Lunch date at Matvilla Beach

Somebody loves Baba!  And somebody loves his baby, too. :-)

This guy was fishing on a small wooden boat - you know your fish is fresh when you're watching fishermen while eating!

Zarya wore shoes for the first time a couple days ago and now loves them.  Just seeing me get her shoes out of her bag to put them on her made her wiggle and giggle with anticipation. We kind of hope she grows out of her shoe obsession!

A couple of weaver birds were playing around where we ate, and this one paused for a moment to pose

Lunch!

Not the most flattering picture of me, but Zarya reaching out to grab herself a chip (which I did not allow her to eat, for the record), is pretty cute.  It's annoying to have a baby with such long arms - she can reach way too many things!  Where did she get such long arm genes from, anyway?!

Today we went out to lunch at our favorite spot, Matvilla Beach.  It was kind of a date, because Zarya doesn't talk yet, so Andrew and I could have a really nice conversation without her interrupting or understanding.  That'll end someday, but in the meantime it's fun to be able to go on a date and still get to take her along.  It's the best of both worlds!

Zarya got to eat her first fried food - not the attempted steal of a chip, but pieces of my fish.  I am happy to say she loved it.  I packed her lunch and brought it with us, since I didn't want to share too much of my fish, and a good thing I did, because otherwise she really would have kept right on chowing that tilapia down, like a true Musoma girl.

We love the breeze and the view at Matvilla, and there are always a lot of birds around.  Since coming to Tanzania, Andrew has gotten into bird watching (a little bit; he's not like a total nerd about it).  The birds here are just so beautiful and interesting.  I wasn't into bird songs until moving to our current house, which sometimes feels like an aviary in the mornings.  When I Skype with my parents, they can always hear the birds before I even say "hello" when we first connect and that's how they know if the sound is working or not and if the volume is right.

Sometimes it feels like there is just nowhere to go and nothing to do in Musoma, so it really is a treat to head out to Matvilla and enjoy our fish and chips there.  I came back this afternoon feeling like I'd been away on a two-hour vacation!

Fall Carving Party

Ronit and Crystal - they look like happy housemates, but what's up with the knife?  Friend or foe?

No, he's not growing a beard, it's just a weekend thing.

George's first attempt at food carving was a great success, likely thanks in part to some coaching provided by Amanda

I always try to match my knives to my clothing, as to be particularly classy while carving.

Scary Sandeen sharklike one on the left, center is the friend/foe housemates one, and on the right is the very successful first attempt at carving one

Our friend Amanda wanted to having a fall party this year - you know, the kind at which you drink cider, carve pumpkins, make caramel apples, etc.  It was about 90 degrees outside and cider proved impossible here, but the rest of the party was a giant success.  Well... that depends on if you are a real stickler for tradition or not, I guess.  Apparently it's not pumpkin season around here, because I've been scouring the market for a month trying to find just one, and have not had any success.  So, watermelons were our "gourd" of choice in lieu of the real deal.  And you know what?  Watermelons carve up just fine!

Cookbook recommendation

I've done a few book recommendations posts on here before, but certainly never a cookbook one!  Today, however, I have a post that most of you won't care about and a few of you will greatly appreciate.  If you find yourself in the minority category of people who cook everything from scratch with pretty basic ingredients (i.e. missionary, wanna-be pioneer woman, or health food nut without enough money to buy strange stuff at specialty stores), this is the book for you.  About half of what I make found its origin in these pages.  It's a Mennonite cookbook, like the renowned "More With Less", but more international and modern.  It has recipes for things from all over the world, made with things you actually have in your kitchen, and most if it is pretty good for you.  My brother-in-law (yeah, Kabyn!) gave this to me for Christmas back in 2008, and my culinary life has taken on new life!

So, I know a lot of you don't care about this one bit, and that's okay, but for those few special ones out there, GO BUY IT!!

A one-leaf fall

Nykerk Music Hall, Hope College

My leaf!

After living in Western Washington, land of soggy Octobers/Novembers for 18 years, I was in awe of every leaf I saw in Michigan.  Hope College, in Holland, MI, has a beautiful campus, especially in the fall.  I never got tired of crunchy, crisp, dry, gorgeous leaves during my four fabulous falls at Hope.  Growing up, I was a voracious reader (and still am), and it always annoyed me to read about people tromping through piles of noisy leaves.  Leaves were soggy things in my mind, burdened by slugs and pine needles mounding on top of them.  And then I went to Michigan and realized that all those authors didn't lie - fall is an amazing season, and you don't have to drown in puddles or slip on slug slime and disintegrating leaves during it.

In fact, back in the fall of 2000 I found the leaves around Hope to be so pretty that I collected quite a few of them.  I carefully transported them back to my dorm room and pressed them in books.  They were fun surprises to discover in random books for a few years after that.

Last week Zarya was doing her usual dining room bookshelf rearrangement routine while I was in the kitchen.  I heard the books come down and so went to go try to put them back on the shelf.  Imagine my surprise when I found a leaf on the floor next to my concordance!  I immediately knew it was one of my fall 2000 Hope leaves, since those were the only ones I ever collected.  My little leaf had survived for twelve years and had traveled the world!  It looked perfect.  It was the beginning of October, just the right time to find a fall leaf, too.  I carefully picked it up and set it up high, well out of Zarya's reach, and admired it for a week.

