It came to my attention that I missed mentioning a couple of birthdays in our 2023 updates. Whoops! Saeryn turned 9 on April 1st, and celebrated with several friends at a nearby kids’ play area & ice cream shop. Gwennie turned 12 on August 11th, and celebrated with donuts and candy (pictured), and friends (not pictured). We’re thankful for the way God has given us family here in Zambia to love, bless, and enjoy our kids!
August & September 2023 – Trip to Ontario & Iowa, & College Tours
Towards the end of August, I (Jody) was able to travel to North America for a couple of weeks. It was a bit of a whirlwind trip, but full of all kinds of good things, from time with my parents on their farm in Ontario, to a Sunday morning at Faith Church in Pella, to a dig through our stored belongings to retrieve books and homeschooling materials. It was a delight and refreshment to have meaningful time with close friends, enjoying good coffee, good talks, and a good trip to the library! Of course I checked out more books than I could possibly read in the few days I was there, just because I could. (Thanks for returning them, Michelle 😉 )
Next up: mother-son bonding time! It was a gift to me, and so good for my heart, to spend time with Evan and Graeme as we drove around Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan to visit several colleges. We had great fun on the road together, saw and learned a lot, and then visited even more dear friends along the way back to Ontario. After a family reunion on Labor Day, Graeme and I flew back to Lusaka, and Evan flew back to Iowa, where he had work lined up, and a home with our close friends near Pella. It was hard to say goodbye to him, even while being proud of who he is becoming and what he is accomplishing. We are so thankful for the ways God has been providing for Evan as we navigate this time of living far, far away from each other.
Click on any photo below to open the full-screen slideshow & see captions.
October 2023 – Cape Town Thrive Retreat
October brought Graeme’s 18th birthday! And on a night cool enough to enjoy a campfire together, too. This is one of our favorite things to do at home on a weekend.
Later that month, I (Jody) had the gift of a trip to Cape Town, South Africa to participate in a Thrive retreat. Thrive ministers to women in missions, and this experience was easily one of the most meaningful and precious of this season in my life. The depth of understanding amongst the other women there, and the compassionate love and care that was poured out on us is hard to express in words. Also: Cape Town is astonishingly beautiful! I experienced deep joy, resting in God’s provision, and I am thankful for all the things that came together for this opportunity to become reality for me.
Click on any photo below to open the full screen slideshow & see captions.
November 2023 – South Luangwa Park with Oma & Opa
In November, Evan turned 20 – yay! – but without us – not yay! Celebrating Thanksgiving (and later Christmas) without him was also quite different – by which I mean not my favorite. Even so, for his birthday, we celebrated Evan as best we could from afar, with a big thank-you to my friend Jonie for helping with cake and gifts delivery!
Our family’s next exciting November thing was that my (Jody’s) parents were able to travel to Africa! My Mom had dreamed of a trip like this long before we ever even considered moving here, which made this time all the sweeter. What a gift from the Lord. They first went to Malawi, and spent several days with their friends Tom and Sandra, who serve in pastoral training, discipleship, and education there. Then from Lilongwe, the four of them traveled to South Luangwa National Park in eastern Zambia, where we met them (having driven up and across from Lusaka) for a several days of relaxing and prime wildlife viewing! We stayed in a lovely home at the edge of the park, and reveled in God’s amazing creation. It was great to get to know my parents’ friends, and hear about their life and work in Malawi as well.
Click on any photo below to open the full screen slideshow & see captions.
December 2023 – Mosi oa Tunya, (Victoria Falls) in Zambia and Zimbabwe
As fun as the sightseeing and traveling were, it was also quite a treat to have my parents around for some everyday life in Lusaka. The timing of their visit meant they could play Sinterklaas for the kids, come with us to a candlelight Christmas service, and have an early birthday party for Norah, who turned 6 this year.
You can’t have a trip to Zambia without seeing Victoria Falls, so of course we took Opa and Oma there – and this time we decided to take a walk across the border into Zimbabwe to see the Falls from that side as well! You can walk along the edge (sometimes *right* along the edge!) of the gorge for quite some distance, and get quite wet in the process. Even now in the dry season, there is much more water and mist when seen from Zimbabwe than from Zambia’s side. It was truly spectacular. The mist was a welcome relief, as this time of year is very, very hot in Livingstone/Victoria Falls. The other ways we coped with the heat? Making plenty of visits to the best ice cream shop we’ve found in Zambia: Da Canton, and taking a swim at the top of the falls! Oma and Opa took Graeme, Torin, Bronwyn, and Gwennyth on the walk across the top of the falls to swim in Devil’s Pool.
A few videos from this trip:
Hello friends and family!
“So much for more regular posts on this blog,” I realize to my chagrin, seeing Feb. 23rd, 2023 at the top of my “Recently Published” list.
