If a Tree Falls in Burundi, It Definitely Makes a Sound

Our house is currently being built.  And one of the amazing features is that it has yet to require a single machine.  Bricks are hand-carried.  Cement is hand-mixed.  There is a guy whose job it is to make mud with his bare feet like grapes in "A Walk in the Clouds" (strange, but that allusion was completely lost on him).

And there have also been trees cleared.  We feel somewhat guilty about this, but work to assuage our conscience by promising to plant more and doing penance by repeatedly reading "The Lorax" to the kids.

I don't know how this process goes down in a land of machines, but here are a few photos of one of the big pines coming down.  Before this first photo, a man climbed 40ft or so and hacked off branches, and then tied a rope around the trunk.  The tree itself is maybe 60 feet tall.

The plan is evident.  Some guys (seen below) will pull the rope he tied around the trunk in the direction they want it to go, while other guys hack at the base.  When it starts to fall, everyone will scream and run.

And it's a good plan.  But a few things to note.  First, that an existing house (where we are currently living) could be crushed if the tree falls in the wrong direction.  Second, a few weeks prior, a similar tree-felling had gone a bit unexpectedly and taken out three other trees on its way down.  So, of course, we all came out to watch.

First, the guys hacking at the base.

 Second, the guys on the other end of the rope, pulling.  The goal is to land it in a 8 ft wide stretch that runs between our garden and the current home building site (for the Cropseys, this time).  Ambitious.

 And after a lot of screams, and an impressive boom, the result was a total ace in the hole.  They landed that giant trunk exactly where they intended.  Amazing.

Old House, New House

Sometimes there is just too much to say, and not anywhere close enough bandwidth to say it in blog form.  So, at least a few photos to show that this blog is still alive.

2 weeks ago, we packed up from our temporary home at the Banga guesthouse.  Here is our "living room".

The front of the house, with the adjacent Catholic church.

The view from our place, which will certainly be missed.

Et voila! Our "new" house, the old mission house where we are staying for the next several months.

And just across the yard, the foundation for our real new home is being laid.

And who wouldn't want to finish with kids-in-baskets?

Bon Vue

For several days (after the initial heat), it has been chilly and raining.  Clouds covered the mountains, making for some nice views as seen below.  (Note: Conflans, mentioned in the last post, is seen up the hill between the tall pine and the shorter pine on its left.)

 This morning, the clouds cleared just enough to see the effect of those clouds on the rain:  Snow-capped peaked.  This one is taken right out our window.  There are two other sets of snow caps on the left and right.  Click on the images to get a bit bigger shot.

France: Our New Home

We have arrived safely in our new home for the next ten months: Albertville, France, tucked down on the edge of the French alps.  Travel went well, and our whole team got all our luggage at the airport.  Thank goodness we didn't fly through Paris, as everyone seems to think this is a surefire way to loose a bag.  The town is great, and the biggest surprise so far is the heat.  I mean, you move to the Alps, you pack heavy clothing, right?  Well, the first couple days were downright sweltering, and our apartment is the top floor with no A/C.  But it's cooling down a bit, and is quite nice now.

In response to several inquiries, we have here some pictures of our lodging.  Everyone asked about this before we left, and we had no significant info, so this was all a surprise for us, as well.  Without further ado.

A view of our building.  The classrooms and non-family apartments are on the left.  Note the mountain backdrop.  We are the topmost right two windows.  The parking lot area has a lot of kids' stuff, and the language school families have almost forty small kids this term!

A view out our window.

Our living room this morning.

A view from the living room into our dining/kitchen area.  Little fridge, but new.  Small sink, but good supply of hot water.

Ben and Maggie's room.  Someone left a 2011 Mickey Mouse calendar on our wall, so I chopped it up and decorated their walls.  They seem to love it.  All our windows are these funky bivalve ones where you can open it sideways like a cupboard, or from the top like an oven.

The distinctly Euro habit of having a separate toilet room.  There are advantages to this, but it does not seem to encourage handwashing.

Another view of the living room, with the kitchen off to the left.

Critters

Several weeks ago, Rachel spent the evening making some truly delicious lemon poppyseed scones. They were to be for breakfast. We were apparently not the only ones to come to that conclusion. In the morning, we woke up, and found this picture. One or two had been thoroughly nibbled. In the background, the window was open.

