Our Sparkly House

When we first took the bus ride of faith to our city in September 2016, we knew no one. People told us we should stay in the big city and try to reach the M people from there. People told us we weren’t ready. Our language skills weren’t good enough. We didn’t have enough experience. We were naive and would be too isolated and lonely to be effective.

We prayed. We sought wisdom. We planned as much as we could. We worked together. And, we got on a bus with all our earthly belongings, our three kids and pregnant (Mabel age 3, Theodore age 1, Samuel 7 months, and 12 weeks pregnant with Baby #4), about a week after we landed back in country from our first extremely stressful home assignment from America.

We arrived at the bus station amid aghast stares and comments. A family! With three kids! So close in age! The youngest so young! And, you have trunks of stuff! Why? Tourists don’t look like this!

We rented a hotel room and started doing everything we knew to do. And, we prayed and worried about everything we didn’t know how to do.

We needed a company to work for, a business visa.

We needed a place to live. A place that would rent to foreigners. And, approval from the local neighborhood Ward Boss to stay.

We needed some type of connections. We, after all, had no friends. No acquaintances. No help. No support.

We needed some peace and some confidence. After all, everyone told us we were crazy for moving out to nowhere away from the comforts and familiarity of the big city and the expat community we knew there.

But God was with us. Even in the obvious stress and mess of a situation.

So, Daniel scrambled around town during rainy season trying to find a place he could teach English for a business visa.

I stayed at the hotel room with no tv and tried to entertain three small kids as we all continued to recover from jet-lag.

Daniel isn’t one to like making a bunch of social connections or having the uncomfortable job of having to introduce yourself and explain yourself a bunch of times a day in a second language–all of this with the goal of trying to land a job.

After lots of inquiry and several attempts, we thought we had a visa in hand (which is it’s own story–we didn’t!) and we began looking for housing.

We were talking to little Mabel, Teddy, and Samuel about what was happening, and trying to give them some stability and comfort even during the chaos and confusion of international travel and staying at a hotel for a month.

When we asked them what kind of place we should try to live in, little 3 year old Mabel kept saying she wanted to live in a “sparkly” house. Hmm. Well, that probably wouldn’t be an option. Most of the houses we saw were dirty, run down, and definitely not “sparkly.” I tried to temper her enthusiasm with realism and explain that most houses just aren’t sparkly. But, she was insistent that she wanted to live in a sparkly house.

Daniel called two house realtors and drove around town looking at places while the kids and I were pretty much stuck in the hotel because of the rainy season weather.

Daniel would go and scope out several places and then take me and the kids back to see the… most promising ones. But, there weren’t too many that were very promising.

Finally, one day he came back from a trip with a realtor and said he thought he may have found a good place, and it was just the next street over from the hotel we had been staying at for the last month.

Mabel asked immediately if it was sparkly. Daniel said, “well… yeah, a little sparkly.”

We arranged a time we could get the key to see inside the house and we went over.

As we pulled up to the house, there was a break from the torrential rains and Mabel immediately noticed the shine from the glass around the top-floor balcony.

“It IS sparkly!”

We had found our house :-)

Some days, I have been less than thankful for this house. It is constantly dusty because it is close to a busy, dusty road. It is constantly full of mosquitoes because the house is designed to be open to the outside with big, wooden accordion doors on the front and large, full windows with no screens. It can feel big sometimes, but only has two bedrooms. And, it is built backing up against a monastery, so we have constant noise of monk gongs and bells, chanting, and have felt a lot of spiritual darkness at times.

I was really wanting to move this year. I wanted a place with 3 bedrooms, a bigger yard for the kids to play, and a place we could shut off better to hopefully help with the mosquito problem we face every rainy season. So, with a huge pregnant belly, I looked all over town for a new place to call home… in vain. I asked friends. I had a local taxi driver help me. I called numbers. I joined a Facebook group for real estate. I prayed and asked others to pray that we could move.

But, God closed every door and I didn’t see anything I thought we could call home. For now, I know this is where God wants us to be. And, I will be content and satisfied in that. I will give thanks.

Thankful that this is the only home my kids really have known. Thankful that we have a kind neighborhood and neighborhood friends. Thankful that we have been able to host a Sunday school class for neighborhood children. Thankful that we are close to a market and close to the only grocery store in town. Thankful that God has always provided what we need, and sometimes He even provides what a little three year old girl wants in the midst of difficulty– a sparkly house.

Our Sparkly House by Mabel, age 4