…it is announced that your plane is ready for boarding so
you get on the bus and merrily make your way to the plane, only to arrive and
find the bus promptly loops around and takes you right back to where you
started and you are all told to return inside. After an hour or so of waiting,
with no information, it seems (though you don’t hear an announcement) that you
can try again. So you all traipse down the stairs to go to the waiting bus,
only to find that in the meantime the heavens have opened. You make a mad dash
to the bus, flip-flopped feet getting a good soaking in the inch-deep lake
between you and the bus. You arrive once again at the plane and everyone
boards, only to be told there are technical difficulties and so you wait
another good while before eventually the plane heads to the runway. Total delay
just over two hours.
…you find the inside of your freezer is a sticky mess
because the power tripped in a thunderstorm when your housemate was away on
holiday, and with no-one there to notice and turn it back on, everything in
your freezer defrosted. Juices from fruit and veg seeped out the bags and made
that delightful mess. Among other things, you have to throw away the lovely
smoked ham you’d bought yourself as a treat from a local expat butcher, who
sometimes prepares such yummy meat delights that we buy from the freezer-filled
garage at his home.
…you get up late after the exhaustion of travel, looking
forward to a bowl of porridge, only to find your oats full of weevils. You
proceed to sieve the weevils out, trying to prevent them all from crawling away
before you’ve had a chance to dispose of them, and then put the oats in the
freezer to kill any remaining bugs. You are not going to throw away precious
oats, but you will keep them for next time you bake flapjack, where they’ll not
be noticeable, rather than using them for porridge.
…you find your toilet won’t flush, because the piece of wire
you had carefully twisted around lever and tube to fix toilet pieces that
wouldn’t connect, were no longer holding. You do some careful realigning and
twisting, and it flushes a treat.
It felt good to be back, in the land of crazy things that
you just have to laugh over because that’s just how life is. After all, it adds
interest to life, gives you things to talk about, prevents you from striving
for the perfect home and makes a good blog! Okay, so on a bad day those things
might make me want to cry, but it wasn’t a bad day. I was happy to be home, the
land transformed into a beautiful, lush green landscape by the rainy season and
with actual sunshine (a rare sighting while I was in England) warming my skin.
Now I’ve been back a few days, and the emotions are a bit
more mixed, not helped by wakeful nights as my body fails to adjust to the
different time zone (even though it’s only a few hours). Back in the office
there seems to be an endless stream of emails that I can’t quite get on top of,
managerial things to sort out and a toilet that doesn’t flush properly. Dreams
of discussing new plans with my colleagues, which could give me more
opportunity to get out and teach, get put to the bottom of the to-do list
(though I very much intend to make sure they don’t stay there), and instead I
am going over quarterly reports, looking at the budget, attending a leadership
meeting, meeting with my mentee and so on and so forth. Actually, I don’t mind
most of those things, it’s just when they take up all your time and you get to
the end of the day and it’s hard to say what you’ve actually done, that it
becomes a little less enjoyable. But that’s how it always is when you’ve been
away from your desk for a while, isn’t it? Nothing out of the ordinary. There’s
just a few little extra challenges thrown in here, like trying to operate in
another language and cross-culturally.
And it is lovely to be reunited with my housemate and to see
other friends and to be back at our Thursday evening Bible study, with good
food and the loud but lovely kids eagerly participating (every other week is
directed more at the kids). But there is also a slight pang, of feeling far
from my family once again, of wondering who I am as I feel like a different
person in each place, not feeling very British when I’m in Britain, but feeling
very British when I’m in a group without a single other Brit. But that is why
God reminded me as I entered this year about His promise to be with us. In all
the fun and frustrations, the times with friends close by and the missing of
those far away, the possibilities and problems, the sunshine and rain, God is
with us and He will sustain us as we walk with Him through it all.
Pictures: From chilly Lapworth walks with my mum (bottom pic) to sweaty Mbeya runs (middle pic, where I'm standing by our house, the one on the right with my Prado parked in front and the mountain I've just been running on in the background, on an overcast Saturday morning).
