Geyman Steps

Most weekends the boys and I go for a ride on my bicycle to run errands or just to grab some street food or a snack. At any rate, it is a great time for the guys to get out of the house and have some male bonding. Today Carmen needed some meat from the butcher which is down the road from us. Unfortunately, the camera turned off shortly before the butcher, but we got some awesome non-stop narration from Jason on the way there. He was pretty proud to be the cameraman!

As I sit here writing, I am refreshed by the rain from last night. The dust is down, the air is fresh, and the plants seem a bit revived. As the rain in moments past has molded the future, I believe we can look to our past and see ourselves today as an awesome testament of God's faithfulness and involvement. I am reminded of a verse: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22-23  God has been faithful. When we were married almost seven years ago, we had no idea what God had in store for us. We could never have guessed that in our first seven years of marriage we would undertake completing college, work at six different jobs, be involved with four different mission organizations, learn a new language, and bring four children into the world while transitioning through sixteen moves to four different states and three countries. All we can say is God has provided the strengt...

Tuesday last week I flew out with another MAF pilot, Kirstein, to Haydom. Our schedule was full with flights out to even more remote villages, and we would not return back to Arusha until Friday. On one of the afternoons we needed to haul to the maximum capacity of the aircraft, and so I was left on the ground.  As I waited to catch a few pictures of Kirstein taking off to the villages, these two girls kept begging me to take a picture of them so they could see themselves. They were quite pleased, and a little shy, when I showed them my camera screen. After he was off, I began my hike to the large hill beside the town of Haydom. Having grown up in the mountains of Idaho, I miss the tranquility and peace of being in the wild. Being away from busy city life gives me time to think and process. I began to contemplate how different Tanzania is from the world I grew up in. For instance, it took me multiple visits to the Haydom airstrip before noticing the ridicu...

Above is a short video about what the boys and girls have been up to. Life sure is interesting with these guys! Tivoli, caught in the act of escaping. She is very proud of herself because she managed to reach up and undo the latch above her head.  They get dirty so fast out here. Soon they will be walking. That should at least save their knees. Nothing like bananas! The past two weeks have been very full with MAF standardization. This involved ground courses and flights in order to learn to operate with MAF International procedures. My last MAF standardization flight took us to a few airfields which we fly into regularly. After crossing the escarpment, which is a plateau dividing very dry land and mountains covered in rainforest, we had a slight diversion to avoid thousands of flamingos which had taken flight over the rainforest next to Lake Manyara. One of those times I wish I had brought my camera! One of the three airstrips we flew int...

First day of kindergarten and pre-school!  Shule (shoo-lay) meaning school in Swahili. We had thought we were going to homeschool the boys this year and already had done four weeks when God placed Christ Church International School in our path. It seems to be everything we wanted in a school including being only a 100 yard walk down our street! Excited about the library and all the new books! You would think we don't have any at home... All the students and teachers gather for morning worship, prayer, and devotions. It is a small elementary school with about 9 children per grade, K-7th.  We had been looking for friendship opportunities for the boys and feel very blessed that the Lord has granted the desire of our hearts.  Kindergarten and 1st grade combined (Silas is in the back left, orange shirt). His first friend is a Tanzanian named Daniel. He is very excited! Jason, though a little more shy than Silas, seemed to have a wo...