Minor Setbacks

First of all, happy Easter everyone!!! Sorry that it has been awhile since we we wrote...we have good reasons.

I had two beautiful, long, descriptive blogs about the incredible Easter celebrations here in East Timor almost ready to be put up for you. That's when three things happened:

1.) I suddenly got sick. All of Wednesday I found myself exhausted and in a bad mood. I finally made it home and crashed. When Brendan got home he came over to give me a hug, but I was radiating heat! I took a quick bucket shower and tried to sleep it off.

My fever was up and down (but mostly up) the next day. It got up around 103.2 three times and I had body aches so we decided to go to the hospital. It's good that we did. They took a blood test to check for malaria (don't worry - it wasn't) and let us go home. When we went back later that night a different doctor looked at the results and diagnosed me with some kind of infection in the lower abdomen. So I got paracetamol and antibiotics and a prescription to rest it off.

Within a day I was doing better and my fever had gone down and stayed down. I'm telling you Ciprofloxin (an antibiotic) has been my new best friend over here. I've never been a pill popper because before it usually wasn't necessary, but here I'm learning to really appreciate antibiotics because they can take you from seemingly the edge of death to normal in one or two days.

While I was sick, Brendan was great and took on all my responsibilities as well as his as much as possible and made sure to check in with me while I was on bedrest. He's also made sure I'm taking it slow this week and I feel 100% now thanks to everyone's prayers and Brendan's care.

So since then everything's been going well and, as usual, sickness quickly fades from memory. Work continues and this week has been really good. It took a couple of days to catch up on cleaning and grocery shopping, but now we're almost caught up.

Problem 2.) The car broke down. We've been getting more and more skeptical about driving it. After having to push start it three times and the muffler falling off twice, we're giving it a few days to rest. It's good to walk everywhere, but it would be nice to have it in case.

3.) The computer crashed. We've had computer problems with my laptop periodically here, probably because whenever we use the flashdrive to put up blogs it gets infected with viruses, which then come back to our laptop. Even though we scan and try to clear the flashdrive, it's a constant process.

This time Brendan doesn't think that the computer will be coming back because the computer will randomly tick and it says that it can't read the hard drive because there is no hard drive. Probably not a good sign. The sad part is that those two beautiful, almost-finished Easter blogs were saved on the computer, as well as other important things (although we did back everything up a month ago).

So don't worry if the blogs are less frequent for awhile. We'll be trying to find the best way to prepare blogs and work with the pictures now that we can't do so at home. But we'll work it out : )

One lesson that we're learning from this is what to do when everything goes wrong at once - learning to practice patience and find more creative ways to do things. That's really the story of East Timor. They have faith and family, but health problems can strike you or your family when you least expect it. Cars have problems and there's no money to fix them so you walk or you drive an unsafe car or motorcycle. Technology is in the early stages here so virus infections and basic problems are bound to happen all the time. But knowing that we are still overly privileged when compared to our neighbors gives us a better attitude and understanding when we have minor setbacks like this. Maybe life doesn't have to be perfect for us.

To end on a high note, we also have had a lot of support. We received lots of letters from the Bishop family, the Davises, Grandma and Grandpa, and even a package from some great people who prefer to remain anonymous. The letters were amazing and the package came with perfect timing (there was a peg game that I played all the time when I had to stay in bed all day). God really does work all things for the good of those who love Him and whenever anything rough happens there's always support that comes in just when we need it. Thank you thank you thank you to everybody!

We love you! You're in our prayers, please keep us in yours : )

Always,

Rachel and Brendan