Life After Furlough

Three months ago we returned from our ten month furlough. (For those wondering what 'furlough' looks like, this article explains it well.)

At the start of this time I was excited to live life in the UK, visiting new places and meeting people who I don't normally get to see. 

We had a great time finding snow in the Lake District along the Hardknott Pass, one of Britain's steepest roads.

However, by the end of last year I was very ready to return to the country where we serve overseas and was longing for the familiar.  I couldn't wait to leave behind all the stresses of furlough.  

The adjustment back to life in our host country wasn't the easiest thing ever though.  This was what it looked like for me:

Day 1:
So, so thankful to be home.  When we got close to our final destination I felt a burden lift as I let go of the travel-related questions:  Are our bags the right weight and size?  Will our suitcases fall apart?  Are we leaving enough time to get to the airport?  How will the transfer between terminals go in Australia?  Will our baggage make it?  Are we allowed to carry cheese into the country?  Which batteries do I need to keep in my carry-on?  Are we going to miss our connecting flight? 

Days 2 - 3:
It's been wonderful to spend the weekend with friends, some of whom we haven't seen for over two years.  I'm delighted to be home, and in a place where I have so many good friends living a few minutes' walk from my house. 

Week 1:
I'm reminded of the harder aspects of living here: People wanting financial help for legitimate causes; a cold virus caught while travelling; repairs that are needed in the house; walking up and down the hill in the hot sun or pouring rain; having a lot of musty belongings to take out of storage and find a home for.   But I'm still so happy to be home and so grateful to God that we were able to return.

Weeks 2 -3
Time to ease back into work.  Well, perhaps it would be better to focus on getting my house straight, but going to work is much more fun.  I'm glad to be getting back to my role here, and am looking forward to putting into practice the training I took on furlough.  I think I'm feeling settled...or at least that I'm almost there.

Weeks 4 - 5
Life is back to normal...sort of.  I'm still not feeling quite right emotionally.  The thought of paperwork that I still need to do can cause anxiety to rise in me fast; especially with financially-related topics.  I remind myself that God provided for us incredibly on furlough in sending the provision that we needed to return to the field and that he's not about to abandon us now.

A couple of friends have reminded me that it takes a while to fully adjust after an international move.  That's the kind of advice I would give to someone else; I forget to apply it to myself though!

I'm still so relieved to be back here.

Week 6:
I really am feeling better this week!  Although our furlough went well overall, with some wonderful moments spent with people we love, it was still tiring and stressful; part of this could have been avoided if I'd made different choices.  But the fact is that I didn't return to our country of service in the most refreshed state; it's really not surprising that my body and mind have taken a while to recover and feel normal again.  

I think I now have the capacity to start typing the blog posts that I've been writing in my head!

Month Four:
I'm finally getting around to sorting out the cupboards that I threw items into when we first got back.  It certainly makes daily life easier when I know where to find and put things.  I don't think I've yet managed to have the whole living area tidy at one time yet, but that goal is now looking realistic rather than overwhelming.  I think I'll get there before our next furlough ;-)

My Overseas Kitchen

I'm not someone who loves to cook.  However, we have to eat and so I spend a fair bit of time in the kitchen.

In our remote location, packaged food is expensive and availability is sporadic; this is particularly true for chilled and frozen items.  So we do a lot of cooking from scratch.  To make it easier to feed the family, I have a lot more gadgets and appliances than I would if I lived in my home country.  Let me introduce you to some of them:

The first is the water filter:

Although the rain water that we drink is clean, it might not be so pure after it's landed on our roof and poured through the gutters.  As well as drinking the filtered water directly, we also use it to make milk from powder. (Boxed UHT milk is a special treat ;-))

Beans (eg black beans, navy beans) are cheap; we eat a lot of them!  But it's a challenge to cook them at 5000 feet, especially if they are already old by the time I use them.  This is where the pressure cooker comes in.  To make baked beans, I soak the beans overnight and then cook them for 25 minutes in the pressure cooker:

Sometimes I'll throw potatoes, carrots and chicken into the pressure cooker for an easy one-pot meal.

