Our daily lives are starting to develop a bit of a pattern. We wake up about 6:00 am. The girls are pretty independent in getting ready for school, which is great. They sometimes need help making their school lunches as it is much more challenging here to find things that are quick and easy to throw together for lunch. I’ve been making bread in my bread machine, but the girls aren’t real impressed with my attempts at making a healthy whole wheat bread. The recipe isn’t quite right and the bread is pretty dense! Lunch meat is very expensive here so it’s usually tuna, cheese or PB&J; on the bread.

Tim faithfully makes me a cup of coffee to get me started. While that is going on, I check my email and Skype.

Emily feeds the dogs and Sarah, the cat. Emily is responsible for preparing the food for our pets. As dog food is expensive here, Emily cooks a big pot of rice in the evening. Tim mixes a small amount of rice with a little canned dog food which Sarah feeds to Slinky in the evening and the morning. The rest of the rice is mixed with part of a can of dog food and Emily gives it to the dogs in the morning.

Tim and the girls leave for school about 7:15 with a stop on the way to pick up the Solomon Star, (
www.solomonstarnews.com) the local newspaper. They arrive at school about 7:30, which gets Emily there in time for the morning exercise routine in which the kids in her class are expected to participate. Motivation is high to arrive on time because if the kids don’t complete the exercise before school begins, they have to do it during their morning break time when it is much hotter.

After dropping off the girls, Tim heads to our office to attend the morning prayer session with our collegues. After that, Tim will meet with our director and another colleague to discuss our upcoming group conference at the end of the month. During our group conference, all our teams in the Solomons will get together for a week of spiritual feeding and group business.

In between meetings, Tim will be working on email and making plans to meet with one of our national literacy collegues, Francis who happens to be in town this week from the village.

Another house project he is working on is to put in additional power outlets. Since we have had a number of walls removed due to the termite damage, we are taking advantage of the open framework and adding the outlets. Most of the rooms in our house only had one outlet and that doesn’t provide enough for clocks and other appliances. Imported Australian Power outlets a cost almost $25 USD each unless we are willing to put in cheaper ones that are made in Asia.

I’m continuing to work on cleaning the house. The curtains all need washing and some of the bed linens as well. I haven’t tackled washing the walls and ceilings which also needs doing to remove mildew stains. (See photo at right.)

This afternoon I am hosting the expat* ladies Bible Study. The group hasn’t met since late last year, so this is a chance to get together and catch up with each other. We’ll also be discussing what we would like to do in terms of a Bible study this year. (
*expat – short for ‘expatriate’, a person who lives outside their native land. Our group is made up of members of the diplomatic, business and missions communities around the capital city.)

At the moment, I am waiting for the guys with the termite baits to arrive. We can’t hear the termites in the floor anymore. We aren’t sure what that means – probably that they have moved on to some other spot in the house. We hope that we can find a place where they are active to place a bait. We have spotted termites outside the house which we will also target today.

This evening the girls’ school is having ‘Meet the Teacher’ night so Tim and I will attend that. Most nights we are home and enjoy playing games and reading which has been nice.

It’s Sunday morning and I am home alone. We were ready to leave for church when Tim went to find one of the neighbors to sit at the house for security while we were gone. Tim didn’t find anyone, so I stayed home. I find it hard to sit through a church service and not worry about what is happening at the house if we don’t have anyone watching things.

We have a fence surrounding our house with barbed wire at the top. Our two dogs provide a certain degree of security, but not enough to keep someone out. At night, a security man watches our house and the one next to us which belongs to our mission group.

If there is no one at our house during the day, we stop at the neighbors and ask someone to come watch the house. When we return home, we pay them according to the time we have been gone. The neighbors are happy for a little extra income and the peace of knowing the house is being watched while we are gone has been great.

I guess I’ll have to wait until next week to meet baby ‘Martha’ at church.

Some of you may remember our friend Margaret. She is one of the three Solomon Islanders who went to Papua New Guinea for training as literacy trainers. Currently Margaret is coordinating literacy projects in her home province for World Vision. Margaret is in town and today came up for a visit. Margaret was looking for some reading materials in several different languages and wanted to know if we could help her out. Tim will work to find materials for her project.

This afternoon while we were meeting with the Montgomerys, we received a phone call from a man who attended a literacy workshop Martha taught a few years ago for the Baelelea language. Frank said the churches in his area need help in setting up literacy classes for women and he told the women they needed to contact our group. We’ll see where that leads.

Frank also shared that there is a strong interest in literacy in the area and that many have asked for copies of the reading book we trained the teachers to use. It sounds like we need to consider a follow-up workshop in that area.