Recovering

I am happy to report that our lives have returned to normalcy after the flash-flood experience two weeks ago.  My mind still sometimes wants to camp out at that awful moment of hearing David shout and seeing the wave of water, but I am battling the flashbacks with remembering how we all came out safely. As a family and with our friends who experienced it with us, we have had lots of conversation about it, and I think we are dealing with it in a healthy way.  No one is ready yet to run up to any waterfalls, but we can talk about it without crying, and even with a few laughs.  

I feel like I need to counter the heaviness of my last post with something light.  There's nothing like a traumatic experience to remind me of how precious life is, and how marvelous, insanely glorious the little things in life can be.  

Little things like eating markisa (passion fruit) that friends from interior brought to us.  It looks like frog eggs, but I promise you it's yummy. Carter and I practically fight over them when we have any around.

A highlight last week was celebrating the solo flight of Daniel P., a new pilot whose initial checkout was David's responsibility. In a few weeks the Perez family will move to the MAF base at the interior town of Wamena, and we are going to miss them here in Sentani.

This week there was a half-day of prayer for all MAF staff and national workers, then in the afternoon we helped teach the national workers how to play ultimate frisbee.  It was hot as blazes, but fun to interact with our national friends in this way.

One afternoon I found myself looking up into our very tall avocado tree, imagining all the guacamole I could make if I could just reach the fruit.  I tried whacking at some low-hanging avocados with our rake and managed to knock one or two down.  Then David came out and improved on the rake by inserting it into a long PVC pipe.  Unfortunately when he then tried to whack at the fruit, the rake-pipe combination was terribly, hilariously wobbly and I about fell down from laughing so hard (a testament no doubt to my fatigue and stress levels).  Our neighbor noticed what we were doing and ran over with his far-superior bamboo pole with hook attachment.  And this is what we got:

Two more things to be thankful for: the girl (who is having a great year in grade 7) and the unexpected little beauty she's holding - a real pumpkin!  In all our years in Indonesia I've never seen one so round and orange.  

Another unexpected find was pine cones last weekend when we went up to the school with friends to play a frisbee golf course.  The last hole is in a little grove of pine trees and the ground was covered with mini-pine cones.  And so Zoe-who-loves-crafts wanted to make something with pine cones and Craft-Challenged-Mama came up with this: