Beautiful Haiti

I think one of my favorite things about our recent trip to Haiti (yes, I know I said I wasn't going to blog about work...) was finding the unexpected - everywhere. This was my first trip there and my mind was full of images of disaster, rubble, poverty... and mangos. I'd heard from friends who were involved in the post-earthquake disaster relief that it was very hot and they had to bathe in DEET because of all the mosquitos.

So it was mind-blowing, after flying into Port-au-Prince (where it was indeed very hot, and the airport reminded me of the airport in Barbados) to drive up the mountain into a cloud forest where for the next five days we were COLD.

Ivy, pine trees, lichens, and mist.

The food was amazing. And spicy!

This mosaic was on the side of a school we visited. Gabriel looked at it and said "Mom, that says Sas!" So, he is beginning to read!

We spent one day at this gorgeous beach, then went to Desarmes (Dezarm) to see an agroforestry project. Another amazing place was this gorge - cool and, well, gorgeous, though sadly littered with trash. It went on and on, curving through the rocks.

You hear so much about deforestation in Haiti. And yes, there are barren hillsides everywhere. But there are also lots of trees.

Beautiful.

abbreviated trip report

We just got back from a fantastic trip to Haiti, for regional leadership meetings. After the four days of meetings we had a day at the beach, and then a three-day learning tour in Desarmes. I haven't downloaded my photos yet but will do soon. I thought before going that Haiti might remind me of Guyana, or the Caribbean coast of Colombia, but it doesn't at all - for one thing everyone was speaking Creole, and it just has a different vibe overall.

Coming back the cold and altitude hit me pretty hard and I was pretty wiped out yesterday. Now just trying to catch up with everything here after being gone for 10 days!

Knitting again!

I recently finished this cable-knit wrap/poncho, a long strip with one end sewn to the side of the other end. It turned out exactly how I was picturing it in my head which is... rare! I love it so much I'm thinking of making it again in different colors.

Knitting, and having multiple projects on the needles at the same time, profoundly increases my sense of normalcy and wellbeing. This is so much more than a wrap.

Mixing it up

I think I enjoy playing with Legos almost as much as the kids do.

My favorite thing is how they mix together different kinds of toys into these elaborate long dramas of love and war.

And creating fantastical creatures they call "Mixels," after a line of Lego monsters that can be re-combined in different ways.

We never really get tired of making these!

Siblings

These aren't really the best quality photos but I was just thinking about how glad and thankful I am for how our kids are learning to play together. They really only fight if they are tired, hungry, or thirsty. Otherwise they just love to play for long periods of time imagining worlds together - worlds of pirates and fairies, heroes and villains, rescue pups and other fantastical creatures.

Giant ice cream with a cherry on top

Gabriel loves to "direct" the drama, while Valerie either goes along, adds her own layers to the story, or contests his pronouncements. It's really fascinating to listen to them negotiate their different ideas about what should go down.

Hugs at church in the US

I remember at some point in high school or college, I realized that my sister and I shared a unique perspective - nobody else in my world experienced all the same places that I had, from a child's point of view. I can see the same dynamic developing with Valerie and Gabriel. It will be a lifelong treasure.

Quick Note

We are going to be out of the country for about a week, and I don't know what our internet connectivity will be like, so I've scheduled several posts to go up while we're away. Enjoy!

Retreat on the Coast

We just got back from our team retreat on the Coast, it was a lovely 4 days of sunshine and water.

This is the same place we went 2 years ago, in Coveñas, and it is beautiful.

The kids LOVED the pool. They were less sanguine about the ocean but did play in the waves a bit.

I knit most of a sock with this yarn! We had this balcony room overlooking the sea.

City

View from our kitchen window in the morning

This is by far the biggest city we have ever lived in. I felt after returning from the US, though, that it's starting to grow on me.

Parque Simon Bolivar

There are some truly beautiful places in the city, and it is possible to connect to the cycles of nature even here.

View from our kitchen window after dark

At the same time, it's a really big, dirty city. Even the pigeons are unappealing to me and I really don't understand why people feed them...

