Commonplace? NEVER!

I seem to get more and more hopelessly behind in blogging. Sometimes it's because we're very busy and sometimes it's because it seems that life just goes on in the same way and I've put this all in our history  before.  But honestly, once we leave our compound, every day is amazing!  I often think about something that somebody  advised us in the MTC.  They said that we should take a lot of pictures in the first weeks of our mission because soon it would all seem commonplace to us.  COMMONPLACE?  NOT SO! 
 I have 5,000 pictures and I could still take a picture every minute.  I am constantly amazed at what we see every time we leave the mission home.  This is a typical outing. We went to church in another part of Kinshasa yesterday. Kinshasa is massive. There are about 12 million people. It takes about 45 min. to get to this place on a good traffic day.  But this is just a taste of what we saw.  (I put large pictures so that you could really see these places, but even they do not do it justice.)

There are so many amazing things to see every day. There are carpenters' shops, street furniture stores,  marchés with all kinds of food and wares to sell, canopied restaurants full of plastic chairs, hardware stores, tin and homemade brick houses and shops, street vendors plying their wares, kids playing Foosball or with homemade toys, checkers, car repairs done on the street, overloaded vehicles and transport buses, insane traffic that goes all over and off the roads to get where they want to be and so much, much more. 

 

    

              

 

 





Then suddenly you come upon a nice, little place with grass and bushes and a neat and comfortable look about it and you've found one of our churches. There are a few church-built buildings, but many are rented.  The members try very hard to keep them looking clean, repaired and inviting, which isn't always easy with intermittent power and water and lots of dirt streets and walkways.  It's always with a sense of gratitude for   their efforts that we visit these wards and branches and mingle with the wonderful, faithful pioneers of the church in Africa.

Commonplace environment?  Not feeling the need to take any more pictures of your surroundings?  Certainly not the case for us in the Congo. We could take a picture a minute and never tire of it.  NEVER!