Sorry!

2015 is almost over and we have been SO terrible at keeping you updated for which we want to apologise! Many of you have been asking about the blog and updates over the months, so thank you for your patience!

While in theory the move from Third to First World should have been relatively straightforward ... reverse culture shock, learning another new culture, settling into yet another new community and building relationships ... a third international move in just 5 years, seems to have taken it's toll on us, with no expendable energy left for anything else. Certainly not how we would have planned it to be but we're working our way through it. For the most part it's been a more of a case of survive than thrive but there has been lots of fun dotted in amongst it all!

In a nutshell, here's our year ...

• We said Goodbye to Nana, Jenny's mum in January and the girls started school and Kindy
• Our container arrived in February and the unpacking began ... again!
• Mark spent a week in PNG in March and Jenny started work in the hangar too
• Grandma & Gramps, Mark's parents, visited in April/May
• We were in the UK June/July for Home Assignment and Mark's sister's wedding
• Jenny's sister travelled back to Australia with us in July and we all got chest infections
• August, we were in recovery mode from everything that had gone before
• In September we got a few days away at the beach as a family
• October saw us celebrate a year since we arrived in Mareeba and finally have the chance to start getting into some kind of rhythm
• School and most other things start to wind down in November for Christmas (yes, really)
• December saw the start of the two month school break ... for Summer and Christmas!

As you can see it has been anything but quiet, we even put a 6 month ban on visitors to help us just have the time and space to process the last couple of crazy years but now that we're almost at the end of that time, we realise that it will probably take a lot longer than that!

It has been an awful lot tougher than we could have imagined. At times where we would like to have had the energy to invite people over to get to know them better or be involved in more things, we have been more focused on just getting to the end of the day in one piece. With transition comes extreme tiredness and that still seems to be affecting us, although not always on a daily basis any more. We know the stages of transition, we understand the why's and how's etc but sometimes knowing it and knowing that there will be an end to it just hasn't been enough comfort! The daily struggle has meant we haven't had the time or energy to focus on too much outside of our immediate family, including replying to emails etc, so again apologies if you're used to us being a lot more efficient than perhaps we have been!

There has been lots of good stuff though too, even from the list above you can see, we've been lucky enough to make many new Australian memories, as a family and with our visitors too. Here are a few observations that we have made about how life is different for us once again since we've been living here in Far North Queensland ...

      

• Lying in bed and hearing the sound of a hot air balloon directly above our house on so many different mornings!
• Watching flocks of hundreds of cockatoo's flying over our house
• Living within an hour's drive of idyllic paradise beaches
• Eating dinner outside and noticing flying ash and smoke dumping on our garden and our food from the burn-off ... fires lit intentionally in the surrounding areas to prevent bush fires later on
• When your children say 'There's a really big worm in the laundry room" and your first thought as you head to check it out is, is it going to be a big worm or a small snake?!
• Every day being approximately 5 degrees hotter than when we lived in Africa
• Kangaroo's and wallaby's really do just hop a long the side of the road (and yes, many don't make it!)
• So many new acronyms and abbreviations to learn, some not as obvious as others!
• When there are several 'pet' lizards all over your house, one in particular who lives under the oven!
• Hanging out a basketful of washing and the first things being dry by the time you peg the last ones up!
• So many more British food items available in the shops, than in both Tanzania or America
• Recognising that the chirping sound we regularly hear is not in fact a bird but our resident gecko's (no idea why we didn't pick that one up in Tanzania!)
• Having most things available locally but only having to drive an hour to a wider selection of shops and restaurants rather than an 8 hour drive to Dar Es Salaam, where things still weren't all that straight forward!
• Having the girls mimic the laughing kookaburra sound, over and over again, as we regularly hear it!!

These are just some of the things that have become 'normal' for us over the last year or so! Who knows what 2016 will bring for us? We hope that it won't be too full that we can't take the time out to 'breath' every now and then ... and we'll try to be a bit quicker in letting you know what we've been up to as well!

First Visitor to Mareeba!

While our second set of visitors have just left ... back in December, just over 5 weeks after we moved into our house and even before all our belongings arrived, we welcomed out first visitor to our new home here in Mareeba. The house was all a bit upside-down and having arrived from Tanzania with 4 simple suitcases, we were living with all kinds of things begged and borrowed ... but it worked and Nana came to spend out first Australian Christmas with us!

As you can see our Christmas decorations were small, understated and mostly from the local charity shop (whilst our others things were still on a ship on the way!) ... but fun nonetheless!

While we weren't able to answer half of her questions about how things work over here or about where different things are ... we were able to explore with Nana and try and work out the answers together!

Abigail started her month long Christmas holidays just 2 days before Nana arrived and so we had lots of opportunities to explore our new 'home' town and area with her. While Mareeba itself pretty much shuts down for a couple of weeks over Christmas with businesses and shops closing, all the local touristy things were thriving and so we had the chance to visit some of them with her.

We had lots of crafty fun at home too with all kinds of projects ... and lots of water fights to cool down, in the garden, in the sea, at the pool, at a local creek and a trip to Green Island, as it was so stinking hot!

 

But one treat that wasn't available to all, was a chance to go up in a MAF plane over Mareeba, while one of the training pilots was keeping his hours up. It was a short 20 minute ride but gave us the chance to see our new home and the surrounding area from the sky.

We also celebrated our first Christmas here during Nana's stay. After early morning pressies, we took a trip to the park and even spied a couple of kangaroo's off in the distance! Yes, really!

With limited kitchen equipment while we waited for our container ... we went for a more simple option for Christmas dinner! A BBQ, seemed to be very fitting for where we are now living, followed by a meringue tower! Very different from anything we have ever had before on Christmas day and a lot of fun!

It is safe to say, as well as exploring with her, we made lots of memories and we had lots of fun with Nana over our first Christmas in Australia. Early in the new year, Nana flew back home and then we properly started the task of settling into life here in Mareeba!

Time to 'potter' once again!

Since that first slightly off-kilter week (Hello Australia), it's crazy to think that six months have passed ... in that time we have achieved so much.

We've pretty much completed all the practical stuff from finding a house, buying cars, getting driving licenses, enrolling in schools, opening bank accounts ... to making friends, finding a church, joining a gymnastics club and working out the new 'normal', to name just a few!

We've also just about finished that stage of settling where we felt we were literally haemorrhaging money, having had to find everything from clothes pegs to washing machines, from rubbish bins to beds, from herbs and spices to dining room tables and everything else in between. We've been learning how to get a good deal by bartering in the retail stores and finding what else we can get hold of and alter from the charity shops (or Op Shops as they're known here!) ... as the cost of living in a First World Country on a MAF wage takes some adjusting to!

There weren't a lot of options property wise in Mareeba but the one we found was a little gem. It's actually the manse of the Uniting Church (not the church we have settled in) and is quite central to the town but tucked away from the main street. It came part-furnished which was wonderful and put less pressure on us at the beginning and is less than a kilometre from the school we enrolled Abigail in and round the corner from the supermarket (very practical!) and McDonalds (which the girls want to visit WAY more than we actually do!).

At the beginning of February, exactly as planned, our container of belongings arrived ... thankfully it was nothing like the stressful experience we had last time round getting it all to us in Dodoma! So while we've still have bits and bobs to do ... it definitely feels like home now!

 

The girls are loving school and kindy. Abigail is at St Thomas of Villanova which is a Catholic school. It's quite small, which is great for her and in some ways there are many similarities to CAMS in Dodoma, still with quite a strong Christian influence. Naomi's Kindy is on a 5 day fortnight and she LOVES her teachers and all the stuff they get up to! Both the school and kindy are in walking distance and so the girls scoot to and from school, with Jenny, almost every day!

Mark's working hard in the hangar and has even already done a short stint (a week!) in PNG helping out the MAF programme there with a wing modification (more about that in a separate post)! Jenny has also started working in the hangar part-time as the Communications Officer and is enjoying being part of everything that goes on in the hangar and helping others to feel the same as part of her role, because unlike the overseas programmes, MAF in Mareeba is less of tight-knit set-up.

We have also celebrated our first Christmas here, while Nana was visiting (more of that in a different post too!), started getting to know the local area with little trips out as a family and enjoying that settled feeling of just pottering around the house and garden doing little jobs and feeling 'normal' again. That is something that we have been longing for, for the last couple of years with no stresses of things like ... will we get our visas? will we understand enough of the language? when will our container be released? will our MAF base close? which MAF programme will we move to? will our container survive another trip across the world? will the mountain of paperwork we have to complete be enough for another visa? will we all be OK learning a new culture again? will the girls adjust to more goodbyes and starting again?! As you can imagine that list is endless and the majority of the items are now redundant ... a BIG weight off of our minds, allowing for the pottering!

One added bonus since we've been here was the arrival of ZBZ. This was the plane that Mark was part of the team doing the first avionics upgrade in Dodoma and also that he did the last engine change on. ZBZ left Dodoma for Uganda while we were still in Tanzania and earlier this year it flew the mammoth journey all the way from Kampala to Mareeba, so that it can now be used by the MAF programme here in Arnhem Land. Two Swiss pilots, one of whom often used to sit round our table for dinner in Dodoma, flew the 15 legs over a week, so the photo below show plane, pilot and engineer reunited! Exactly a year before all 3 were based in Tanzania, now there is one in Uganda, one in Mareeba and one, soon to be in Arnhem Land!

We needed to get some new family photos recently ...  so what better a backdrop than ZBZ before it heads off once again!

Hello Australia

It's hard to believe that we arrived here 5 months ago. In many ways that time has FLOWN by but we accomplished so much, especially in those first few weeks that it seems like forever ago now!

