A (not so) Normal Day

Yesterday (Wednesday) we woke up ready to continue our quest of figuring out “normal” life here in Haiti with 2 babies and an orphanage.  Our teams left this past Saturday (click here to read about these great groups) and we took a couple of days to recoup, so we are just getting back to our life here.  Today we woke up ready to spend the day doing some work online (we just got fibre optic internet installed at our house and it is great so far), spend time with the kids, make sure the tutors are doing their work correctly, meet with a couple of the kids about various things, make sure Sophie and Elijah are adjusting well, and then end the day with service.  Instead, this is the day we ended up having:

• Elijah wakes up at 5:45 and so do we.
• Lener comes to the door around 6:30 to go into Port for a few things because he couldn’t go to Port Au Prince on Monday or Tuesday due to some gang activity on one of the main routes.
• We eat breakfast at around 7:45.
• Jess tries to get some work done finishing up our team packets when a local politician, his brother, and 2 other men show up at our home.  They tell me that there is a little 8 year old boy whose parents have recently passed away and is living with his aunt who cannot take care of him and want to know if we can take him.  I’m not going to share the whole story right now (maybe later), but I ended up meeting the little boy and his aunt and we talked for over an hour about things and ended by saying they will come again on Monday to talk more.
• I come back inside, Jess wants to sit down with Sophie to do “school” and I end up taking another 30 minute phone call about some things going on in the states.  It was actually a really good conversation with our Board President.
• We eat lunch and get Sophie and Elijah down for a nap, and I am going to go down to the kids’ house to make sure our 1:30-4:30 studying and tutoring time are still going well.  Unfortunately, our tutors did not show up until over an hour after they were supposed to be there.  They are in college in Port and ran into some traffic, so there was  reason.  But instead of me going down at 1:20 and coming back at 1:45, I was there until after 3:00.  
• Our mechanic shows up at our door and tells us he is going to the states from this Saturday until May 2, and he is still trying to find the parts to repair the blown head gasket in our black truck hopefully before he leaves.
• Somewhere along the line, Jess took an important phone call from the states as well.
• And in the midst of everything else, Elijah started walking!

These are just some of the reasons that it can be difficult to figure out a “normal” life here.  We are in the process of setting “hours of operation” at our home so that people (other than our kids of course) know when they can and cannot knock on our door.  I mentioned before that we got this new internet installed and it should help us immensely with the work that we need to accomplish here.  We also know that there will always be days like yesterday, it was just a little discouraging that it happened on the day we were trying to get back to normal life here.  Please be in prayer for us as we learn to balance our family time, time with our kids, work time, managing employees time, and everything else that goes into living here in the correct way.  We do not want to get burned out here and we also do not want to close ourselves off.  It is definitely a delicate balance and we would appreciate you praying for this specifically.  I had forgotten how crazy things can happen and how stressful things can get here.  I do understand that it is like this no matter where you live, but it is really easy here to lose family time and rest time at the expense of all of the needs surrounding you and while this may seem like a noble thing, it can actually make you much less effective.  Please pray that we find and maintain that balance.