Friday

I slept appallingly (sp?!) Thursday night and decided at 3.30am that I wasn't going to get up at 4.50 as planned to be at the farm by 6am. My commitment to the farm is 3 days a week. I had met that commitment and didn't think it wise to drive more hours than I'd slept. So...I got up at 5.40 to tell the farm manager I wasn't coming and slept wonderfully til 7am. I spent the morning baking bread, working on my draft Farm Plan Report and chatting to Mama A- the lady who cleans our house 3 mornings a week. I had taken her to visit her daughter in the village yesterday on my way to the farm and visited her home here in town which was nice. She is such a sweet old lady and very patient with my ciYawo and my wanderings through the house while she's trying to clean it!

A colleague came over for lunch (smelt the bread?! :) and it was a great few hours discussing and sharing how life here has impacted us so deeply. What will we do when we go back to Australia? We've changed and we won't fit our old lives any more. To be honest, the future looks lonely and uncertain. Neither of us regret coming here and being a part of this world for a short time- its a privilege. But when we consider the future we've both started to realise that the cost is possibly greater than we ever imagined. I suspect the benefit is going to be greater than we ever imagined too. The sheer scale of God's plans always amaze me and he's been good and faithful til now so I really have no reason to doubt his faithfulness in the future!
There is a song by Sara Groves called 'Painting pictures of Egypt' that I think captures the feeling well. The chorus says "I've been painting pictures of Egypt, leaving out what it lacked, cos the future feels so hard and I wanna go back, but the places that used to hold me cannot
hold the things I've learned- those roads were closed off to me while my back was turned...'

After that I had a 2 hour language lesson. Although my teacher was quite despondant the other day about how much vocab I've forgotten :( I would like to point out (in my defense) that I am now much better at using the vocab I DO have in an understandable sentence structure. I can also distinguish words and process them when different people are speaking now MUCH faster than before-so Im understanding alot more of waht is going on around me, even if I am slow to form sentences in response. Either way, whether Im doing better or not- we're both working harder at my language which a good outcome :)

After language I collected all the veggies in our veggie patch that were ready (about 20 tomatoes and 20 capsicums) and decided we really needed to eat a lot of capsicum for dinner! SO we had fish, steamed veggies and indianish stuffed capsicums. The recipe was so yummy I've put the link in for you. The only thing I did different was add a tiny bit of liquid to each capsicum after stuffing it so the masala mix didn't fall out.
http://fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=248791

After dinner we watched one of my favourite movies- 'Japanese Story'. Normally it is the storyline that hits me the hardest, but I have to admit I felt terrbily homesick watching the scenery and felt a bit teary during the 'Perth International Airport' scene (!!!) remembering my own departure from those bleak gates. I lent it to a South African friend last week and I heard (via the rumour mill) that he loved it so much he edited out a few scenes and showed it to his village friends?! I wonder how it interacted with their world view? How would they interpret it? He's coming 'round for dinner tonight so I'll have to ask him how it went.