Hose-eating rats and more

Moving always provides a good share of unexpected and unforeseen incidents. We thought we’d share some of our favorites from the past week or so…

- A rat built a home in the bottom of the washing machine. Don’t worry, I watched him run over the wall into the neighbors yard, not before he chewed his way through one of the hoses. I suppose it takes a hungry rat to eat a rubber hose.

- I’m now referring to the Internet situation as a saga. It pains me too much to tell the whole story, and it would only bore you. Remember dial-up? I’m now dreaming of dial-up. What they call broadband here is the speed of dial-up back home (they oversell the bandwidth and so there are too many people trying to use the same server). The service we have now is pathetic. I can occasionally get on long enough to send and receive email, but not after 7:30 am and before 11:00 pm.

- We realized we needed to re-grout the tile in one of rooms. I hired a guy and when he showed up he had no tools. I think he used a key to scrape out the old grout and then he asked if I had an old flip-flop (in case you don’t know, the flip-flop is the standard Brazilian footwear), he actually said something more like this, “go get an old flip-flop” (of course, everyone has an old flip-flop). As per his instructions, I then cut it up into 4 smaller sections so that he could use it to trowel on the new grout.

- It’s been fun to see our girls get to know the neighbors. One family in particular is large hanging around in front of their house most of the days. Fortunatly for them, they are either oblivious to, or just care, that they don’t exactly blend in with their surroundings…

Doing the Limbo

For those of you wondering if we have been stuck somewhere on the TransAmazon Highway for the past few days, we were only stuck for about 5 hours. We jumped right into moving into our new house as soon as we got back. In fact, after arriving around 3:00 am, Brin was up at 7:30 packing stuff and getting ready to move. She did, however, hit the wall about 12 hours later (not literally).

The highlight of our adventure on the way home had to have been the delay we experienced about 2 hours from home when we came upon a stretch of road where 3 trucks were stuck in the mud (it was nighttime so no pictures). We thought we were going to have to spend the night on the road, but fortunately they were able to move one of the trucks and allow for some vehicles to squeeze by. So, after 55 hours in a bus we were glad to finally be home. Thanks to all of you that helped with our language school expenses, and especially for all the prayers.

We are now in the midst of our 3^rd move (that I can remember) since we’ve been in Brazil. We keep filling in for missionary families that are home on furlough. But now we hope to be in this house until we leave for furlough, probably this summer. Moving, in any culture, has it’s stressful moments, but here it seems to remind us again that we must change our expectations of how efficiently things should run. I think we’ve somewhat begun to learn from our past experiences, because this time our “moving day” has turned into our “moving week”. It’s good that we’ve lowered our standards, however it has made for more moments when we wonder aloud “did I bring that to the new house yet? And if so, what box is it in?”.

So right now we are in that limbo-state... some stuff is in our new house, some stuff is in our old house. We are without internet, but the lights are on. I fixed the drain in the shower, but haven’t hung the curtain in our master bedroom. We do like our new house though. It gives us plenty of room, it’s in an ideal location and we are looking forward to making it home.

Here are a few pictures of our new digs:

View from our front porch

Mia's 4th

Today Mia turned four. Another birthday in a strange place (anyone remember Ava's birthday on the boat?)... but it seems like it is becoming more comfortable. If you're intersted, here are more pictures of our day with Mia.

It was good to have a reason to celebrate. We're still in Salvador, with one more week of language school. It has been good. And it has been hard. I will leave you with a picture of our family.

breaking bad habits

Here is something funny. On Friday nights, we have a small group meeting up at the mission guesthouse. So we would tell our kids we were going up to the mission. Except when we went to the mission, really we were just going to the Kubacki’s home, the family that lives in the guesthouse now. But, in Ava’s mind she equated “the mission” with the Kubacki’s. So she refers to the Kubacki family as “The Mission.” As in, “Is ‘The Mission’ coming with us?” or “Why doesn't 'The Mission' have to eat fruit before they get chips” So, after over a year, she was still calling them The Mission so I had a chat with her and explained that we can call them by their names. She seemed to understand, but still to this day she calls them The Mission. But it’s kinda cute, so I just let her.

I am so like Ava. During the past year in Altamira we picked up plenty of Portuguese, some of it, I am finding, was erroneous. So the problem of unsticking of the wrong words and replacing them with the correct words is really hard. And when I continuously mess up it does not come off nearly as cute as Ava. O well. We are still plugging away.

We have this 7 more days of class and I am nervous even writing that because I need so much more. It hasn’t been easy though, especially for Josh. God allotted him about 1500 words a day. That is just how Josh is designed. So imagine this, Josh spends all of those words, in Portuguese, while the teacher shakes her head saying, “wrong,” or “again.” Josh comes home exhausted and is not in the mood to say one more word. It makes him a real treat to be with. But we knew language school would be challenging. Despite the ocean, the restaurants and the pickles, mustard, and nectarines we can experience here, it has not been without challenges.

O yeah, I almost forgot, we found a small jar of Peter Pan peanut butter. It was $14.

Here is what the guys do in their free time.

Ava has enjoyed the beach even more then the other kids, she pitches her body into the waves and screams to herself gleefully. Probably because she feels rather caged all morning in the small house we share with 2 other families.