My rice cooker originally belonged to a Japanese family.  Fortunately a previous owner translated the labels into English:

Rice is cheap and easily available.  We eat it; we feed it to our friends; when dog food becomes unavailable, we feed it to our animals.  I'll also cook rice in the oven, in the pressure cooker or, of course, on the stove.  (Yes, we do have a regular oven, microwave and kettle in addition to these other gadgets.)

Friday night is popcorn and smoothie night for us.  Unpopped corn and bananas are cheap and plentiful so, with the assistance of the blender and popcorn maker, I can put together a cheap and easy meal:

There are challenges living in a community where people come and go so often.  An advantage though is that used items often come up for sale when people leave!  This how we obtained the appliances in the above two photos.  Many appliances sold by other missionaries were originally bought in the US; this means that a transformer (the large, clumpy, metal thing) is needed to run them. 

Other items we've acquired over the last 12+ years include a tortilla maker, waffle maker, sandwich maker, immersion blender and slow cooker.  All of these help me keep producing food in a place where I can't just pop something into the oven at the end of long day.

A Blog Post For the Less Emotional

This post is for you if:

1)      When something sad or hurtful happens you may (or may not) feel sad or distressed for a short time, but it doesn't interrupt your life in a big way. (A massive loss may affect you more than this.)

2)      You make decisions based on what seems most logical, not based on how others may feel about your choice.

3)      You find it confusing when other people cry, or feel upset for a long time, over something that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you.

4)      You don’t think about how others feel about you (even the idea of other people feeling things about you may be too confusing and alien for your brain to process).

5)      You don’t know what to do when people are upset.

This post describes me perfectly; at least it describes how I used to be before I learnt about emotions! 

It’s not that I don’t feel anything.  I can feel fear, guilt and shame.  I regularly feel annoyed.  I don't often feel sad though.  And when I do, it's not a deep, pervasive sadness.  It's usually more that I feel a little unsettled.  I can't think of many times when I've felt hurt by people; if I do feel this way, it usually doesn't take much to talk myself out of it.

So, here are my tips to myself, and to anyone like me:

1)      Recognise that you don’t have to suffer the painful emotions that others do.  This is particularly true for overseas workers away from home.  (As much as I love and appreciate my extended family, I’ve never once looked at pictures on Facebook at Christmas time and felt sad that I wasn’t there.)

2)      Realise that statements such as ‘If you don’t cry when you read this book, you aren’t human’ weren’t written with you in mind.

3)     Some authors will have you believe that all women feel emotions strongly, act a certain way or most desire a particular thing.  Books with these claims were apparently written by people who haven’t interacted with a wide enough range of women.

4)      Be grateful for the abilities God has given you.  If you are the only non-emotional person in your group of friends, you can bring a unique perspective to a situation. (Some of my deepest friendships work so well because we are different from each other in the area of emotions, so help each other achieve balance in our thinking and feeling.)

5)      Recognise that other people’s emotions can be a massive force in their lives, even if you can’t understand why they are upset.

6)      You don’t have to understand people’s emotions in order to help them.

7)      Often the best thing you can do is just to listen. (You may later have the chance to help with the practical issues; but first listen.)

8)      Listening is not a waste of time.  It’s often extremely helpful for people to process their emotions by talking. 

9)      Good listening involves acknowledging or clarifying what people have said. Again, the feelings don’t have to make sense to you.  You can still say things like, “It sounds like you felt really sad.” or  “How are you feeling about it all right now?”.

10)  Be gracious when people don’t respond to your own issues in the way you would most like, or when people assume you feel something that you don’t.  For instance, I realised years ago that when someone said, “I’m sorry to hear your relative died”, it would have been better to have responded with “thanks” than with “It’s ok – she was old”. 

11)  If you have children, listen out for their feelings too.  When they come home from school bubbling over with a story of something that’s affected them, or are clearly distressed, take the time to listen to their perspective, letting them share how they feel without immediately jumping in with solutions.   

If you have any tips to add, I'd love to hear from you in the comments section!

Stationery Stress

Believe it or not (and this will be especially hard to believe if you've been inside my house) but I actually enjoy sorting out cupboards. 

I don't get around to doing this sorting as often as I need to.  By the time I've done the more urgent tasks of picking things up off the floor and tidying up surfaces (if these jobs get completed at all), I've usually run out of time for the deeper organising.  I have started to schedule 'organising things' into my weekly schedule; it's one of many activities that I rarely get around to if I don't schedule it in advance.

