First off  I need to say that these pictures took almost all afternoon to upload, I thought it might help tell the story…   They are showing up small but if you click them you can see them in all their slow internet glory….

We have been getting letters and emails’ asking what life is like here for our family and thus this post here to give you a bit of a window to daily life in our little town.

First off you have to understand a bit about this town, it’s a town of about 20,000 people in the south of the country. The town sits between several tribes and serves as a hub for their trading and activity. Up until 2 years ago there were no cell phones or Internet access of any kind. Most everything that it has to offer is relatively new and so it’s a strange mix of the 21^st century and the 18^th. People have cell phones but are still getting used to them and the fact that you can call people instead of showing up at their door step at 7:15 in the morning. Internet is basically email since everything else in the world seems irrelevant when you are 2 days drive from a big city.

So when I say that it was a bit of culture shock for our kids I mean it in every sense of the word, they had to get used to a whole new way of life. Where they used to get up and play in the living room with toys or watch a cartoon they now run out the door at 6:15 to check on the chickens and the goat. They spend hours playing in the dirt and swinging the hammock. They have learned to love the kids in the orphanage and learned to share their things and parents like they never knew before. Its like we have entirely new kids now. Our oldest who was easily one of the pickiest eaters I have met is now ordering the local food and eating it with veggies of every kind. There are times when we have cried and wanted to scream at the top of our lungs because we had gone weeks without speaking English to anyone outside our family but then we look at our family and the way everyone has stepped up to the challenge before us and we know that we will go home changed in ways we never could have changed at home.

We spent much of the past 2 months working on the new children’s home which they will be moving into two weeks from now. We rented a small home in a very quiet little neighborhood and with the help of the most wonderful people from South Africa (more on them in a later post) built the coolest kitchen bathroom set up in Northern Africa. We typically get up in the morning eat either oatmeal or corn flakes and make the half mile walk over to the new home to make sure that everyone knows what their job is for the day. We hired 4 local laborers who for less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks will spend the entire day working at a pace that would put any Cal trans worker to shame. Its funny, we completed what would have been a 50,000-60,000 addition in America for 2800. And that’s with a new 1’ water line that ran 3 blocks underground to get our water service installed.

We also spend at least a few afternoons a week at the Orphanage spending time with the kids. We try to just go be with them and let them know that they are loved, but inevitably we end up doing things like scabies baths or diagnosing mysterious lumps and infections. We are hopeful that the new home and it many hand washing sinks and high tech water filter system will take care of most of that.

So that’s our life in a tiny nut shell. Pretty exciting huh?

And oh yeah…  Did I mention that the little peanut of a girl in the pictures is the new addition to our family?  We are almost finished with the adoption of Sophia Edalawit Benkert our new little baby girl.  She is a little sweetheart and even though she has only lived with us for 2 months we can hardly imagine life without her.

Levi