You know you live in Africa/with children when...

It's hard to put everything that I've experienced in the past almost 2 months into my first blog post, so I will summarize and give you a picture of my life with a fun and informative post entitled:

You know you live in Africa/with children when...

• every piece of clothing you've worn has spit up, poop, and/or food on it.
• you are joined at night by bed bugs (called “chinch” here), roaches, and a rat under your bed.
• you have a bacterial infection on your arm resembling some kind of flesh-eating disease.
• a pagan family buries their son with a knife, a live kitten, and other objects, so that he can come back and revenge his death using them. (The man was a believer but his family is not. He was killed in a motorcycle accident but since his brother and father were also killed in motorcycle accidents, the family believes that someone cursed him, causing the accident. Therefore the objects to revenge his death.)
• you can't send out regular updates because of a combination of:
  1. slow/no internet
  2. no electricity
  3. a blown up lap top charger from a power surge (the step-down apparently wasn't working)
• your feet are NEVER clean.
• your judgement of what are “dirty clothes” becomes a lot looser because, well, washing clothes by hand is just not enjoyable and I really don't think you can notice the spit up, dirt, and food stains anyways.
• you're dealing with many extremely hard situations that have you emotionally and mentally wore down and asking God for wisdom like never before.
• you end up scrubbing a 10 yr.old leg ulcer every 2 days, because for some reason the hospital that the man was in for months, couldn't/wouldn't do anything for it.
• you have to tell a nurse that the HIV test she just took on one of your kids and read as negative, is in fact positive, and wander how many people have been told they're negative when they're actually positive because of a misread test.
• you get to hear the kids pray that their friends and families back in their villages will come to know Christ and have a huge burden for them.
• you witness the kids taking care of some boys who are in a very hard situation and giving them their own clothes, taking them food, and sharing the gospel with them. *proud big sister moment*

Ok, this doesn't get close to telling you everything that's happened and is going on with the kids, but it's something. I'm starting to get more of a feel for my role here, though I'm still waiting for God to show me what to do as far as outside of APOH. But currently I can't imagine doing much else. My time is pretty filled up with the babies, the girls, and just trying to build relationships and learn language and culture.

Me and the girls are going to start doing Tae-bo..they have been begging to start! I could use prayer in conveying things that God has laid on my heart to the kids. It's hard to share things that are so different from their culture and try to get across that I don't want to change their culture, but that God want to change hearts.