Central plaza 

There is so much air pollution and traffic. But there are also sunsets and rainbows.

View of Monserrate from our neighborhood

There are parks with playgrounds everywhere (although you have to be careful of all the broken glass left behind by drunken university students, and dog poop).

Local park

The one place in this city that I feel all warm and fuzzy about is our office.

Flower blooming outside our office

Every big procession, parade, or protest goes by here.

Soccer parade outside our office

Regardless of Terry's and my mixed feelings about "Bog," the kids love it here and tell us from time to time that they plan to live here forever. They were beside themselves with happiness to be back after our time in the States (which they also enjoyed a lot). From their perspective, it's home.

Parque de los novios - boats for rent!

Meta: Reboot

I've been thinking about updating this blog and resuming a regular blogging schedule. I think about this probably several times a week. If I blogged every time I thought about blogging, you'd all have something to read on a regular basis. So then I started wondering what is holding me back, and I figured it out (I think).

Bear with me as I go a little meta.

The first rule of blogging is that blogging about blogging is boring. But I need to do this to get unstuck.

The second rule of blogging is never blog about your work. While a lot of people in my organization do blog about their work, and although doing so is considered a great tool for promoting the work of our organization and bringing attention to serious advocacy issues, for some reason I feel very resistant to the idea of flipping this into an advocacy or PR blog.

Blogs have genres; this started as a knitting blog and then migrated into mom-blog territory when I had kids. I feel like the golden age of the blog was when we lived in Albania and I used this space as an online diary for documenting our experience there as well as milestones in the children's development - we were so far from our families, that it was an important tool for connecting with them. So in that sense it became an expat mommy blog.

So why isn't it still? When we moved to Colombia, I moved into a new role in leadership, sharing the national director position with my husband. I was still writing my dissertation as well. The first 18 months here were a long, dark haul of fairly intense stress because of the wave amplification effect of these three processes - adjusting to the job, trying to finish the dissertation, adapting to a new country and culture. All this while caring for our kids in their own processes of adaptation and adjustment.

About 6-8 months ago I started to come out of that dark hole. But in the meantime I fell out of the habit of blogging. I didn't have time, I didn't have energy, I didn't know what to say... Honestly, I didn't really want to write about the hard parts of living here. It was too personal, and this is - ultimately - a public blog.

Now that I have the time and energy again, I still don't know what to say. I can write about the kids, our pets, our neighborhood, the city we live in... I don't know how to write about our work. Because our job title is literally to be representatives of our organization in Colombia, I'm perhaps hyper-aware of how I am representing that work on my blog (remember that second rule of blogging...?)

I was thinking recently about something I heard a memoirist say (and I paraphrase): remember when you are telling your story that you are the narrator, not the protagonist.

So, with that aphorism in mind, I'm going to give it another shot here. I'm going to narrate our lives here, knowing that the narration is always partial, perspectival, incomplete. I might end up writing about our work from time to time. We'll see how it goes.

Reboot

We are 30 days from the new year, and I think it's time to resurrect my blog.

30 days ago, we marked 2 years in Colombia with MCC. The time has gone so fast, and the kids have grown so much. Valerie finished her first year in "big kids' school." I am so proud of her for facing a lot of fears, and learning so very much! Gabriel had a good year in preschool, he survived his sister moving up to a new school, and continues to expand his Spanish vocabulary daily.

We acquired two guinea pigs.

More stories coming soon.

My little monkey turned 4!

So more than a month later I'm finally catching up with some current 4-year-old Gabriel photos...

(he's also wearing my knee-high boots)

helping Dad make pancakes for breakfast

siempre un payaso!

"GOL-OMBIA!"

As soon as he saw the cake he ran and got me those candles to put on it

Current favorite toy: "Caterpillar Power!" (This was in Sogamoso on our team retreat)

Every single day, he lights up my life.

more links

And here are some blogs written by other MCC country reps, my peers.

Michael and Melissa work in Guatemala with their two little girls. Michael was an MK in Peru a "few" years ago. Scroll down to see a couple pictures of Terry and Valerie taken during our Rep meetings in Bolivia in March :-)

Jenny and Jake work in Nicaragua with their three kids. We met them in leadership orientation almost two years ago!

