FINALLY!

Well, we had a milestone last week. With our kids safely looked after by my parents Mike and I went to work at Partners in Hope 2 days last week. Our first day was so encouraging. We are actually shadowing the docs that are working to learn the medicine and practice our Chichewa. It was exciting to be back in the medical world again as our 5 months of language training have used a different area of our brain and we were feeling like our medical knowledge was slowly leaking out. But we were encouraged to be talking to and examining patients again, and although we are both a bit rusty and the medicine is very different (HIV and tropical diseases) it also felt very comfortable.
Our second day was a little different. The patients that day seemed to have much more complicated problems and I was following one of our Native Malawian clinical officers (they function like an MD) who also spoke very native, very fast Chichewa. We were both a bit overwhelmed and discouraged since we have spent the last few months studying language and it was hard to catch a word edgewise. So please pray for perseverance as we continue our medical training and language lessons. We still have much to learn before we will be able to function independently in the clinic. Yet we know that God will be faithful to see us through, just as he has done time and time again since we embarked on this adventure. Thank you for your prayers.

Visitors!

Hello everyone. We are still alive and well in Malawi. In fact we are doing even better now that Heather's parents made it safely for a visit. They arrived last week and will be staying until just after Easter. We have been looking forward to their visit since our arrival and it's hard to believe that they are here. We've enjoyed showing them around Lilongwe and they have been huge helps to us already--watching the kids, helping us with small projects around the house, building a wash-u game for our enjoyment (there will be more about this game in a future blog). And I'm sure we will have more pictures to post now that Nana is here.

We took a family excursion to Mount Dedza just before my parents arrived. We were able to drive up the mountain quite a ways and the kids hiked for about 20 minutes to our picnic spot. We are starting to take some regular family walks together to increase the kids' endurance as we have our sights set on a hike up Mt. Mulanje (the highest point in Malawi) sometime during our time here in Malawi.

Mount Dedza

Waiting at the airport

for Nana and Papa