Moving

Photos are really my best writing...

If you have ever been here, you probably wouldn't recognize it now.

Hannah are not the only ones moving... Hannah has also moved her blog... she is the wanderlovestory blog on the right.  Here she is sporting Joseph's sunshades.  Take off the tag, but why?  Just because it blocks my vision?  

A little differently

Many of you might not know the details to our leaving Gabon, but Envision closed their site there.  

We had to sell all our stuff, which was actually quite a bit.  There were a few families before us who did a wonderful job at outfitting the place, and then as people would come they would often leave things.  So in the end we ended up with quite a bit of stuff... for example... over 100 towels and 40 sheet sets!  
We made a listing of the big stuff (couches, refrigerators, etc.), that we sent out to other missionaries and nationals, and had two yard sales to sell the little things.  It was craziness!  Think of black Friday madness in your house!  One guy who Hannah observed to have just picked up a basket of things without looking at them, came back days later complaining that the stuff did not work.  We said we would refund him if he brought the things back, but he really just wanted us to give him a deal on a chain saw that was not actually for sale.
There is a book called "African Friends and Money Matters" by David Maranz which I highly recommend if you ever go to live in Africa.  Unfortunately I actually read the book the last month I was there!  I definitely wished I had read it the first month!  This book describes a lot of the cultural differences between Africa and the Western world.  One of the big differences is how you do yard sales.  Actually to be accurate I'm not sure they actually do yard sales.  But we learned that the way we did it was not the best way to go about it.
But in the end after we had it all sold and understood that we had not gone about it well, we had one person who was thankful because they normally did not get the chance to get stuff, but this time they did.

Let's try a video

Marcus, Scott, and Jeff playing their newly bought djembes (jimbay).

Porcupine, Antelope, Crocodile, Palm worm, and python

Oh to be back in the US!  You know it took less than 30 seconds to upload these two photos!!  Unbelievable!
You can order whatever is on the menu!!  And there are so many choices!!
Culture shock.
But you usually can't order python.

On Wednesday nights we usually had a English Bible study with Alace, Steve, Nesmi, and Andou.  Andou is a Gabonese who married a Malagasy woman (from Madagascar), Nesmi.  She speaks perfect English, and what he didn't understand she would tell him.  My last Wednesday night, I told them I was headed to the states and they asked if I had ever had snake or catfish.  When I replied "no", they insisted that I have some before I leave.  So wouldn't you know, they showed up the day before I left with a sampling of what we think was a python and some spicy catfish.

Not done yet...

Just so you know i am not done yet with this blog.  

I landed on US soil last week and will be trying to figure out the next step in my life.

But i have so many photos and things that i still want to share from my life in Gabon.  I am pretty sure that future blogs will not be in any kind of order, but really as memories occur to me or i scroll back through pictures.

So far i still feel a bit numb, especially since i have hit the ground running since i got back.  I miss Gabon and the people that i became attached to there.  But as one of our interns quoted Dr. Seuss "Don't cry because it is over, but smile because it happened".