Settling In (and some photos that never made it)

Do I say "transition complete?"  Of course not -- I think I lives will always be marked by transition, but this move to the village is pretty much behind us (I caught myself last night for the first time yearning for the ability to walk down to my neighborhood vegetable market in Tirana with all its variety -- I knew that moment would come).

The timing for our move to the village has been pretty good, overall.  Out of necessity, we needed to wait until after we finished summer school.  During the month of August, ministry programs are on hiatus, so the slower schedule has also proved helpful in keeping our sanity when life was starting to feel a little bit chaotic -- like finding the drill bit under all that pile of a mess on the kitchen table. 

Nathan is turning the space under the stairs into a little office space of sorts.

While we still have a number of things in Tirana (mainly off-season clothing and a few more kitchen items), I think we can say now that we are mostly settled in to our new home (i.e. the kitchen table is finally clear!) and it feels good.  Now we can turn our attention to other matters!

Here the kids occupied themselves with a 'taxi' they made out of a box and the base of Mom's new desk chair.

Other matters like hosting!  The last few days have found folks in our home almost every day.  I'm happy that we've had a couple different young women from the village over for coffee one-on-one's.  These are so important for just 'checking in' on heart and spiritual matters.  (Regretfully I've been bad about pulling out my camera, so here is just one photo):

We've also had some friends and acquaintances in the missionary and expat community over (many are curious about life 'in the village' and what's going on here).   While we want to be intentional in cultivating relationships with our neighbors in the village, we have found the missionary and expat community here to be a wealth of helpful information that help the learning curve not feel so steep.  We are all involved in very different kinds of ministries, too, so it's interesting to see what others are doing.  Again, I don't have pictures from every get together, but here's two from Sunday:  

Above and below -- Ms. Tanja reads a Bible story and the children act it out (Jesus calms the storm -- the children are the scared disciples).

I have been working to back up my photos from this year and found some photos from July that didn't make the blog...

This boy is so serious about his coloring.

I love it when some of the 'bigger kids' come to kids club to help out (and craft time usually requires a lot of help!).  I think it goes to show what it meant to them as children when they took part.

So we had another week where the creative juices were not flowing and we played 'hangman' with words from the Bible lesson, girls vs. boys.  The girls were fewer in number but walloped the boys pretty good.

Except Ellie thought 'hangman' was too violent, so we renamed it 'fisherman'.

It will probably be quiet on the blog for a few more days.  We have an appointment for Reni's next fitting Wednesday morning at 10am.  Given the distance, we are going to spend the night at the apartment tonight in Tirana so we can be 45 minutes closer and not have to leave quite so early for Pogradec. 

On our return trip we will pick up some papers that are ready for us to take to the immigration office and submit those, along with a photocopy of Ellie's old birth certificate (yes, we still wait for word that her records have been corrected in the national registry).  As the days roll by, we want to submit what we've gathered so far, so they know we are working on this in case the August holidays delay Ellie's paperwork even longer and jeopardize our ability to get our documents submitted in time.  Thankfully, we were able to get Reni's birth certificate without any issue.