I recognise that if I had better systems in place for storing items, I'd have to spend a lot less time picking things up from the floor and horizontal surfaces.  Now that the children are at an age where they can be helpful, this is particularly true.  They are getting good at 'pick up 15 items from the floor', but the activity would be even more successful if they knew where to store these items once they'd picked them up.

I don't seem to be a natural at figuring out good storage solutions.  Until yesterday most of my stationery items were stored in zip-up plastic bags in this box:

If a system is to work for me, then I need to be able to find and put away anything in a couple of seconds.  Obviously that wasn't working with the 'pile everything into one big box' method.  In fact, I discovered no fewer than eight rolls of tape hidden between bags in that box as well as numerous pens and pencils of all descriptions, and lids that don't match any of them.

Another difficulty is that there's no Office World around here.  I have been looking out for storage solutions though, and was happy to find a three-drawer storage box for sale second hand this week.

This is what the cupboard looks like now.  It's not beautiful, but I'm very excited that every member of the family should now be able to find and put away stationery items.  Note the 'spare lids' box; I've recently discovered how essential this is to keeping our felt/marker pen collection going!

Of course I won't really know how well this system is working until I take another picture in a month and see what it looks like then.  It surely has to be an improvement on the big-box-pile in any case!

You won't find me on the Great British Bake Off

On two occasions I tried making cookies from scratch.  The first time, I pushed them too far into the oven and watched them burn in the fire at the bottom.  The second time, I think something went wrong when I mixed the butter and sugar together; in any case, they didn't work.
 
I think I may be the only expatriate woman around here who doesn't bake.  Though I certainly appreciate my friends who do :-).  Other than the doughnuts which we eagerly buy at market each week, there is no opportunity to purchase cakes around here.
 
I have a couple of exceptions to my 'no baking' way of life:
 
A) I sometimes make 100% wholemeal bread rolls with the help of my breadmaker (which I think I may have broken last week...).  We can't buy nice-tasting bread here and packed-lunch options are limited, so it's very helpful to have bread rolls that my family will all eat.
 
B) If a member of my family has a birthday and I haven't managed to talk anyone else into making a cake for them, I will somehow get involved in that process.  Usually Andrew makes the cake, using a box mix with some interesting added ingredients, and I do the icing.
 

Yay for our dinosaur cake tin, which so far as been used three times.

This is why I don't bake:  

1) Baking is not fun for me.  I know at least some people enjoy it.  Many people apparently also enjoy other activities which require some degree of co-ordination and artistic interest; for example painting nails, putting on make-up or doing crafts.  Not me.
 
2) It takes me too long to find the ingredients in my cupboards.  This leads me to believe my time would be better spent tidying my cupboards (something I find more enjoyable and satisfying than baking anyway!)
 
3) If I took time to bake, I'd have to give up something else in my life.  I don't want to stop resting or working, and I certainly can't afford to give up tidying!
 
4) In the culture I grew up in, a store-bought biscuit (Americans: think Oreo...or even half an Oreo with no cream) was considered a perfectly adequate snack.  So it's hard for me to find the motivation to produce anything more extravagant for 'snack' purposes, knowing that I could just purchase a packet of Oreos (which thankfully are available here).  I'm finding there are a range of other snacks I can send to events such as school parties that don't involve baking.
 
5) If I attempt to bake, I end up with flour and sugar all over the place, as well as dirty pots and pans that I might not get around to washing very quickly. The number of ants, cockroaches and rats and are roaming in the vicinity, eagerly searching for food, make this particularly dangerous.

6) I already have to cook mostly from scratch, due to the limited availability of ingredients.  I don't feel the need to spend any extra time in the kitchen.

Green omelet anyone?  I don't think I'll be starting a food blog anytime soon!

So, baking can leave me 1) unhappy 2) frustrated  3) unfulfilled  4) unmotivated 5) overwhelmed with mess and 6) kitchened-out.  Rather than feeling that I should bake more, I can see now that the world (and particularly my household) is probably a happier place when I avoid it as much as possible!
 
Please don't think that I have a low opinion of baking overall, or of time spent baking.  I greatly appreciate the efforts of people who make the baked goods that I love to eat.  I know baking can be great way to love and bless other people.  Life would be a lot less exciting for me if I never got to eat homemade baked goods.
 