2023 was quite a year for us, logistically, physically, mentally, emotionally – the works – as we have continued to learn, adapt and live into our work and home here. It was also a year in which we were able to do some traveling, both within and outside of Zambia. All along the way, through ups and downs, in plans coming together, and in plans changing, God has been with us, and God has been good to us. With thankfulness for His faithfulness, we share here a kind of summary of what life looked like for our family over the past year. (In which I make up for not posting anything for over a year with this behemoth and its similarly sized sequel.)
March 2023 – Resonate East and Southern Africa Team Retreat
What a delight to go back to Cathedral Peaks in the Drakensberg of South Africa! The fellowship with colleagues who have become dear friends was a blessing to all of us. We were especially thankful that our older kids had meaningful (and fun!) time with peers – other “missionary kids” with similar life experiences: living in a new or different country and culture from the one your parents grew up in, navigating friendships across an ocean, and having “home” mean different things depending on who is asking. It continues to be something of an unexpected journey to parent third culture kids, and we’re grateful not to be doing it alone.
Click on any one of these photos to view them full screen slide-show style.
April 2023 – Kitwe and Solwezi
We traveled north and west into the Copperbelt province of Zambia. It was a joy to celebrate a friend’s wedding on Easter weekend, visit a chimpanzee sanctuary, and connect with friends that had recently moved up that way, while seeing and appreciating some new-to-us parts of the country, including some thousands-of-years-old pigmented rock etchings. We even made a bunch of new friends who excitedly and insistently welcomed us into a birthday celebration they were having on an afternoon boat cruise around a lake in Kitwe.
(Scroll through the slideshow below using the arrows on either side of the photos.)
May 2023 – Mother’s Day & Giraffes at Lilayi Preserve in Lusaka
Click on any one of these photos to view them full screen slide-show style.
It was surprising to see this giraffe’s head popping up in the tall grass – you do not see them lying down very often!
June 2023 – Lake Kariba, Camp Life Clinic
About a 3 hour drive (depending on so many things) from Lusaka to the south is Lake Kariba, By volume (or perhaps by potential volume – it’s very low right now), it is the largest man-made lake in the world. It is down the Zambezi River from Victoria Falls, and was created as a reservoir for hydroelectric power generation. Across the lake from Zambia is Zimbabwe, which also uses the lake water to generate power, and there is a busy fishing industry on the lake to harvest the tiny kapenta, (sometimes called Tanganyika sardine) a very popular type of fish you may remember from an earlier post here about the grocery store. Other lake inhabitants include tiger fish, hippos, and crocodiles. Lake Kariba is also a popular vacation area, and we enjoyed a few days near the town of Siavonga on the lake as a family in June. It was partly a celebration of completing our homeschool year, and partly a time to savor being together before Evan and Graeme left for jobs in North America.
Later in June, the kids and I (Jody) had the privilege of being able to serve at Family Legacy’s Camp Life over the course of several weeks, assisting with health screenings for the day campers, as well as playing and worshipping with together with them.
Click on any one of these photos to view them full screen slide-show style.
~
July 2023 – Family Time, Trip to Botswana & Livingstone
Big highlights for this year were a couple of visits from family, first in July and later in November! Ryan’s parents came with his older brother and family from Ontario, Canada in July, and were able to spend about 2 weeks with us. We showed them some of our favorite places in and around Lusaka, traveled to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls, and from there into Botswana for some wildlife viewing as well. It was a lot of fun to see our kids enjoy the rare gift of time with cousins, and it was satisfying to feel that we had made ourselves at home enough here to host with some competence.
Another time of fun and celebration was the joint birthday party Bronwyn (turned 14!) and Torin (turned 16!) threw, inviting a number of their friends to a game center near our home. It was evidence of God’s provision of community and joy in their lives here in Lusaka.
Part 2 coming up shortly …
Many times, the first questions our family and friends from “back home” (which for us encompasses various parts of Canada, the USA, and Europe) have for us include some variation of “What is it like living in Africa?” It’s a totally understandable question to ask, given that not many have had the opportunity to actually try it out, and given that the stories and events that make the news tend to focus on places and situations far outside what is probably familiar to many North Americans. With that in mind, and with over a year of living here under our belts now, we want to show and tell you a little bit of what in fact it is like for our particular family living in this particular part of Africa.
