We made it!
Just a quick note to let you all know that we made it safely back to our little house in Salatiga on Java! Our travels went incredibly smoothly (the girls are getting better every time!) and we made it here just before dark Sunday evening.
It was very sad and hard to leave Palangka Raya. Truly, our life there is fantastic and we love the place and the people deeply after just 4 months of living there. It has become our home away from home, for sure. We are anxious to return and so grateful that we feel that way!
It's weird to be back in Java. What a strange feeling to walk into the same house almost exactly one year after we first started this language learning journey..and feel like we were literally starting all over again. The empty (except for basic furnishings) house, the long list of groceries we needed to buy, the kinks that had to be worked out of the house like fixing shower heads and putting things in their proper place. It was exhausting. I went to bed discouraged and didn't sleep well at all. (It's loud on our street. Even louder now because of Ramadan - the holy fasting month. We live very close to several m*sques and they were going strong until after 9 pm and again waking everybody up to eat once more before dawn at around 3 a.m.)
This morning, we set out to visit our old friends and we had such fun re-connecting with them. Talking and joking around with these people reminded me of two important facts -
It was very sad and hard to leave Palangka Raya. Truly, our life there is fantastic and we love the place and the people deeply after just 4 months of living there. It has become our home away from home, for sure. We are anxious to return and so grateful that we feel that way!
It's weird to be back in Java. What a strange feeling to walk into the same house almost exactly one year after we first started this language learning journey..and feel like we were literally starting all over again. The empty (except for basic furnishings) house, the long list of groceries we needed to buy, the kinks that had to be worked out of the house like fixing shower heads and putting things in their proper place. It was exhausting. I went to bed discouraged and didn't sleep well at all. (It's loud on our street. Even louder now because of Ramadan - the holy fasting month. We live very close to several m*sques and they were going strong until after 9 pm and again waking everybody up to eat once more before dawn at around 3 a.m.)
This morning, we set out to visit our old friends and we had such fun re-connecting with them. Talking and joking around with these people reminded me of two important facts -
- We DO know Indonesian! We're not starting from scratch. We just have some improving to do and that's going to be fun because....
- We have some great Indonesian friends here! They all seemed genuinely happy to see us and we were genuinely happy to see them, too. It's good to see that those relationships are still going strong, even after our absence of nearly 4 months.
We only have two more units to go - about 10 weeks. Last night I wasn't so sure, but this evening I feel like we can really enjoy our time here.
It is beautiful here. Breathtakingly so. Oh, and it's so nice and cool here - that in and of itself is such a treat!
Brooklyn starts 2nd grade tomorrow. The other girls will start preschool again as soon as we can get that arranged. And Sean and I start on Thursday. Back to school we go...
Your family is so adaptable, I am so encouraged and blessed by the transitions and sacrifices you all make! So proud of your girls, and so proud of the example you set for them!
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