A visitor

This afternoon Jennifer came into the bedroom and said in dazed voice, “I just found a strange woman in our kitchen…” We are currently living in a SIM compound that was offered to us for two months.  There are three houses in the compound and two gates.  Only one of the other homes is occupied.  Apparently the woman hadn’t noticed Jennifer come into the kitchen as she quietly slid open our back door.  “Oh, is this Krista’s house?” she asked surprised. Jennifer was taken aback and said, “no,” at which point the woman quietly disappeared. (Krista is a SIM missionary who visits the women’s prison regularly.) When Jennifer mentioned it to me I immediately ran to the front gate that is usually unlocked during the day, and it was standing ajar. I crossed the street and asked a neighbours day guard if he’d seen a women come out of our gate. “Yes,” he said, “she ran down the street that way and around the corner.” Feeling my suspicions had been confirmed, I headed back inside. A few minutes later our neighbours were home from school with the children, we explained what had happened. This evening the husband came over to tell us that the girl who is staying with them can’t find her new laptop. He’s feeling terrible because he had been sleeping in the house the whole time.

Jennifer is missing our dog right now. He’d always been a bit of dilemma to us. We’ve never really had a day guard but didn’t worry as long as we had the dog. (A friend of mine has a proverb that goes, “A guard is good. A guard and a dog are better. Just a dog is best.”) With our old dog we never really worried about people coming into the yard like this since everyone was afraid of him. (Except the developmentally challenged boy who seemed to be able to find his way into the driver’s seat of our car—the dog didn’t even bark at him.) What worried us was that he might be scaring off the people we wanted to talk to. We wondered if some of our friends might come more often to visit if they didn’t have to worry about getting past our dog.

That was just kind of the icing on the cake for our day today.  We just got our car back from the garage yesterday but this morning Jennifer couldn’t get it started after getting money at the bank. (The garage had washed down the engine and water got in the spark plugs.) She was getting money to pay the mechanic—the power steering pump was making an awful racket and the mechanic told us someone had put engine oil into. We had it replaced.

It was also the first day of school for both Jennifer and the boys. The boys were both ready to go but school also brings its own stresses.

I’ve managed to lose about fifteen pounds in the first week coming back, at least according to the scales in our house. I’ve been working on cold or flu for the last day or so and Jennifer has had a lot of upset stomach. Hopefully our bodies will transition over to Niger soon. Last night was the first night I was able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour but I think that was just because I wasn’t feeling well.

Yesterday I met with our pastor here. I asked him what he was envisioning for the near future of the church. He said that he felt it was time to look at planting another church. We are meeting tomorrow to talk about how that might happen.