First Impressions

Well, here we are! We have finally made it and survived our first week! Our new address is Mission Aviation Fellowship, PO Box 491, Dodoma, Tanzania ... all snail mail, gratefully received!

Our home had been prepared for our arrival, repainted and kitted out with the basics as well as a welcome sign for us and one each for the girls on their bedroom door! We're still awaiting the arrival of our container here but are able to carry on very well for the time being with lots of borrowed goods!

Here are just some of our first impressions for you ... 

The climate is one of the obvious differences ... it's been averaging about 90 degrees most days. We've been enjoying the sunshine ... but also feeling quite hot. Interestingly, it's a lot more bearable than an Ohio summer though!!!

Our neighbours have been helping us settle in very well ... (Naomi's new best friend!)

There were a few extra little friends to welcome us to our new home too ... hundreds of big 'bitey ants' at both our front and back doors! We've dealt with them now though!

Abigail and Naomi enjoyed watching a couple of lizards crunching away at the ants at our back door one day. They sat and watched in fascination for about 15 mins ... and yes, they really do make a crunching sound when the lizards eat them!

Other bug influences we have to remember are malaria tablets and mosquito nets ... we have come with a stash of the tablets! Mark has to take his every day and the rest of us once a week. The girls seem to have got the hang of the mosquito nets quite quickly which is good, as we want to reduce the chances of catching malaria as much as possible!

We won't be taking drinking water from the tap for granted anymore either. Everything that we drink has to be filtered otherwise we may not feel too good ... something that we have to remember when brushing our teeth and other every day tasks! Soon it will all just become a habit, rather than something new and different.

The girls seem to be embracing our new home and routines really well. They had become a little cranky towards the end of our time in the UK, as everything was so up in the air and are now loving everything about life here. We have quite a large area on our compound to play and they're really enjoying that. Abigail started school on our third day here at her request and has been loving that too.

The newest 'member' of our family is Maria. It is usual to have house-help here as everything just takes so much longer. It is also providing employment for local people and helps with learning the local language and culture. Maria was Jenny's house-help when she lived here before (1999-2001) and they have kept in touch ever since. She started working for us on our second full day here and has already won the hearts of the rest of the family with her beans and fresh chapati's. It has been great to have someone we know we can trust right from the start!

There is a big Muslim influence here. We often hear the call to prayer from where we live, especially the first one in the morning and the last one at night. You'd be forgiven for thinking the building in the photo below is a mosque, as there are many in town. 

Spot the cross on the top ... this is actually the Anglican Cathedral where we went to church on Sunday, to the English Service! Whilst our Swahili is in the early stages and because there is Sunday school for Abigail, you will probably find us there on a Sunday morning for the time being!

Mark started in the hangar this week too but we're sure there will be plenty of aircraft photos to come in the coming weeks and months, so for this post at least, we haven't included any!

Facts and Friction

Part of our preparation for living and working overseas with MAF is a course called 'Facts and Friction'. It helps to equip us with the visions and values of MAF, giving us information about the organisation in general, what is expected of us and more about what it is like to live overseas in an African country.

It is a two week course and we did the first one in 2008, just before Abigail was born as part of our application process with MAF. Up until now, it has been based in Ashburnham Place, a beautiful conference and retreat centre in Kent, although we learnt that this will be the last one there.

Most people do both weeks of the course at the same time and so we joined a group that had already been working together for a week. They were very welcoming though and we made some good friends who we will be keeping in touch with over the coming weeks and months. One family have already headed to Uganda over the weekend and will be moving on to Chad in a few months and others will be going to Uganda, Kenya and us to Tanzania.

We covered all kinds of topics, learning from both the trainers and each other, everything from manuals to missiology, bribery to car-jacking, malaria to newsletters and everything in between ... including what to do in a grenade attack, which we got to put into practice one afternoon out in the grounds of Ashburnham!

One highlight for us, in particular, was meeting and spending time with Stuart King, the founder of MAF. Although 90 years old now he still plays an active part in getting to know all the new members of MAF and had lots of fun with us on our 'health' day working out which bugs give you which diseases!! It's amazing that the first MAF flight (that he flew) went from Croydon ... where we were both living when we started to consider MAF as our mission organisation!

While, we were busy in the classroom, the girls were having lots of fun with either Jenny's mum or Mark's parents, who between them came down and looked after them. There was a great playroom, which the girls really enjoyed ... but the seaside wasn't too far away, so they had a few trips down there, collecting stones and eating ice-creams.

We were very grateful that they were able to do that, it was great that MAF make allowances for it ... and that the grandparents were able to have the opportunity to see what we were up to, as well as have some quality time with the girls before we head overseas and whisk them away!

We really enjoyed the week and everything we learnt ... now all that is left is some family time and then sorting through and packing up all our belongings ready for our flight to Tanzania on Saturday. We expect our next update to come from Africa!!!