And then I started to wonder, what does one do with an antique leaf?  I mean, I couldn't throw it away!  I considered putting it back in my concordance, but hiding it away again didn't really appeal to me.  Then it came to me - share the love!  I transported my precious leaf, the only one of the fall this year in Musoma, to another Holland, MI, family here in Musoma.  That lovely leaf is now displayed in their house, bringing some fall cheer to folks far away from fall leaves - far away from all but one, that is!

Zarya, almost 11 months old

Proof that babies really do play with rattles - this is one of her favorite toys

She loves video Skype!

Zarya gets soooo excited when I turn on my computer and she hears someone talking!  And when she can even SEE that person, she starts squealing and kicking her legs with glee.  I mean, how thrilling is it to get to see Babu and Bibi all the way around the world in Olympia (although sometimes she gets distracted watching herself in the little video in the corner of the screen, instead of looking at the big video of them in the middle)?
I don't know what missionaries did before Skype, but it is one of the greatest inventions of the modern world, so far as Zarya and I are concerned.

Getting ahead

It's hard work to get ahead in Tanzania.  On one hand, the communal caring-for and sharing that goes on within families is really beautiful, but on the other, it makes it nearly impossible for anyone to break out of poverty.  It's a system set up so that nobody with friends and family ends up hungry and homeless, which is great, except that it also prevents anyone from being really well-fed in a very nice house.

To give you an idea of how this works, I'll give you a little case study example from a young man with whom I was talking yesterday.  He's the second child out of nine kids, and the oldest boy.  His parents chose him to be one of the few in the family who would receive a good education, since they couldn't afford to send all their kids through school.  They, along with the extended family and the brothers and sisters who weren't chosen, sacrificed a lot to put him all the way through secondary school.  After graduation, he managed to get a pretty good job with a regular salary.

Now, however, he has a huge responsibility to take care of everyone in his family.  Just this past weekend, his sister had a baby, and he was asked to pay for her transport to and from the hospital and the hospital bill.  Also, his cousin's child got sick, and he had to foot that bill, too.  While his cousin might not have directly contributed to his education, she's still family, and she needed help.  Every week or two, there is a relative who needs something or other, and he's expected to pay.

He has been trying to save up some money for a little nest egg, in hopes of getting married and having his own family someday, but how can he refuse?  They put him through school, and without their help, he'd be in the same situation they are.  As the oldest and wealthiest male among his siblings, he's the one they are all going to go to for the rest of his life.  When his father dies, he'll be responsible for taking care of his mother and any surviving grandparents.  If any of his brothers die, he's the one in charge of providing for their widows and children.

This system ensures that there is always someone who can help you in your time of need, and it keeps the family relationships close.  There are a lot of good things about everyone caring for one another and being responsible for each other, and I don't think this young man would argue otherwise.  However, he's already feeling the frustration and pressure, and he's still in his twenties.  A lot of people are depending on him, and he's wondering if he really got the good end of the deal or not.  It's not always so lucky to be the "lucky" one!

Missing family

The other day when I dropped Zarya off at another missionary's home for the afternoon, she started crying a little bit.  The other mama, the one whose house we were at, said, "Are you missing your mama, Zarya?  It's okay to cry.  I miss my mama, too.  Sometimes I'm sad to be far away from my mama, just like you are."

The next day, a different missionary woman I encountered was having a rough day, because it was her father's 70th birthday, and she was missing the big family party.  She had a good attitude about it, and said, "You know, it's only a few days each year that I feel that the whole living here to do missions just might not be worth giving up being near my family, but this sure is one of them.  Tomorrow I'll probably be fine again, but today I really wish that I wasn't here in Tanzania, unable to be with my dad."

Sometimes Andrew and I talk about being far away from our families and how it's difficult that we can't just pop over for a visit.  We don't need to live two blocks away, but a little visit now and then would sure be nice.  In the picture of my dad and Zarya, you can see how little she is - that's how old she was when he last saw her.  She's grown up a lot since then, and gone through some super-cute stages that our families have totally missed.

It makes me sad that we can't do things with our families like put a puzzle together, like we did last Christmas.  We video chat on Skype once a week, we upload short video clips of Zarya onto YouTube for them to watch, and we e-mail regularly, but it's just not the same.  You can't snuggle a baby over Skype, and you can't spend the afternoon in the kitchen talking and baking together via e-mail.  Between the two of us, Andrew and I have five sisters, and if any one of them walked in our front door right now, Zarya would have no idea who she was.

Missionaries have to "count the cost".  We know we're called to be here, and we've chosen to obey and live in East Africa.  We don't regret or resent it, but that doesn't mean we're not sad about it sometimes.  Zarya is sad when I leave for two and a half hours (and, mind you, she's asleep for two of those), and likewise, we're sad when we leave our families for two and a half years or so.

Dad, Mom, Papa, Nammie, and all of our sisters and brothers-in-law and the plethora of nieces and nephews, this one is for you: we love you and we miss you!