Home Sweet Home

Dear Friends,

Well, we’ve finally made it to home. We arrived here on Saturday evening (Saturday morning back home) at around 6:30 pm. We left Manado around 11:45am so it was long day of traveling but it was uneventful and for that we were so thankful. We were so excited to see our new house and to begin the unpacking process and were so pleasantly surprised when we did finally see our house. It is so much more than we expected and will more than meet our needs over the next 2 years or so. God is good that way though, we’ve come to understand. He loves to bless us above and beyond our expectations and we give Him all the glory!

Our house has 3 bedrooms but one will be used as a family room. Here in Indonesia, the front room of the house is a sitting room, intended to entertain visitors when they stop by. It is generally a formal room and not used on a daily basis by the family living in the home. So our front room will be that and one of the bedrooms will be where we spend our evenings and weekends as a family. Jack has a “Jack sized” room, just right for him and our room is quite comfortable as well. Our bathroom is pretty big and we have a small area where the dining table is just off the kitchen. We will finally have the room we’ve longed for to entertain guests and our back yard is huge! There are banana trees, coffee trees, and several varieties of citrus trees in our yard. Joel is excited to pick the coffee berries off the tree and learn how to roast them himself. Who knows, perhaps we’ll start our own coffee shop here. Can’t you just see Joel doing something like that?

We have taken several trips to town with our orientation staff yesterday and today to begin to buy the things we need for our house. They don’t have Laundromats here so we bought a washing machine yesterday and all the things necessary for hanging our clothes out to dry. Sometime this week we’ll head to the dishes store to get our dishes and then the fabric store to order our sheets to be made for our bed. Jack will have to have a crib made and a mattress ordered from the furniture store and we will also order some furniture for our family room there too. I went shopping for some groceries today at 2 different stores and our fresh groceries will be bought at the market tomorrow. Are you getting the idea that nothing happens quickly here and Wal-mart is a foreign idea to them? We will learn the ropes for these kinds of things in the next few weeks and will piece by piece put our house together. Please pray that we would have patience in this process. We come from a world full of conveniences and they just don’t exist here!

Our house helpers arrived today and so we began the process of language learning. I’ve never felt so helpless as I was today trying to explain how they can help us. We had an interpreter here for a little while but soon she left and we were on our own. The one gal speaks and understands a very little bit of English, so that was a help, but there is still so much left unsaid. Pray for us to learn quickly and to retain what we learn. God will enable our minds to grasp this language but again, patience on our part is required. Nothing comes for free and we have to put lots of work into this process.

There is so much more I could write about with all our first impressions, but I will end this here and encourage you to check out our blog where there is a lot more information.

Thanks for reading and praying and writing.

Bethany for Joel and Jack too!