HOME

There are many places that one calls HOME.  This is our Arizona HOME. It's a place that we planned and some of which we built with our own hands. Some of it was built by my father and the rest we contracted out so that it would last more than a year or two.

It's filled with special things that we've collected through 42 years of marriage and even more important it's filled with precious memories of the time spent with family and friends in this house, family gatherings, preschool days, birthday and school parties, wedding receptions and bridal and baby showers.  It's a special place to us, this HOME.

HOME is also said to be "where the heart is."  So this picture is truly a picture of  HOME. 

For three and a half weeks, because of the unrest relating to the elections we were refugees in Johannesburg and were welcomed by wonderful senior couple missionaries who made us feel at HOME and shared their HOMES with us.

Brent and I enjoyed the hospitality of the Renlunds for part of our stay . They were so kind and it was so comfortable to be with them in their home.  They made us feel like family. 

Then when their daughter was coming for Christmas, for the rest of our stay.we moved into a recently vacated apartment in Duke's Court, where the majority of the senior missionaries live. It was good to give the Renlunds back their space and have "our own" HOME.

Brent was invited to us Elder Soares' office in the area office building, as the Soares' were on home leave.  He worked much of every day by computer and phone to keep things going back in Kinshasa. 

Our couples were also hosted by good senior couples who opened their homes and hearts to us. They were so good to us. They included us in events, had dinners and went out of their way to make us  comfortable.

            Evening with Marge and Jeff Clayton

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New Years with our couples, Martineaus and Webbs

Dinner at the Howes

We visited malls, saw movies, ate at nice restaurants, shopped in grocery stores full of a huge variety of foods and other merchandise, ate MacDonald's ice cream cones and fell in love with Magnum ice cream bars, shopped some more, went to game parks and saw animals, enjoyed the company of over 50 other senior missionaries, drove beautiful streets filled with nice cars that stayed in their lanes, sat in churches that had organ music playing, saw Christmas decorations in malls, sent packages and post cards home, spoke English, had washers and dryers,  and a did a host of other things that we can't do in Kinshasa. Johannesburg was like a taste of HOME in the U.S.

But on December 28, 2011 we happily headed back HOME to Kinshasa after 3 and 1/2 weeks as refugees in the beautiful and civilized world of Johannesburg.

 As we visited with the missionaries in South Africa we tried to explain Kinshasa to them. But it's not possible to describe. You have to be there to even slightly comprehend its uniqueness, it's crowded streets with traffic and pedestrians weaving all over the roads and dirt-packed shoulders, it's crowds of people, handcarts and old, battered transports filled with people, streets teaming with vendors and strewn with piles of garbage and debris, its dirt roads with potholes as big as a small car, it's smells and the air heavy with the smoke from thousands of cooking fires, it's lack of restaurants, theaters, malls, it's setting sun, blood red every night from the pollution in the air, it's lack of variety of foods, it's power and water outages, and a million other things that make Kinshasa entirely unimaginable.  BUT, we realized that this, to the eight of us, is a special HOME that we have come to appreciate despite its difficulties and lack of... so many things. It's just the Congo and it's our home, where we will spend a remarkable and unique few years. We are happy to be HOME and get back to what brought us here.  

 

It's actually nice to be HOME!

Posted by LBJ at 8:21 AM 2 comments: