Burgers and Pools

"Listen kids, today we will go to New York!". "O", says Moses, "Can you eat that?" We are in the US now! What an blessing for kids to speak more languages. Moses feels free to talk to anyone. We had dinner at a restaurant and he started talking with the customers in the boot behind us. "Hi, what's your name? Mine is Moses. How old are you? I am two. I was in new York. I was on a ferry and saw lots of helicopters!" The kids have the time of their life! We get invited to church families and most of them have pools. So, after swimming (the most favorite activity for our water-loving kids) we get to eat hamburgers! This causes the little boys ask one of the two questions when we tell them what's next: "Can you eat it?' or 'Can we swim there?'

What a world! Not just the kids are rolling their eyes out these days. The trip to the Shoprite here was an event, a sight, an adventure..."mom, look at this, mom, look at that!" Fruit covered with chocolate, veggies in chips appearance, a whole isle with cereals only... we didn't know how to make choices. What kind of bread do you take? We are happy as long as their is bread at all. This country seems to have no limits of anything. We shouldn't stay longer than a month and come too often...it would make going back to Malawi harder. We have talks about this with our older kids, they observe things and it is easy to let envious thoughts enter your young hearts.

We are making quite some bloopers... simply because we are not from here! I'll share just one... The last night of our camping trip with some church families we all went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. First problem: what do you order? There is so much choice and the names on the menu don't make sense to us. Finally I made our order, a pizza each, as Malawian portions are small. Wow, we could feed an orphanage from the pizza's we ordered! The size of the drinks and meals are at least three times bigger then we expect! There we sat, as if we were starved...some people kindly helped us eat the food and some of us had pizza for breakfast and lunch the next day!

"Mom, the people here are so nice! So kind and friendly!" We are being blessed with so much kindness and love. It's wonderful to see our kids make connections with church family. Joash and Rhode didn't remember anything anymore from the time we were sent, eight years ago! The purpose for our trip to the US and Canada is mostly to reconnect with the church and share what we do, in His name on behalf of the church. We hope to meet many more of our church family members. We have one 'problem', receiving so much care and not being able to return much makes me feel uneasy. I think proverbs says there is a time to receive and a time to give. I hope our 'batteries' are being charged in these seven weeks gone from the field to be able to share from that again back home in Malawi.