Day 10

There are people from all over the world doing amazing, selfless work with vision, initiative, and very few resources.

Gratitude for little things is very important.

A positive attitude can go a long way in making a tough situation better.

Challenges in the Mission field are never what you expect. There are always surprises, good and difficult.

Day 9

"Baaing" goats sound like crying babies outside your window.

People can carry anything on their head/back. We've seen mattresses, backpacks, desks for school, huge basket of live chickens (seems dangerous), side of beef... you name it!

People eat all the parts of the animal. They sell the cow leg from the knee down with hoof and all, eyeballs, skull, chicken head and feet, as well as many organs which we cannot identify. In Ghana they even ate the chicken bones - probably a good source of calcium!

Day 8

Roosters do not only crow at dawn. We actually don't think they can tell time at all as they seem to crow at any hour and many days begin at 4 am. After you've lived in a place for a while, you stop hearing them so that is a good thing.

Bimbo is an unusual name for a bread company in Guatemala.

Day 7

The water filter can amazingly make black water, clear.

Many days, plunging the toilet is a more than a once a day event.

Day 6

Rain in the tropics is impressive, as is the thunder and lightening.

One can get a flea infested house without having a pet. The fleas come from the squirrels and rats that live between the ceiling and our roof.

We've also seen beautiful red tomatoes growing with plastic pesticide containers strewn around the base of the plants. So that's how they become so red and delicious...!?

Day 5

Dogs and squirrels eat avocados, a delicacy that we bet most dogs and squirrels never get to sample in the US.

You know that your children's Spanish is better than yours when your kids tell you not to speak to them in Spanish in public or when you look to your children to tell you a word or how to say something.

If soap sits around long enough, it turns black and becomes almost unrecognizable as soap. We found this in the first house we lived in in Guatemala.

Day 4 and 2 more...

Moths can be the size of small birds. You find this out when you have the brilliant idea of putting a new light socket over your kitchen sink so that you can see better at night and the bird-sized moth scares the begeezers out of you.

It is not a good day when you wake up with what you think is rain coming from the ceiling onto your head and pillow only to realize that it is not raining. When you consider what could be happening, you realize that it is actually urine coming through the ceiling boards from either a squirrel or a rat that live between the ceiling and your roof.

Day 3

Head lice can be incredibly easy to get and very difficult to get rid of.

When you accompany your kids on their first school field trip to the "beach," you encounter this as the dock.

Day 2

When there is a lot of bat guano in your ceiling and it rains really hard, it comes down in big black streaks on your walls all the way down to the floor.

Shade grown coffee does grow in the shade, but this shaded field is also often littered with garbage.

When you get a double yolk in one egg, it is cool. When you get it in a second, it is really interesting. When you get it in a dozen, it is unnerving. What has that chicken been eating?

10 days and 26 ways

Over the next 10 days, we will be sharing 26 things we've learned or only experienced in the missions. 

1. You know you've lived in the Missions for a while when you tell a story and your kids ask you, "What's a comforter?" or "What's a driveway?"

2. Cars and trucks that look like they could never be functional, somehow function with nearly flat tires, so many people in the bed of the pickup that the back bumper is just a couple inches off the ground, missing fenders, broken windshields, lurching movements, and unsettling sounds.