Home Sweet Home – Again by Charlene

For those of you who have lost track, this is the fourth place that we’ve called home in the last 18 months (and that’s not even counting when we made ourselves at home at Mom and Dad Wieler’s for a month). Our journey here was thankfully very uneventful and the kind airline attendant in Nelspruit let us check through our 8 pieces of overweight luggage and didn’t seem to notice our 8 pieces of carry on baggage (the girls had been instructed to “walk tall” and make it look like their backpacks weren’t as heavy as they actually were).

We’ve been here for 2 weeks now and we’ve been busy getting ourselves settled in. Most of our time has been spent setting our house up, getting our work permit, getting our girls settled in school and helping with homework, meeting some of the local work partners and by boiling and filtering lots of water – a first for us. Nearly all of our furnishings were already in Zambia in storage from previous MCCers who have left. The grass couch and chair were custom made for us by a guy on the street. By popular demand, here are a few pics:

The front of our house

The Living Room

The Dining Room

We don’t have any pets at this point but there are some cats that are trying to make our place their home. The cats are wild so they are not keen on being touched as my bitten hand can attest to. There are at least a dozen of them and they look quite malnourished so our girls took pity on them and spent their allowance on buying cat food. At least we won’t have to worry about having any rodents on our property.

The Herd of Cats

Last week we got to meet the MCC Zambian team and they are a great group of people. We spent the day in a budget meeting and then had a fun night out dining on Chinese food. Right now the team consists of Siggi and Lois (our Country Representatives), 3 SALTers (see www.mcc.org for more info on this one year service program) and a one year service worker who will be completing this July. There is still room for more if anyone is interested!