First of all, we live in a city (see Lusaka’s Wikipedia entry here), and we have found this to be a significant and sometimes difficult adjustment in itself, coming from a small town in mostly-rural Iowa. Everything is generally noisier and busier in a city (maybe especially in an African city) than in the suburbs and small towns of North America. Lusaka has a population of well over 3 million people, and has both the benefits and challenges you might expect any growing city to experience. Infrastructure is an ongoing challenge; for example, in late January, our electricity supply increased to 16 hours per 24-hour period, meaning there would be 2 4-hour periods when we did not have power. (I should note that I am using these numbers fairly loosely, as that’s how Zesco, the electrical company, also seems to understand them.😄) Yes, I did say this was an increase – for the several weeks prior, power had been about half on and half off, in either 6 or 12 hour increments. This is a seasonal problem, due in part to low water levels in Lake Kariba where Zambia’s main generating stations are located. The rainy season is here now, and we hope that there will be a general uptick in generating capacity going forward. Still, even in “good power” times, we certainly experience more outages, low-voltage periods, or unexplained electrical weirdness than we were used to in Iowa. Like many (but certainly not most!) people here, we are thankful to have back-up power systems in our home, such as batteries and inverter, a generator, or solar power options. This helps a lot with a general feeling of stability, as well as the obvious things like cooking, or homeschooling that requires technology, or even literally keeping the lights on. It can be dark in the house this time of year, with so much cloudy weather even when it’s not raining.
Another infrastructure challenge is the road system. Lusaka has lots of paved roads, with lots and lots of potholes, missing pieces of pavement, collapsed shoulders (or just no shoulder at all in the first place) plaguing many of these roads. It has plenty of unpaved roads too, and these can become quite an obstacle course during rainy season. You know you’ve adjusted to this when your description of the route to a new friend’s house includes “we only bottomed out once, and didn’t get stuck anywhere!!” Here is the current situation on campus, where our laneway turns off the Justo Mwale loop:
Traffic in general is not usually too difficult to deal with, even when there is a lot of it, as most people don’t tend to speed. There certainly are times and places in Lusaka where you know you will be stuck waiting, or going very very slowly, like in any city. Minibuses though seem to be a rule unto themselves, and we laugh at the ones that have sayings like “Judge Not” or “God Forgives” painted across the back or even at the top of the windshield. They almost all have some kind of phrase or name or other remark painted on them, sometimes logical, sometimes nothing we can make much sense of. We have not really tried out the public transit options here in Lusaka, which includes taxis and larger buses as well as the many many minibuses (mostly 12-14 passenger vans). We do have our own van, and while the minibuses may drive quickly when they’re actually driving, the frequent stops and various routes will make a trip take much longer than we could drive it ourselves. They’re also usually very full, (read: overflowing, sometimes with the back hatch not able to close) and I’d just as soon not cram my groceries and my children into them, since I don’t have to. Ironically, as we drive a large van, it is very common for us to see people assuming we are a minibus ourselves, as they try to flag us down for a ride. Maybe one of these times we’ll stop for them, and see if they actually would get in with all of us. I suspect they would be surprised when we opened the doors.
Shopping in Lusaka can be really easy, and it can be really frustrating, even just for regular grocery items. We have plenty of basic supermarkets here, plus some nice specialty shops, butcheries, and bakeries, as well as the ubiquitous roadside vendors and many, many market areas, and yet sometimes you cannot find celery anywhere, even though you had no problem getting some just last week. Sometimes the milk shelf at Shoprite has all low-fat milk, but next time it might be all full fat. Most of the time though, we are able to find most of what we want to buy, even things that are familiar to us, and if not the same, at least similar to what we would buy and eat in North America. Sometimes I think that the differences can be more American vs British than American vs African, in fact, especially in terms of brands available. Of course, there are things in the shops we go to here that you won’t find in most Iowan grocery stores, such as kapenta,
or your staple 25 kilo bags of nshima (finely ground maize to make a sort of thick porridge). Right outside the supermarket (or any store, or any bus stop, or speed bump, or … you get the idea), you’re likely to find several vendors on the curb offering things like dried fish, dried caterpillars, roasted maize, bananas, tomatoes, pineapples, mangoes, and more.
One of the benefits of city living here is that restaurants abound in Lusaka, and it is not difficult to find Indian, American, Chinese, Lebanese, Turkish, Italian, Nigerian, or Thai food, as well as places with mostly Zambian dishes. For a land-locked country, the seafood offerings also seem pretty good. Price ranges seem similar to what we were used to in Iowa. Almost anything can be delivered to your house, even if the restaurant itself doesn’t offer delivery – there are motorcycle couriers available all over the city, many just for food deliveries.
Other shopping, such as for household items, sporting equipment, furniture, hardware, clothing, etc … can be a similar experience as for groceries. If we can’t find something, it’s usually because we don’t know who to ask. From power tools and appliances, to furniture both second-hand and brand new, custom-made, to clothing either boutique, department-store, or second-hand from market vendors (plus any number of tailors and dressmakers to make whatever you might be looking for) to stationery, toys, and books(!!), almost anything can be acquired if you have the time to look for it, aren’t super picky about selection, and of course have the money to pay for it.
(Above pictures: Manda Hill Mall and a weekend market in the parking lot of Arcades Mall; both are not far from our place in Lusaka.)
