I didn't want to lose her when things got hard as they undoubtedly will (not that her life has been easy up to now). Then one day I was talking to her mom about math, and the mom got all excited (she likes math too) and asked me to tutor her two daughters! So these two girls, aged 8 and 12, come over twice a week and do math with me. Incredibly, they seem to enjoy it. (As excited as I am about math, I know it isn't a favorite activity among students, and I really didn't expect them to have fun with it. But I guess it's always fun to discover something beautiful that you didn't know existed -- and to be able to perform a skill with which you have struggled before.) Who knew that math could be ministry!
Please keep Dan (my brother) and Marcela in your prayers as well. They have two toddlers and a baby, and my brother is carrying the main burden of responsibility for the church right now while the Schierkolks are away. The bug situation has not lessened their stress at all! Pray for the bugs to go away, for restful sleep, and for God's grace to continue to do the great job they've been doing! I've really been impressed with the way they've been handling it all.
Please pray also for Joanie, an American friend of ours who has been in the hospital for several days for an infection from a hip replacement surgery.
Well, I'd better get to work; I have a little over two and a half hours to assemble lasagnas for tomorrow's dinner and pack up my house.
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This morning I was wondering how it could possibly be so hard to find the time to sit at my desk for eight hours a day, when supposedly that is the main thing I am here to do. I wondered as I chatted with the neighbors while we helped each other hand our garbage up to the man in the back of the garbage truck. I wondered as I did my morning chores, including sweeping a 75-foot stretch of the street that was very, very dirty and littered from a party last night. I wondered as I took a break from my sweeping to walk a little old lady (complete with high, quavery voice) to the water company so she could pay her bill. I still wondered as I walked downtown to three different stores to buy denim, a zipper and a button, to replace a pair of jeans that tore. (It’s not that you can’t buy factory-made jeans here -- it’s just that they don’t come close to fitting me and also they seem expensive to me.) I was beginning to wonder less as I walked near the edge of town to a seamstress who said she’ll get around to making me a new pair in about three weeks. As I arrived home just in time to hang the laundry and start making dinner, it hit me. I have a hard time finding eight hours to sit at my desk because I am too busy WORKING!
I do put in many hours translating Sunday School material. I work hard on it. I take pride in it.
But sometimes I have to remind myself that those other things that take up so much time are also part of the work God has called me to do. With my personality, I would love to just sit at my desk all day long! Fortunately, God uses circumstances of Life to interfere with that. I find myself forced to interact with people, and I find myself blessed in the process.
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We got our clothesline back! This happened several weeks ago, but what with the tumors and being healed and everything, I just didn't get around to mentioning it. :-) I was quite grateful! It had been long enough for me to become convinced that a clothesline is not a luxury. (I suppose technically it is, since there are people here in Jerez who don't have one... but it sure is hard to get by without it!) I think I had taken it for granted before I lost it. I'm glad to have it back.
(The white arches are not our house; the belong to the house across the street.)
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