Dave in Chad, Rachael has some time on her hands

Dave has gone to Chad to get our team leader and his family who've just come back from a short visit to the US. That's kind of a simple way of putting it. But we are glad they are coming back and excited to see them again.

In the mean time Ben and I are staying at the hospital compound so we won't be out in the village all by ourselves. we might stay out there is we had a car, but we don't, and therefore its best to be near other people. Especially since I've been having a lot of dizzy spells and tiredness lately. Ive had everything you could check checked. My Blood pressure is normal, My blood sugar is normal, I was checked for malaria yesterday. I'm not dehydrated. I just get so tired I have to lay down and can't get up to do anything or else I see spots or my head spins around. Last night I started to feel better when the air cooled down. I was doing great today until the air heated back up, at about 7:30:)

So here we are. Ben is playing with the compound's kitchen set and putting couch protectors over his head, pretending he is wearing a head covering like I do. Its hot but thankfully we have the fans and cold water. About a week ago the electricity went out for four days and we didn't have fans or cold water. It was a very hard time for me. I admit I could have handled the situation better. But I learned a lot, including to decide to have a good attitude when things like that happen, because you have to DECIDE to have a good attitude. You aren't going to just have one. Its too crummy of a situation:)

Here is a video of Ben helping with dinner. its kind of long but worth it. If you would like to see a video of him in the car on the way down to Cameroon check out Margit Moody's blog. the link is on the left side of my page.

living in Cameroon

So, its been a long time again since i've written on here. I moved to Cameroon. A country right next to Chad. We are just four hours south of Chad's capital, N'djamena. So far so good! I feel quite blessed actually. There is a hospital mission here in this village called Meskine. They are renting our team houses until we can get into Chad. The houses are great and much better than anything we could have hoped for (in my opinion). Plus the hospital "people" arranged for us to have house help when we arrived. With out the house help this would have been a totally dificult transition, so I can't complain.

Ben helping our house helper with the

laundry.

There is still a lot of work to do of course. I bake all the bread we eat. There isn't a lot of food avalible here in the village so we have to go to a near by larger city for it. When we go there its kind of a stressfull setting. You go through stands in 100 + degrees, hoping to find what you are looking for. With a slightly stressful situation like that its not suprising that in the three weeks we've been here we've had to keep going back. I feel like I've got a ton of stuff when we leave, but turns out thats just because it felt like a ton of stuff. Really I only had like three meals worth! I'm getting better at it though. I also don't have a concept of how much I need of certain things. turns out that when you make everything from scratch you go through a lot more salt, sugar, flour and oil than normal. I think I've gone through a gallon of oil in the last three weeks. In France I went through a gallon of oil a year, maybe less. I never realized you had to use it in bread, in your bread pan, to cook all your veggies, for meat (since the meat dosn't really have much fat in it) etc.

I'll attach a couple picts and call this good. I hope I can come up with something a little more interesting for my next blog! sorry everyone. I think that stress is hampering my creativity!

Ben playing with the kids who share the same yard as us.