The significance of the window is that we don't have any screens, and most of the days our two doors stay open all day long. Thus, unless the open window and the devoured scones were a coincidence, the perpetrator was likely something biggish. I'm going to go with bird. It's not the only option, but it is the most comfortable one.

On another "critter" note, you may recall that we keep a pet gecko, named Kiboko Kidogo, or "little hippo". In truth, we keep a number of geckos, since our windows and doors don't close solidly enough to prevent a fluid coming and going of such sneakers, and we can't tell them apart. This is one of the Kibokos below.
Well, apparently roosting at our place has its perils. Yesterday, I opened the door to the back hallway. I noticed a little bulge at the intersection of the door and the wall, near the hinges. It appears that one of our Kibokos slid into the seam of the door at precisely the wrong time, when someone decided to close it. He was stuck. And flat. Very, very flat. And therefore not so much in the land of the living anymore, either. Rest in peace, little hippo.

A Chapter Closes

A very long time ago, it seems, we wrote that 2009 would be a banner year for us--having a baby, graduating from residency, selling the house, moving to Africa. Along the way, we've learned some tough but good lessons that God's timing is not our timing. Nothing really happened on our timetable. Maggie was late (OK, only 2 days, but I thought for sure she'd be early!) but a perfect arrival, coming on the day my and Eric's vacation time started. We graduated. At least that happened on time. And the months went by, and no house sale. We prayed. We cried. We made Plan B, and C, and D. We wondered if we had heard God wrong. We wondered why something seemingly so insignificant was delaying our departure to Africa. We moved to the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. We wrote many blogs. (See here, here, and here). And then, stepping out in faith, we bought our tickets to Nairobi without selling the house.

So, in November, we received an offer on our house. We didn't share the news with many people, because the sale was contingent on the bank accepting our short sale, which is basically loan forgiveness to the non-real estate folks. We asked them to ignore the difference between what we owed the bank and what the offer on the home was for. It was exciting to have an offer, but we didn't want to get our hopes up, and were told the process could take up to six months.

Ten days before our departure to Kenya, we received word that the bank had accepted our offer, and all the terms, in record time. We signed the papers the day before we left. Our house closed today. We are speechless with gratitude for God's most perfect provision.

"Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits." --Psalm 103:2

"The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy." --Psalm 126:3

Home Tour Part 3

Part The Third and Final

Home Tour Part 2

Part The Second

Home Tour Part 1

This was initially a single 3-minute video tour of our new home but we couldn't get it loaded, so now it's in three parts. We'll get the other 2 up as soon as internet here allows.

Jason (sans hockey mask) et al

A few weeks ago, a tree in our backyard began it's slow funeral descent - right onto a telephone line. Thus, it had to be dealt with. It took a while to locate a chainsaw. Having been in medical circles during my tenure in southeast Michigan, I've made a lot of great friends, but of the wrong sort if you're looking for a chainsaw. Finally, I happened to ask my friend Rusty Chavey, who lives in the woods and hails from Texas, and despite being a doctor, he had a chainsaw we could use.

So I called up Jason Fader and Dan Rocke, two individuals always up for some faux-masculine activity, and we set to work. I asked Jason how comfortable he was with a chainsaw. "Quite comfortable," he said, "more comfortable than Heather is with me using a chainsaw." And he proved his mettle. Between the three of us, one chainsaw, and a host of less powerful tools, the tree (and a few other branches that we decided were in the way, once we really got going) was dealt with speedily. And no one was injured (except the tree, R.I.P.). I'm now thinking of starting a medical therapeutics trial where men with low testosterone levels are treated by taking a chainsaw to a huge pile of logs.

Shock of Spring

After a long Ann Arbor winter (and this year, with the highest snowfall in recorded history), that spring would come at all comes as a shock. We all knew with our minds that spring would come, but our surprise at its advent just shows that our hearts doubted nonetheless. Amazing phenomenon. Here's the very first flower to bloom in our yard. Don't worry, when I picked it, there were others blooming, so I didn't return the yard to a completely denuded state.

What in the world are we doing?

All I know is that there's no leaking anymore. I guess that means we did it right. 3 days with no shower was interesting. Not exactly novel for us, but interesting nonetheless.