After a completely uneventful journey, 3 flights (Dar Es Salaam-Dubai-Perth-Cairns) we arrived in the early hours of October 10th to start our next big adventure. We're very grateful for the in-flight entertainment which kept the girls completely amused the whole way and on arrival we obviously looked like we fitted in, because going through duty-free in Perth we were greeted with "Welcome Home! Hope you had a nice holiday!" (Little did they know!)

Those first few days were a bit of a blur as we struggled to adjust to the time difference, which was 7 hours ahead of Tanzania. However on both days at the weekend we were able to catch up with families who live in Cairns. One who work for MAF here (having previously lived in Dodoma before our time there!) and another who we've known for years, it was great to have the chance to catch up properly after quite a long time!

Mareeba (where we live now) is about a 50 minute drive up through the Kuranda Range and rainforest and then inland across the Tablelands (up in the distance of this photo!), so on the Monday, after a few days to adjust we headed up to look at schools and houses ... and also to meet up with another family that Jenny knew from her Dodoma days the first time round who are now serving MAF here. 

By lunchtime though, it was clear that something wasn't right with Mark and so a trip to hospital was in order to find out what was wrong. (We were already grateful for the medical services that would have been much less accessible had we been in Tanzania!) We were then sent back down to a different hospital in Cairns with more equipment where Mark was being tested for fluid/blood clots/tumours on his lungs and where the girls had to leave him late at night hoping that he would come home safely in the morning.

Thankfully it turned out to just be fluid (pleural effusion), which while excruciatingly painfull, was not life threatening and Mark was returned to us in a taxi at 4:30am the next morning but was really sick for the next few days. Our well laid plans to find cars, houses and sort out the endless paperwork that comes with arriving in a new country just had to wait. (As an aside, at his follow-up appointments and x-rays several months later, he was given the all clear once again!)

By the end of that first week, we'd restarted the settling process, albeit at a slower pace and bought a car, registered some of our paperwork and secured a place at school for Abigail (among other things!). But by the Sunday we decided to give ourselves a break from it all and did something just for fun and completely touristy, a trip on the Skyrail and Butterfly train, above and through the rainforest.

It was just what we needed and we lots of fun together. The photos above speak for themselves. Not quite how we'd envisaged our first week to go but you just can't plan these things!

Goodbye Tanzania!

Was it really 5 months ago that we were packing up our final boxes and saying our goodbye's back in Tanzania?! With all that that entailed and the settling in process at this end, these next few updates might be a little overdue! 

The end of the first term in Dodoma and the girls last day at CAMS was Sports Day. Abigail had lots of fun competing and Naomi's class came along to watch. For the first time in years and years, the yellow team won (spot the colour of Abigail's t-shirt), so it was a perfect end to our time as a family at CAMS!

It was also probably one of the hardest days in the way of goodbye's as well, even though by this point we had already said goodbye to the majority of our MAF friends. Teachers and friends at CAMS, made up a large part of our Dodoma life, both Tanzanian and Ex-pat and there were lots of them to say goodbye to and tears on all sides! 

When we got home after Sports Day, we had to say one of the hardest goodbye's ... to our House Mama, Maria. She was most definitely part of our family and with her limited education and no means to travel, one of the hardest people to keep in touch with. For Jenny, it was the second time she has had to say goodbye to her and it didn't get any easier.

The following day all we had to achieve was the safe collection of our belongings and the final few goodbye's. In true Tanzanian style this did not go off as planned. In fact, at an already extremely stressful time for us, it probably couldn't have got any worse. Instead of a 9am pick-up, the team and truck didn't arrive until 5pm. The truck was too small and there wasn't another one available. 

A good friend had to frogmarch the driver to their local depot and proceeded to sit on a pile to tyres while waiting for them to sort it all out! The new truck had no breaks or fuel so had to be fitted with both and so in the dark and after the girls were in bed, they finally loaded our belongings onto the truck below. Having driven through the previous night and then seeming to be extremely spaced out, we confiscated the keys from the driver until the following morning. Driving on the Dar road is dangerous enough without them having to drive through the night once again.

As we had spent so much time waiting and on the phone trying to sort out the collection of our stuff, unfortunately the final goodbye's that we had planned for that last day never had came about and there were some really lovely friends that we never had the opportunity to farewell as a result. 

However, the end was inevitable and very early on the Sunday morning we slipped out of town almost unnoticed, except for one of our favourite guards who came to say goodbye. Having lived at the bottom of Lion Rock for so long we drove by it for the last time.

Before the mammoth trip across the world to Australia we took a few, much needed, days out at the beach in Dar Es Salaam. Having some time to take stock as a family and also just have some fun after such an emotional roller coastal of the previous weeks and months.

We visited some of our favourite spots one last time and then just concentrated on having fun ahead of the hard work that we knew was to come, settling in Australia. As you can see we definitely succeeded with the latter!

On Wednesday 8th October, we bid farewell to Tanzania and all the work, memories and friendships ... ready for the next adventure!