Nearly all the MCC country reps in Latin America are new, having started soon after we did. I think there are two "veteran" families (Haiti and Bolivia). So it's been comforting to be able to get together once a year, share stories and recognize our own learning curves in their accounts. Especially those with young children.

For when I don't post for a long time...

A number of people on my team here have blogs. Interestingly, they are nearly North American and female (with the exception of one married male who co-blogs with his wife). Here are links to all the ones I could remember/find at the moment, with a little blurb about each blogger.

The Llama Diaries
Hailing from the Yukon, Anna spent two years working with MCC in a displaced community on the Atlantic Coast; she now lives in Bogotá and she regularly posts thoughtful, in-depth and often poetic pieces about life as an expat in Colombia.

Latin American Learnings
Bekah is a political advocacy junkie, also Canadian, working out of our Bogotá office as our "Connecting Peoples" person. She's also a fellow Lord of the Rings nut although you won't see any hobbits on her blog. (Oh well!)

Xtina's Crossing
Kristina is yet another Canadian blogging from our office - she works with the Mennonite World Conference and is a social media maven. She's also very handy with a crochet hook, so, a woman after my own heart.

From I to We

Larisa also works on the Atlantic Coast; previously, she spent two years with MCC's Seed program in a rural community and is now doing local-level advocacy work on a more regional level. She doesn't post often, but when she does it's definitely worth reading. 

Colombi-Eanes
Giles and Amy live in the sweltering-hot Chocó region on the Pacific Coast, the first North American MCCers placed there. It's an absolutely fascinating place and I love reading their reflections on living and working with the church's social ministry (cacao, HIV/AIDS prevention, and more) projects.
Their most recent post has a photo of me in it - good luck if you can spot me though :-)

Head Pointed Toward the Sun, Feet Moving Forward
Lani is a current Seeder living and working on the Atlantic Coast in a community called Libertad. She posts great stories about

Seed Colombia

All ten young people participating in our 2-year Seed program also post on a shared blog; here you'll find perspectives from 10 different points of view on living and working alongside the Anabaptist social missions here in Colombia. Half our Seeders are male, and half are from the Global South, so here you'll get a very diverse perspective on our lives and work in Colombia.

Enjoy!

Little Yarns

Last night Gabriel walked with me to the neighborhood grocery store, just after the rise of the full moon.* He looked up at the little pin-prick stars above and said "Mom, the stars are little tiny hedgehogs, and the moon is a ball of chocolate for them to eat!"

Did I write here about Chetten Mall? According to the kids, Chetten Mall is on the other side of outer space. You can only get there in a rocket or space shuttle. There is pizza at Chetten Mall but no trees or grass. There are mechanical animals to ride on. Ogwerts do not go to Chetten Mall (duh! They live in the rain forest!).

Valerie has developed a fascination with thinking and talking about death and heaven, talking about it pretty much every day. It was kind of kicked off by the kids seeing a dead pigeon on the street near our house. They were grossed out and fascinated, and not a little worried. They asked lots of questions about what happened to the pigeon, and where it went, etc. etc. Gabriel got over it a few days later but Valerie has been mulling over all these existential questions, I guess it's been about a month now? All kids go through this stage, right?

* Can I just stop to express one of my pet peeves? And that is people who don't understand the phases of the moon. The very first My Little Pony episode describes the moon rising when night begins, and setting at dawn to give ascendancy to the sun. Well, sure, for maybe 3 nights around the full moon, but not at any other time during its cycle! Why don't people realize that the moon rises an hour later every night? Is our society so disconnected from the natural cycles of the earth???

a bunch of pictures

A lot happened in May ~ We celebrated V's 6th birthday (at Sunday School)

 V. started "Transición" (between preschool and 1st grade, so sort of like Kindergarden) at a new school ~ she loves it so much, she says she wants to go there "forever!"

She decided she wanted to start wearing dresses! They do not slow her down in the least!

 I managed some knitting during some long meetings...

 (my own improvised pattern)

 The kids were generally awesome!