But that doesn't mean that I personally have to be involved!
 

Dressing an Overseas Worker

Do you have a clothing style?  I think my criteria for buying clothes has always been something like 'If it's cheap enough, and isn't too long for my short body, or too short for my comfort, and doesn't need to be matched carefully with other clothing items, then it will do'.

That worked fine when I lived in the UK and had clothes shops within walking distance of my house.  If I was buying clothes that had been designed in the last decade, and if they met the criteria above, then I couldn't go too far wrong.  I was never a fashion queen, but I had clothes that I felt comfortable in.

Skip forward to now.  With very few exceptions, everything in my wardrobe was either

a) Given to me (thanks Mum and Mom!)

b) Bought for a couple of pounds second hand (either from colleagues or at a second hand store)

c) Purchased more than 10 years ago

The result ends up looking something like this:
 

Photo by T Bunnow

This photo was taken while I was playing the part of someone who sang very badly, so it probably was fitting that my clothes didn't look too great either. 

The truth is though that it had been one of those evenings when I was rushing to feed everyone, to get the children ready for bed, and to go and pick up the babysitter, so I had just grabbed something typical from my wardrobe.
 
I also don't usually carry soft toys around with me.
 
The skirt in the photo was passed on to me about ten years ago by a colleague who found it in a second hand store here.  It was a great skirt...ten years ago.
 
So, what are the challenges I face, as an overseas workers trying to clothe myself?
 
1) There are no clothes stores that I can easily get myself to.  The only clothes stores within easy travelling distance are second hand stores.  But unless someone offers to take me to one, I'm just too unmotivated to try to find a ride there or to travel with someone else on local public transport, especially with the added pressure of having to be back by lunchtime for the children.
 
2) The cost.  Yes, our budget is set up so that we can afford to buy clothes.  However, I just can't seem to bring myself (even when I do have the rare opportunity to do so) to spend money on full price clothes, knowing that there are others ways to get clothes for a small fraction of the cost.  I'm not saying this is a sensible or rational thing, but I do find it really hard!
 
3) The local culture.  If I look at the local women, there's a whole range of dress styles.   Not so long ago it was much rarer for women here to wear trousers: the tops of the legs are the area where most modesty is required.  Many women, especially those who are older than me, wear long, loose skirts and blouses.
 
However things are changing fast, and I've noticed that many women working on the centre here now wear closer fitting outfits, including trousers. 
 
So if I wear longer, looser clothes I'm fitting in with some people here, but will look very baggy compared to others.
 
4) Losing awareness of what's normal back home.  I remember, years ago, meeting a young person who had grown up overseas.  She was wearing something that looked totally out of place to me, and was fine with that.  At the time I couldn't understand it.  But now I totally get it. 
 
I don't often see people dressed in the most recent fashions, and I'm seeing other overseas workers dressed more modestly than they would back home, so I wouldn't recognise a 'normal' look if I saw it.
 
When I'm on home leave, I'm sure I must look like I've stepped out of a time machine.  Especially because the winter clothes I bought last century still keep appearing; I don't wear them often enough to wear them out.
 
It's true that I don't generally care too much how I look.  Overall I see this as a good thing; it's not as if I need anything extra to obsess about. 
 
Most of my life I go around not really noticing what I see.  I might have a long conversation with someone; but if you asked me later what they were wearing I wouldn't have a clue. 
 
In theory I think it's good to contribute beauty to the world.  But in reality, I choose to concentrate on other things.  So I'm not usually too motivated to do anything about the clothing situation.
 
Recently I have been starting to think a little more about how I dress.  After 10 years of wearing skirts, I find myself wanting to abandon them for the jeans that I wore constantly, outside of work, in my previous life  (What's not to love about jeans: they go with anything. No thinking required!).  And I realise that with the changing times, this is probably fine here (at least depending on the jeans, and depending on what top I wear with it).

I get to spend a couple of days in Australia soon, so I'm challenging myself to look for a new pair of trousers to buy!
 
It's been bothering me more lately when I wear baggy clothes that I know I don't look good in at all.
 
Last week I went through my wardrobe and gave away all the clothes that I don't like to wear.  The item that was hardest to let go of?  The skirt from the photo above.