Saturday, September 12, 2009

Babies!!!

This has been an exciting week for us. One Monday our neighbor had a baby boy! The deliver when very well. The baby is healthy and happy. Lindsay and I were just hanging out at our hut, playing with the children when one of the kids told us Tetdarey (our neighbor) had her baby. We asked Jemma, the wife of the chief, and she told us the child was lying. Then a different child came up and told us that Tetdarey had a baby. This time when we asked Jemma she said it was true. Jemma also told us that we could go visit Tetdarey’s compound. So, we ran over to see what was going on. We were there for a few minutes and then they brought the precious baby out to us and we got to hold him. The child couldn’t have been more than an hour old. It still had a little blood on it from the umbilical cord. We asked if we could take a picture and they were very excited about it. Then they told us that Tetdarey didn’t have any food so Linds and I went back and made a chicken rice side with lots of vegetables. We’re not sure who actually ate the food, but the plate came back empty.

On Thursday, one of the mom’s in our compound, Jemma, had her baby! We were out under a tree after language learning got done and Halima came by and told us that Jemma had a baby. We didn’t believe her at first so we asked if it was a boy or a girl and she told us it was a girl. So, we quickly went back to the compound and sure enough Jemma had a precious little girl. That evening when we were making dinner, we also made enough for Jemma too since we provided dinner for Tetdarey when she had her baby. Also, by sharing our food during this time we’ve been able to show much we care about them and this is a very significant thing for the culture here. Out of the six families that are in our village two of them have brand new babies. This means that this Monday there will be a booki (baby naming ceremony) for Tetdarey’s baby and on Thursday there will be one in our compound for Jemma’s! I’ll explain more about what a booki next week after we go to both of them.

As for the rest of the week, it’s been really good. For the first time since we’ve been here we’ve had a regular week. We went out to the bush on Monday and we stayed until Friday with absolutely no problems. We’ve had language learning from 8am-9:30am every morning and then we’ve stayed under a tree for a couple of hours to study the Word and to practice language. Then we hang out with the kids and eat something snacky for lunch. In the afternoon we visit the different compounds to sit and visit with them. Then we head back to our hut for dinner. We make a good sized meal for dinner and share our leftovers with the mom’s. Then we break out the ashia. We only had ashia two nights this week because due to the large amount of sugar and caffeine, we haven’t been able to sleep until really late. As a substitute we did have kool-aid and popcorn one night and the other night we had cookies and water. This week was truly refreshing. It was wonderful to be back out in the bush for the whole week without getting sick.