Adjusting

Hello everyone,
I'm settling into sort of a routine. Each day, at 5:15 AM I get awakened by the little schnauzer dog we are watching, as she wants to go out. My precious Kami never wakes me up; she waits until I get up. When I open the door for Kami to go out, she sticks her nose out, and if she thinks it's too cold, she won't go out until later, when it warms up. She is definitely showing her AZ roots! And although it is winter here (well maybe by now it's spring--I'm confused what season it is!), it is still quite warm each day. It's chilly in the mornings (about 60), but it warms up quickly, and by mid afternoon, it's pretty warm (though not by AZ standards).

Once I'm up, I get the kids ready for school, and then I go with the driver to take them to school--about a 10-15 minute drive. The kids are still not thrilled with school, but they do seem to be accepting it, and they have made a few friends. So far, the work is way too easy for them. They still won't use the bathrooms there so there is always a mad dash for the bathrooms when they get home. At this time, we have 2 of our 3 bathrooms working. This is an improvement over yesterday, when we only had one working.

Once the kids are at school, I go walking at the golf course with one of the other wives. It's a nice course (18 holes), and Bill plays there at least once a week. It takes about 40 minutes to walk the whole thing. I'm happy to be getting some exercise. Soon, we're going to start going two times around the course!

After walking, I either go home or go to French class. French class is held for 2 hours every MWF. Unfortunately, the class is not at the same level I'm at, so I'm quite bored. I've started using the time to do my own self study in French.

Once I'm back home, house cleaning, laundry, and water boiling commences. This takes the rest of the day. It is just incredible how quickly everything gets so dirty. I thought the dust was bad in AZ, but it is nothing compared to this. Fortunately for me, I now have a vaccum cleaner, so that helps a lot. Since I no longer have my house cleaner, today was my first day to test out the squeegee and cloth method of mopping my floor. It worked pretty well, except I got a splinter in my finger from the handle.

The rest of the day, I spend killing ants in the house, and picking ants off the dogs. We seem to have a major ant problem here. The plus side is that I haven't seen many other bugs here (yet)! I guess I'd rather have ants than big sewer roaches! The ants come in through holes in the walls. When pipes have to go through the walls, they just cut big holes out in the walls or in the tile, and put the pipe through; the hole around the pipe is never fixed or patched. I've been going through a lot of bug spray! I've also been using a lot of packing tape, which I had thrown into my suitcase at the last minute! I found a small crack in the wall in the bathroom where ants were coming in. I just took the packing tape and covered up the crack! No more ants coming through that crack!

At 2:30, it's back to the school to pick up the kids. Once home, it's not too different from the way things were at home. The kids watch TV and have a snack, then it's homework time. Then time to make dinner and lunches for the next day. We often go to the hotel for dinner. Once you are in a house, they don't want you coming to the hotel to eat. However, we have no light in our kitchen (fluorescent bulb burned out), so it's hard to cook. Who knows when they might get around to changing that bulb.

We continue to have power outages and water issues on a daily basis. These are mildly annoying. This house has a lot of problems, and now I see why no one else wanted this house. I'm worried what will happen once the rains start. I imagine we may have a lot of leaks! We may be moving into a new house in early November. Another family is moving to the mine site, so we may get their house--we'll see. On another positive note--our air shipment (all the stuff that the company shipped over for us) has arrived! It is here in Lubumbashi, but it still needs to clear customs. I have no idea how long that could take.

Guess that's about it for now. I'm tired. Time to go to bed so I can start the whole process over again!
Laurie