Little blessings

Our daily life is becoming more of a routine. We are adjusting to regular power outages ranging from 2 – 8 hours every few days. About two weeks ago the pump for the bore hole, where we get all of the water for our house, broke. It took just over a week to repair. Conveniences make life easier but they aren’t always necessary or available here in Malawi. For a short period of time we drew water from the neighbor’s outdoor spigot for essential water needs until the pump was fixed. [Read more…]

Teacher, do you speak Spanish?

We are long overdue for a blog update. We have had a busy, but good beginning of the school year here. When we last wrote it was summer vacation, and the children were on break from December until March. During the break we took the opportunity to get involved with teaching English at vacation school, getting to know our neighbors, and helping interpret for a large medical brigade of U.S. doctors who came primarily from MN. Emily also kept on baking with the women’s baking cooperative during the summer. They are a determined group of women who didn’t want to take the summer off! We also took a small vacation to Ecuador, which was an incredible experience. Here are some updates about our ministries for the 2013 school year. [Read more…]

How are you?

One morning this week, after daily Mass, I was hurrying to get back to the house in time to finish getting ready for work. Instead of giving individual greetings to each member of the community as I normally do, I said a general good morning to everyone. Later in the morning, Br. Luigi teasingly told me that he was mad at me because I hadn’t said good morning to him. I realized that because I hadn’t greeted him separately, I had not in fact actually greeted him. Whereas in America a communal greeting is perfectly acceptable, here it is not sufficient and in some situations may even be considered rude.
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