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!