Theory and Practice

With just a two days of 2013 to go I can't believe how much has happened for us as a family since this time last year ... or even the last few years! This week Naomi celebrated her third Christmas and each of those have been on a different continent. Life has certainly not been boring for us!

In many ways our lives are a big adventure but from now on things are set to become relatively mundane and not quite so exciting ... at least that's what we hope anyway! When we moved here, we had hoped that it would be for at least 4 years but most probably for the whole 8 years we have committed to MAF. As a family (and even as a couple) this would be the longest we've lived anywhere together! Crazy but true!

In theory it will us be a chance to really get into our groove, which we've only just hit in the last couple of months! It will be a chance to really get involved in the community. It will be a chance for us all to get settled in our home and open it up to others, knowing that we won't be moving on anytime soon. It will be a chance for our girls to spend their childhoods in one place. It will be a chance to live life in the guaranteed sunshine! It doesn't promise to be easy, limited resources, far from family, an ever-changing ex-pat community, no respite from the heat! However it really feels like home to us now, for how long though, we are yet to see.

Everything can be mapped out in theory, but in practice it can work out a lot differently!

Things change unexpectedly out here. Friends of ours are packing up to leave in a few weeks and move to South Sudan ... their plans are most definitely up in the air right now. For us things are also on hold at least until the end of January. The future of the MAF Tanzania programme is currently under negotiation and we won't know until then which way it will move forward and whether that will or won't include us as a family.

While a lot of people will be thinking about News Years resolutions right now and how they are going to start 2014 off on the right foot, perhaps tweaking some things or drastically changing others, my family will have to wait just that little bit longer. 

We hope and pray that our 2014 will be right here in Tanzania well and truly getting into that groove but only God knows right now what it will look like. I'm glad that we trust one who has already got it all worked out on our behalf. While some people think that is a huge risk, I know that with him in control we will be able to work our way through whatever this next year will bring. We got through this last one which was was a rollercoaster in itself! We'll just have to wait another month after everyone else before we work out what (if any) resolutions/changes we want to make!