I want to mention one significant factor to consider as to whether food, clothing, and other goods and services prices seem similar to what we were used to in North America, or at least not always a lot higher. While this may be the case, it is also true that the average income in Zambia is not at all similar to North American incomes. In Lusaka, salaries will have a huge range, but we know some general workers who are paid around $100/month USD. See also here. Considering that, we know that many of the things we personally might buy without much thought are completely inaccessible for many Zambians.
It is interesting to observe prices and the wide range, especially when comparing local items to imports, and of course the range in quality. We are thankful to have been able to find most of the food and clothes we have needed here at fairly reasonable prices (for us), with some things costing more than you might pay in Iowa, especially if you are looking for higher quality, but others costing less. Guess how much we paid for this stack of 60 eggs, for example:
(Scroll to see exchange rate at the time)
Having experienced an entire calendar year here in Lusaka has made us aware of how much of life in Iowa reflected the seasons, and specifically the weather of those seasons. Things like outdoor swimming, lawn games in the backyard, and air conditioning in the car are no longer limited to a few summer months. The school calendars also tend to be more year-round, with more frequent, but shorter breaks than the long summer break we took in Iowa. There is a contrast between the dry and rainy seasons, but it’s definitely not like going from shoveling snow in February to hot and hazy July afternoons at the pool. You see the seasons changing here in the bewildering amount of dust coming in the house even through closed windows (dry season), or in the ever-present smell of new green things and damp earth, and even more produce for sale along the street (rainy season).
Below: last July – a dry-season hike in the “winter.”
Whenever I think of changing seasons, and notice myself adapting to (or coping with) change, I can hear in my mind my pastor from years ago, at the church I grew up in, quoting Isaiah 40:8:
“The grass withers, and the flower fades,
but the word of our God shall stand forever.”
So, it turns out that there are actually many aspects of life that easily carry over from Iowa to Zambia for us. We buy groceries at a supermarket with a credit card, or we withdraw cash from an ATM to buy produce at a market stall. We have dental appointments, eye exams, and urgent care clinic visits, and usually notice very little difference from what might have been our North American experience for the same things. We sing familiar hymns in church, and walk to a friend’s house so our kids can play together in the afternoon. We walk the dog, call a plumber, and take out the trash. Just, with all of these things, sometimes – most times – there will be an interaction, or a situation, (not necessarily positive or negative – just “different”) a feeling of uncertainty or the unknown, that never quite lets us forget where we are, and where we aren’t. We’re at home here, yet we talk about our family and friends “back home.” It’s the same, but different. It is a vivid reminder of our place in this world – anywhere in the world – as Christians: because we are part of the body of Christ, we can find home anywhere among other believers, and when we feel unsettled, out of place, or homesick, we can rest in the knowledge that our true and final home is not this world.
~ Please feel free to ask us questions if you are curious about life in Lusaka! We still often feel very new here, and won’t ever be anything like local experts, but we’ll gladly share our experiences and observations.
Sometimes it is easy to forget that what seems like normal life to us might be interesting to our family and friends that live far away, namely, not in Africa. I was realizing that we haven’t posted that many pictures or written many blog posts about our lives and work here in Lusaka compared with how much we were able to share about our time in Kenya in 2016. I think that demonstrates part of how a short-term sabbatical is different from an indefinite-term move of house and home and all that. I feel like we have been much busier this time around – working to put down roots and establish friendships, routines, and a whole new normal. Furnishing and fixing up our home has been a big time-consumer, and of course we also have homeschooling to accomplish, activities for the kids to first research and set up, and then fit into our week, a church home or homes to find, join, and participate in, and so on … all part of any big move, I’m sure, but to a greater degree in terms of time and energy required in our situation. All that said, we have had a chance to do some really cool things, both recreational, and ministry related, outside of Ryan’s work of teaching at Justo Mwale University. Here are a couple of examples.
We have gotten to know a wonderful ministry here in Lusaka called Impact One Initiative, and enjoyed several afternoons visiting their library in N’gombe neighborhood. Here we can read to and with the many, many children that come by after school. They love to sing and play games with us as well, and this has been a fun way for our kids especially to meet and play with Zambian children.
A good friend we have made through church here manages a children’s home just outside of Lusaka. There are several house mothers caring for around 20 children, ages 1-16, who have lost one or both parents, and whose extended families (if they have any) need extra support to care for them. We were able to help our friend in sorting around 600 items of clothing she had sourced from a used clothing market as 100lb bales.
A few other things we’ve been up to include hanging out with our pets, playing games at home, visiting baby elephants, attending Christmas concerts in a beautiful church, a caroling sing-along at a restaurant, and swimming at the top of Victoria Falls.
Don’t miss scrolling through the above slideshow!
Stop By Sometime 