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.