Maness’s Birthday

George and Flossy returned from Blantyre this morning, and George brought a surprise for us… sundried mice from his home village in Kasungu! He has been talking about these mice for quite sometime now, as he really likes them, and has already set the dinner date for this Thursday. You can bet that I am going to have my camera out ready to catch the action at that meal.

After catching up for a few minutes with George and Flossy we headed off to work at CBF for the first time in a long while. When we arrived at the CBF office, we remembered just how much we missed it. Maness, Elizabeth, Gibson, Ben, Harold, Moses, ad Thwango were all excited to see us and they all made sure that they gave us individual hugs. We are so blessed to have such a great family here in Malawi.

We spent the entire morning on our research and entered a lot of data… Afternoon came and we were surprised to hear that someone in the office was having a birthday. In fact, this someone was Maness who was turning 28 years old. We decided to be a part of the festivities and purchased Maness a chocolate cake and her favorite food for lunch, pizza.

We spent the lunch hour singing to Maness, cutting the cake, and devouring delicious (I will be honest, it tasted like cardboard) pizza from Pizza Inn. Pizza Inn is the most famous pizza place in Malawi (as it is one of the few) but the pizza is nothing to rave about. One thing Andrew and I have come to realize is that pizza really is a universal food. I have yet to travel to any country in the world where you cannot find a restaurant that sells pizza. Good job Italy (or America, since the pizza definately resembles American pizza more than Italian).

After we celebrated Maness’s birthday we spent a few more hours on our research and then set off for the US embassy so that I could get more pages in my passport. The visit was successful and when I return to the embassy tomorrow, I will have 48 new pages inside. I told Andrew this just means we have to travel more…

(Below: Andrew’s post)

Today was another in office workday, but Kylie and I left early to get some additional passport pages added… To be honest I can’t distinguish whether we did that yesterday or today! Partially a result of writing my blog entries a couple days after the fact… Oops.

Something that’s been reaffirmed to me during our time in Africa is the constant need for effort.

Scripturally we’re admonished not to be slothful or lazy, and that applies to everyday things. If we were to become lazy at work we’d lose our job, or lazy in scripture study we’d lose our faith, etc. being diligent in all things (from work to a marriage) is an important principle.

Even the small things I’m finding are critical for maintaining a good life balance… Guess that means more push-ups now!

Africa has truly been great to us and we’re enjoying the life lessons and experiences.